This is one of those moments…
This is one of those moments when, on the way home from visiting your brother, and it’s after midnight, and the bus isn’t due for another 5 minutes, you realise that you haven’t written or shared your blog post for the day. And if you are going to keep to your 365 challenge, and show up every day on your blog, then you’re not going to be able to sleep until you’ve posted something… anything….
And as the liminal moment when the veil between days gently stirs with the promise of tomorrow, I find myself strangely energised. Almost as if this… this… this is the moment when we can just drop into the sacred in between – the pause between exhale and the inhale right before the body demands its due and draws breath. That perhaps, it is here, that we can tell one another the truths that live in our pulse.
After all, the place of deep intimacy is always in the holy now. In the words that are tattooed upon the chambers of our hearts. Those words are inscribed in the chemical compounds that rush through our plasma. Those words are communicated where nerve ending meets nerve ending in never ending strings of electrical pulse. Those words are enveloped in the layers where epidermis lays with dermis with the intimacy of long term lovers.
Ah yes. Those words. We forgot about them. We forgot we didn’t need to look for them. That they were there all along, there all the time. We forgot how to sit, how to be with, how to listen. Listen now. Lie with me. Let our spines align with the bed – two parallel lines echoing one another, but not touching. Our separateness irreconcilable with our desire to connect. So let us lie here for a while. Me in my skin. And you in yours. Let us lie here and listen to our breath, the syncopated rhythm of our lungs as they inflate and deflate in time with our own body’s demands. Let us try to resist the feeling like we should somehow breathe in tandem. You have your breath. And I have mine. Lets honour the dance for what it is, the fluidity of us.
So now, it’s just us and the sound of our breath…. inhale follows exhale follows inhale follows exhale. Hear the gentle rush of air. Isn’t it the sweetest symphony you ever heard? Isn’t it? And if you don’t agree, then you’re not paying enough attention. Because the sounds of breathing are the sounds of life, the sounds of our determination to stay tethered to this realm of existence where we can keep dancing, keep kissing, keep playing, keep loving, keep living. More beautiful than a Chopin nocturne. More beautiful than birdsong at dawn. More beautiful than the words that leave your lover’s lips – those ones you’ve longed to hear, and thought perhaps would forever remain unuttered. Yes, even more beautiful than those.
Let us follow that sweet sound. Let us travel into the interiority of our bodies – you in yours and me in mine – and travel with the airflow as it moves down our throats, through the glottis and past the trachea, and into the bronchiole networkings of the lungs. And then beyond. Into the blood flow, attaching to corpuscles so that we may be carried to all places. Let there be no place that is forbidden to us. Let us know full intimacy with ourselves. Let us meet each cell with love. Love for our bodies, our muscles, our skin, our organs, our joints, our nerves and our bones.
And in this intimate communion with our visceral selves, we will find those spaces where the stories live. We will faithfully record the words that we receive there. We will know our bodies by heart. Yes… we will know our bodies by heart.
