The Slow Way Newsletter: What Makes Us Fragile Makes Us Beautiful
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unhurried thoughts
What Makes Us Fragile Makes Us Beautiful
This week I’ve only had space in my overwrought mind to read poetry. (And, of course, listen on Hoopla to a breezy romance that required nothing of my emotions.) Listen, I’m still saying no to any fiction where bad things happen. And I have no space right now for sad essays or heady theological thinkers. This week: Just good, certain, steady words. I have Maggie Smith’s new book of poems in my bag while I write this. She’s new-to-me, but that doesn’t mean much. I’ve been distant from the world of poets for the past decade and am only just tip-toeing my way back in. Maggie’s poems feel like the poems that first drew me to poetry. The way words build an entire sense of reality: a delicate gray hair in a mop bucket in the Jane Kenyon poem, or the magical ache of watching a child grow in Cathy Song’s work. Good poetry can force so much weight on one well-said word or phrase, an entire truth that diamonds itself: rock crushed until it sparkles.
. . .So often
I’m reminded the body
Is built for ending.
How have we not
evolved past these
temporary containers?
I mean, what a place
to keep everything
everything!”
Smith writes this about her daughter’s body, and all these bodies of ours. If they weren’t so tender, and so utterly dependent on not getting scratched or bumped or made ill from the dangerous invisible air bugs we breathe in just by saying hello to one another in the grocery store (sans mask). These bodies, changing every year so that the part of me that was once muscular in my younger days is now the very best cushion the kitten chooses on the couch, surrounded as I am by bony boy laps. I point out to my disgruntled cat-loving children that I’m soft for a reason. I am our cat’s favorite lap because of the well earned squish of all those pregnancies, a love for french fries, and the general grace of being-in-my-forties.
Two months ago I decided on a night-time walk with Richmond the Pup and Brooksie that we should jog a bit, enjoy the evening, forgetting that my town is not very diligent about the flatness of old sidewalks. I tripped over a rise in the concrete and became a creature entirely constructed of knees and elbows, sliding little-girl-style across the concrete. My wounds looked like a seven-year-old’s, now healed into angry red scars. But my right knee has a strange dent that hurts when I touch it. Every day, I move “call the doctor about the knee dent” down on my to-do list. I mean, it’s weird, but what can I do about it? Who has time to worry that their knee cap is now dented?
Ace’s body has been a teacher for me in how tender we all are, how every little intricacy of our bodies works to keep us whole and alive in the world. Ace was born with low-muscle-tone, which affects most people living with Down syndrome. This means that every physical skill he has gained in his life has been harder for him. His muscles are slower to strengthen, his motor skills less easy to build. Oh, the exercises we did with his baby body so he could learn to sit! The cheers that rose when he first stood on his flat fleshy feet! The beauty of watching him run and kick a ball!
What makes him fragile, what makes life that much harder, is the very thing that makes it so magnificent. His body bounced in circles around the trampoline for an hour this past Thursday night while rain completely drenched him. He loved it, the sensory overload of feeling the rain pour and his body lift over and over into the air. Chris and I know most kids can’t stand the feeling for being soaked like that, wearing clothes on a wet trampoline. But Ace feels the world differently, and we know that when his body asks him to jump, we should follow its lead. His particular body doesn’t sleep if it didn’t jump, or swim, or swing that day. And Ace needs to do big heavy body movement every day to feel at home in his world, to be able to lie down and be still.
In learning to be generous toward Ace for what his body needs, I will continue to learn generosity toward mine. This past week came with heavy realities, and when I couldn’t sit with them, I walked with them. I slept when my mind was too overwhelmed to think. I worked in the garden when fear stuck to my throat and I needed to work it back down to my toes. Our bodies are always telling us true things about the world: what hurts, what scares us, what we need. Mine tells me I’m afraid when my jaw hurts, when my shoulders are stuck around my ears, when my hands are restless and need to be useful.
These bodies, covered in fleshy softness, coated in feelers so we can be tickled and scratched and bruised and cut and broken. Wouldn’t an exoskeleton have been a better idea? Less susceptible to violence, injustice, abuse? But even covered in armor, we’d have those soft inner parts, the organs that too easily forget themselves and overgrow false cells, the kind that hurt us, the kind that refuse to stop making themselves again and again.
I am no expert on bodies. I tend to stay in the world of ideas and words. But some of the best words, the best metaphors for goodness or love or gentleness come from our own knowledge of what it is to be a body. Not in a body, not a soul that temporarily resides in a messy flesh covering, but a whole self, organ and blood and mind and heart and delicate everything. All of me can break, and it will. One day, it will fail me fully, and that loss will leave a hole in the world. Your loss will too. And that’s what I’m trying to say. As Maggie Smith says, “The body / is built for ending.” And who thought that was a good idea?
But, maybe what makes us fragile is also what makes us so beautiful to our Creator. That we wear such a tender covering over our soft, always changing insides. That we are weak, given a small life in which to learn that it’s our weakness, and not the false exoskeleton we pretend will save us, that makes us worthy after all.
a slow practice
When I was very deep and feel-y teenager, prone to mystical encounters, I had a moment with Jesus that formed me deeply. I was seventeen and awkward, sad that boys didn’t really like me, and The-Very-First-Boyfriend had gone and made out with my friend behind my back and left me crying on New Year’s Eve in the church bathroom, as one does. I was basically sure it was my body’s fault. Big teeth, flat chest, bony knees, thin hair.
Then, some time later, at some magical youth group worship service (oh, man, I still get nostalgic for those), I experienced a moment of connection when I felt myself standing in front of Jesus and knowing I was deeply and truly loved. I envisioned Jesus looking at me and all those faults I saw in the mirror every day, looking at those same places, telling me why each of those parts was deeply good. How I was wonderful and lovable and worthy. Not because my body might change into something The-Very-First-Boyfriend/Betrayer might find good enough, but because it was holy. It belonged to me, was made for me, and I was valuable.
If every seventeen year old girl could hear that truth! That her goodness will never be found in her perfection, but in her holy and wild uniqueness, her beloved, innate, God-ordained value.
I wonder if there are parts of your body you rage against. Maybe you’re like me, puffy in areas the cat loves, but not quite the body you used to know. Maybe you rage against the parts of you you’ve always battled, certain that if you could fix some part of yourself you might become more fully alive, happier, more at home in the world. Or maybe your body has begun to let you down. It hurts you, it keeps you from doing the things you dream of doing. It is no longer a thing you get to control.
Let’s pray with our bodies. I first learned the concept of a body scan from Tara M. Owen’s beautiful book, Embracing the Body, which I read in the weeks immediately following my miscarriage in 2014, a time when I deeply needed to find peace in a body that had failed, that had lost in what I felt was its most important job. Tara describes beginning the body scan prayer with our feet on the floor and our backs against a chair, asking the presence of God to help us pay attention to how every part of us feels, one little bit at a time. Beginning with the top of our head and working our way down to our toes.
As you practice this prayer today, I want you to treat this exercise a little bit differently than simply tuning in to how your body is feeling as you turn your attention to it. I want you to ask God to help you discern what it is you've been asking of this part of you, what you feel about this part of yourself, and what beautiful things it does for you. As you turn your thoughts toward the gifts each specific part of your body offers you, lift up a simple prayer of thanks for your skull, your eyelashes, your lips, your neck, etc.
Allow yourself time with each part of your body. (And if you don’t have time for this in one sitting, come back to it when you can! This is a lovely way to fall asleep.) Let yourself be reminded like my teenage self was, that you are uniquely formed, not because you’re perfect by some outside measurement, but because you are loved.