Driving to the Unaffected Coast

I think a lot about the wounds I carry. It has never seemed very fruitful to think of the injustice of it. There are always others worse off. I am never completely innocent or less deserving of receiving a random share of unfairnesses. But looking forward, I can see in the wounds, the possibility of something else. By staying with the pain, I can sometimes open up to something amazing, a connection, a feeling of being larger than I thought I was. Each wound becomes an opportunity to do this thing. 


 Also, hammocks are awesome. 

 

Dissolution and Augmentation

The caterpillar shakes in time lapse like one possessed. It shrugs off its skin, like an overcoat, wads it up and sets it aside. You’d think you would be able to see it now, the real thing, the caterpillar naked, shorn of ornament and true, but underneath the mask of colored bands lies armor. We can never see the transformation itself: the rearrangement of cells, the shifting of body parts, the dissolution.

Inside the chrysalis, nothing has a name, but then, before the conscious idea of a form even emerges, the goo inside the armor aligns itself, the unnamed and unnameable cells have been shunted into a pattern and suddenly there is a body. The wings are carefully folded in on themselves, like a parachute ready for use, except that no one has folded them. Instead the cells have just arrived in their places to tell a story.

Once upon a time there were wings. We don’t even know what they look like yet, but we are becoming these wings.

The story breathes and the cells remember. And in remembering, they discover what wings are. The breath of capillary action moves through the wings and they become what they always were, what they were even when the caterpillar was scrunching along eating leaves. It could feel their presence, on another plane, waiting, whispering their story. As the imago emerges from its armor, the cells remember and slowly tell the story of wings.

What story do your cells remember?

Where I End And You Begin

We think we know what we are, where our boundaries lie. We look at our skin and think, “That's where I stop and the rest of the world begins.”

But it's not that simple. We breathe in molecules; oxygen, nitrogen, carbon. We eat all sorts of atoms. We don't know where all they've been. And those atoms of unknown origin are what our bodies use to repair cells, distill neurotransmitters, concoct enzymes, and cook up hormones.

Each of our cells has membranes that allow only things as small as a molecule in or out. You eat something, like a banana, and it gets broken down in your gut into molecules that pass through the wall of your small intestine into your body. Those molecules get passed around from cell to cell as needed. If one cell needs potassium, it sucks some in. If a cell has too much potassium, it pushes some molecules back out through its membrane. Eventually, some of the potassium molecules that were once part of a banana, and more recently part of you, get sent packing completely to possibly fertilize a banana tree if you live where banana trees grow.

Your whole body is made up of molecules borrowed temporarily from the rest of the world. What you add to those molecules is your own style of consciousness. You can tack on a bit of energetic feeling to those potassium molecules. What will you give to the banana tree? That feeling of disgust as you look at your flabby tummy and smell the sweat you’ve built up coming home on the bus after a day working a job you hate? Or something else?

Breathe in and feel whatever you feel. Breathe out and thank all those molecules heading off to other bodies, wish them well, for all the cells they touched.