To be in the place that I am
I took a fall down the stairs last week.
I wasn’t as if I had been waiting for it. But stuff like this happens for a reason.
Yes, I know what that sounds like and no, I’m not joking. These phenomena can take on really strange or funny proportions. Whenever my husband Chris is in some sort of emotional turmoil, for instance (work-related stress, worries about his children…), he will have transport problems: car accidents, bike breakdowns, technical damage… We didn’t understand at first, but we started noticing that whenever he had an accident or a problem, it always happened in moments when he was upset. So after a while, if he had another bike breakdown we would joke: okay, what’s the real problem here? Turns out there was always some interesting inner process that was going on and worth taking a better look at.
I have used the body as metaphor for years. So hurting my pelvis and tailbone, fragile areas to begin with since giving birth nine years ago, was something to take seriously. Linked to root symbolism, the origin of life and a deep, basic sense of security, the pelvic bowl is at once the center of a woman’s strength, her foundation and the seat of her creativity.
Falling like I did (just missing the last-but one step of the stairs and landing on my tailbone) isn’t considered life-threatening. But I confess I had underestimated the impact. At forty, I have never broken a bone in my body, and my most serious physical injury (apart from the tempest that was childbirth) has been pneumonia — quite a different type of affliction altogether.
So I have been monitoring my body with a fair degree of astonishment over the last two weeks. How it heals miraculously quickly. How some deeper bruises tend to linger. How something might still, after all, be wrong (there is one side I can’t lie on at night — not because it hurts, but because certain movements I inadvertently make while lying on it send a pain up my spine that will wake me up without default and will have me spend the first two hours after I get up in the morning positively cripple.
I have also been soul-searching and monitoring my inner processes. Just as interesting. Along with my bruises I felt like a well had been opened inside me to let some deep, pent-up tension out at last. A painful purge, if you like.
Things I’ve learned:
Pain wears you out. That goes for both physical pain and emotional pain. I have rarely felt so tired than after a day of trying to function at fifty percent, trying to keep the continuous nagging feeling of tiny claws in my muscles in the background. It’s no coincidence that I have been writing about inner judgments and the sentences we inadvertently cast upon ourselves.
For me, at the start of this new season and perhaps a whole new year, counting in natural cycles, the conclusion of the last two weeks of hurting and healing is this:
I want to be in the place where I am.
Without proving myself to anything or anyone, without trying to be better than I am, without passing judgement on myself, on a situation, on other people or a combination of them all. I want to wake up in the morning and be glad to be where I am, without any intention of going or getting anywhere. For I, too, am also a place in itself, a dwelling for my soul, and I want to be there, in that place. At home in and with myself, and happy about it. I want to bud like a tree in its own time, and catch the sunlight as much as the rain.
I want to Be.
I am, once again, trying to look at myself with new eyes.
