T-360: The Healing Power of Fire and Water

Lake Michigan near Escanaba, MI

The Healing  Power of Fire and Water

June 25, 2012

Yesterday, when we finally got in the car after the giant strain to  get packed and out the door to Wyoming,  I  suddenly felt my neck.    It hurt!  I   could barely bend it.  I had apparently been clenching my  shoulders, neck, and jaw, unconsciously, while we were packing, and scrubbing, and checking and re-checking the pages of lists.

Who knows how long I had clenching?  For all I know, it could have been for months.  It could have been for hours. I was, and have been, so focused on the task,  that I blocked off communication from my body.  I know this is a bad, bad thing, but I also know that it is how I have survived, after a fashion,  in my day to day life at Matrix.

Oh boy, does it show, too.   It shows in the giant pouch of fat circling my abdomen and hips, the encirclement of daily stress and strain.  It shows in the incipient dowager's hump bringing my shoulders and my ears ever closer together.  It shows in my throbbing jaws which radiates tension across my skull.   It shows in my swollen and tender feet and gimpy knees which complain when I ask them to carry me just a little further.   I feel it most in my locked and angry hips, which cry out  in rigidity and sorrow every time I try to just let go.

I have learned, oh so well, to silence the complaints. That is not correct.  I have learned to not hear these complaints.  I have become the perfect Cartesian thinking automata.    Doing, as Marge Piercy so elegantly puts it, "what has to be done, again and again."

The life of the company, the task at hand at Matrix, has always taken precedent over everything.   Over my need for daily exercise, over regular meals, over time with my husband, certainly over time with my friends, over time spent bettering my community or my home.   I have let it become my be-all  and end-all.  It's been a pretty bad choice, one that I am trying to end.

And let me tell you, I am encountering resistance.   Almost everyday,  someone tells me the choice to go on this bike trip, to let the daily life of the company go, is wrong or dangerous or foolhardy or....

It may be.  But I am just self-aware enough to know that I need to heal my body and my spirit.  If the cost of that healing is death of my company, then my company is poorly devised.   I will do what I can to put it on a sure, self sustaining footing, but I can no longer offer my body up on that particular altar.

Other, more sensible people, with better body connection and better health habits, would never have let it get to this place.  But these are old and sinister ways with me, born in childhood, nurtured during my high school years, and perfected during my irrational march to completing my coursework for my PhD by the age of 25.

Achievement "out there" masked and substituted for the emptiness and sorrow "in here".   But now, years of therapy and anti-depressants later, I long for a sense of wholeness and safety with myself, within myself.

I glimpse it, here on the teeming shores of Lake Michigan, in the ever present rolling of the surf, in the whispering of the cedars and the birch. 


I see it in the licking flames casting a glow of warmth and gentleness on Wes' face as he stares into its dance.  I feel it in the rocking  pain at the base of my spine as I walk an excited Louie through  lush greenness of the JW Wells State  Park, way up on Green Bay. 

These little whispers are calling me to a deeper connection to myself, to God, to the universal divine, which asks me to honor its creation in me, of me,  through me.  I hear it, so slightly, so slightly.  I mean to hear it more.