Stigmata

Live everything

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Dear ones, thank you for staying with me even through these long health sabbaticals.
My health has still been quite poor, which has made it difficult to maintain a steady output.

I hope the beginning of spring (and autumn in the southern hemisphere) has been kind and that this letter finds you well. If that is not the case, please know you are in warm company here.

Wherever this finds you today, I am here now with a poem for you and some words from the wild.

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Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto), Allegorical Figure of Spring, 1546—1548

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Stigmata

I want to be touched.
Even though I ache,
even though I am bleeding.
Remind me I am a living creature;
retrieve the worlds
stained with light within
my soul.

It may be the only artifacts that
outlast centuries
are wounds.
I am reaching up through the ruins
of centuries, through
the fragments of a thousand days I have
yet lived.
I am peering
through the other end of a telescope,
entering my body again through a lonely fire.

Here are my scars:
the pearls, the songs,
the stigmata.

There, quavering:
ice-cracks, pre-vernal streams,
earth that yields
to the combustion of flowers.
Green wisps
are lifting from the dark earth.

I am resurrecting beneath your hands.

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Man cannot live on bread alone.
But it would not be a stretch to say I could live on songs. Paintings. Poems.
Well placed hands.

I once walked through the world as a soft animal, sensitive to beauty. Dizzy with fervor. Wild love blooming recklessly in every corner of my soul. My body a reflecting pool, lit with the grandeur of being alive. A living mirror.

I was my own, yes. But I was also the fidelity and anger of my mother.
The keen intellect of my Grandmother.
The bite of the neighbor’s dog.
I was with the wind blowing through the aspens.
The crush of petals beneath muddied feet.
The rich song of violins.
Maple-smoke rising from an ivied sugar shack.
Faces turned away from mine.

I experienced everything viscerally.
Flushed cheeks and prickling skin.
A stomach that writhed and fluttered.
Limbs that ached and ached.
A galloping, racing heart.

I felt everything. I lived everything, as Rilke wrote.
Beauty and terror.

There was vigor in my body and soul. A will to go on, to see all there was.
And also an abiding grief. A growing weariness.

For much of my life, I was unaware that I work differently than the people around me.
I understood that others found me strange, and that I experienced life at an intensity that no one else really understood. For years, I was told I had depression and anxiety.
It didn’t seem so far-fetched. I fit the bill. But something was missing.
I didn’t know that my sensitivity wasn’t just psychological, but rooted in my body. Only in the past few years have I found names to describe my inner workings:

Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
Mast Cell Activation Syndrome.
Dysautonomia.
Autism.
Endometriosis.
C-PTSD.

The list gets longer with every appointment.

When you live with these conditions and their companions, your body needs more.
More care. More attention. More stability. More boundaries. More rest.

Our bodies are really remarkable in their capacities for adaptation and regeneration. But continuous lack of proper attention can compound existing vulnerabilities and lead to detrimental effects; the likes of which have caused me to be bed-bound more days than not right now.

Due to this, for some time now, I have dwelled mostly in the realm of the intellect: that is, the mind. A celestial place lofted above the body. Distant, clouded, sometimes glittering.

I want to live life as I once did. Attuned to more than aches. To more than a vast, encompassing darkness.

When my body is touched now, it is as though I am being reached through ruins. As though I am somewhere just out of grasp. Hidden by pain.
The constant light-headedness.
The crushing, deadening fatigue.

This is the first spring of my life that I have not wanted to smell the flowers. I don’t know how to exist in the world as I am now. I am slowly learning how to live again. Through the grief. Through the beauty. Through the terror.

I cannot deny the burdens of existing in a complicated, mortal body.

And still, if I concentrate. If I reach further. There is something of God in me beneath the surface. A softening. A breaking.

Something pearlescent.
Something new rooting in my body saying:

I want to be touched.

I want to touch.

I want to be loved.

I want to love the world again.

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Dear kindred,
Thank you for being here. It means much more than you know.

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I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to curate a playlist. Do take a listen if this seems like your cup of tea! Let me know if you have a favorite off the list. And, of course, feel free to follow me over there for eclectic but premium music taste.

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