on wednesday we talked about getting back to the body. "what does your heart, what does your stomach feel about that," she asked me, "if your head stops interpreting, stops interrupting?"
i've been sitting with that for a while now, off and on, for the last day or so. what does it feel like - what is the lived experience - of inhabiting the body? those of us whose heads do all the talking, who are deft with a turn of phrase, who use language like a scalpel and pretend like the very act of dissection arrives at the truth of the matter, might have trouble with this kind of question. how to arrest the language of the mind, let go of the clever weave of mental and emotional that knits up the explanatory scarf? i guess a body could get strangled with a scarf like that, and yet be none the wiser.
and it's funny that we can find ourselves chasing down - with the blind urgency of ambition - all those things that we find lacking in ourselves. a subconscious drive to completion. suffice to say that i'm finding the irony - or is it a lesson? - inherent in my pursuit of a career in medicine (for what career could be more literally about the body than that?) revealing.
so on her couch, in her basement office that is beginning to smell a bit like home or some semblance thereof, i dug in and listened hard for the sound of the body stripped of mind. and if it's talking, i'm not hearing much. but i'm willing to keep trying. it seems important. as j so often says, and i say perhaps not enough, i *am* teachable...
ani difranco - work your way out
No comments:
Post a Comment