On embodiment and delight
I'm in it for joy these days
“I sound like Brenda Vaccaro,” I say to my spouse Janyce, as she hands me more coffee. It’s a Saturday morning in June, a day after my 58th birthday. I woke up slowly and late, chugging down more water from the bottle on the bedside table, making the dog wait for her walk until 9am. Now we’re about to meet my ex-husband Jim for an owl prowl on the rail trail and I grab the binoculars on the way out the door.
Two days in a row now, Janyce and I have seen the owl family. A mother barred owl perched about halfway up from the ground on a tree branch, spinning her head around, her black eyes staring right at us, back hunched like a cat ready to pounce. Her two large owlets nearby were discernible as babies only by their puffed feathers and their clumsy short flights, each taking turns launching from a low branch right onto the side of the rocky cliff. The last couple of days we shuffled down the gravel path, once in the heat of the afternoon and twice at dusk with the gnats swirling around our heads. We stood in awe for a few moments, silently watching. I say shuffle because I did something to my lower back recently, turned fast the wrong way or did a forward fold too far, and it’s still not right today. I also have one of those dreaded summer colds, too. Not sick enough to sleep all day and get it over with, just enough to drag an extra burden of crumminess on my back like a pack mule traipsing along a dusty road.
“Well, we can try again later this afternoon,” I say, as we stand at the parked car at the end of our fruitless outing. I toss my binoculars onto the seat and use both my hands to gingerly hoist myself back into the passenger seat. The three of us pause to watch a crane flying in the distance against the clear sky.
Last night, the thunder storm flattened the milkweed in my garden before it had a chance to open all its bright orange flowers that were at the point of bursting, the pounding rain splintering them at the base. When I look out across the yard, my beautiful and bountiful Kousa Dogwood has decided it can’t bear to flower this year and so is seemingly conserving energy for another season. I could be disappointed at any number of things it turns out. We all can.
I’m working on my own embodiment lately. Embodiment is a buzzword out in the wellness ethos, a sister to the buzzword trauma. When I was growing up, we didn’t talk about our “trauma.” I learned to not be all that curious about my promiscuous teenage years, or to question my disordered eating all throughout my adult life. When doctors urged me to end my first late-stage pregnancy in my twenties for my own health, that painful memory lodged itself in my body forever as only true trauma can do. But I never called it that. I did the requisite grieving and therapy appointments and called myself healed. But mostly I pushed it away. I became even more of a master of dissociation, proud of my own stoicism, my ability to get back out there and get on with living. But after the pandemic, the politics of the past eight years, the world thrust into the visible climate change many of us never really saw coming, I started to notice that I could no longer cry. Not for a sad movie, not for terrible news from a friend, not for anything. I was stuck in a state of seemingly permanent fight or flight. With decades old trauma lodged deep in my bones. Dulled to the rest of my beautiful life.
But I don’t want that.
The writer Prentis Hemphill says about disembodiment, that if we taught ourself to do it; we can undo it. But we need to practice, “staying open in different conditions, in different moments, with different stimuli. The practice is staying open no matter what happens.”
“I knew we wouldn’t see the owls today,” I say. “I wanted to see them too much. I think the trick in life is to stay open but not wanting.”
“I think you are right about that,” says Janyce, turning the jeep onto the dirt path and coming to an easy stop at the side of the greenhouse. I watch her walk past my open passenger window and make her way into the red barn to pick up our farm stand vegetables.
Life can beat you up. But what about all the delights? The poet Ross Gay wrote a book of essays—one every day on a single delight. I love this idea. Yesterday, I delighted in the bumblebees on the catmint, the pliable purple stems bouncing up and down in the sun. I delighted in the sound of the barking fox outside our slider door after the rain. I delighted in watching the bluebirds return for a second brood, four of them sitting side-by-side on the branch outside our window: mom, dad, and two large speckled babies, almost full grown, but still hanging around.
I heard an interview with Ross recently where he said that joy is possible for everyone at any moment because we’re all alive for only a short time. “It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty,” he said.
“Do you want some mango?” says Janyce, handing me a small white cup filled with bright and cheerful squares of yellow fruit.
“These are so good,” I say, opening my mouth and spooning in the soft sweet flesh, letting it yield to the pressure of my bite. Pure delight.
“Thank You” by Ross Gay
If you find yourself half naked
and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,
again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says
you are the air of the now and gone, that says
all you love will turn to dust,
and will meet you there, do not
raise your fist. Do not raise
your small voice against it. And do not
take cover. Instead, curl your toes
into the grass, watch the cloud
ascending from your lips. Walk
through the garden's dormant splendor.
Say only, thank you.
Thank you.