Body

A Poem

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Arriving at the doorway to my lungs

I put down my heavy luggage.

I pause and look all around.

I notice there is beautiful crawling ivy

and purple flowers creeping twirling through my ribcage.

There are birds and I guess there must even be

sky and rivers, trees and open pastures.

Am I on the inside or the outside?

Does it matter?

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I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling claustrophobic,

suffocating, anxious to escape this body…

AND I have also felt all sorts of FREE in this body.

It’s the free that keeps me in here,

that has led me to traverse the layers beyond layers

to dream and play and slowly learn to love

the untamed parts, the dark parts.

Oh wise body, if I may be strong enough

to meet your wisdom.

I look up and see my beating heart,

Wow. Hello there! Thank you, heart.

You are so much more than an organ.

I see all the tiny cracks in you,

the places that have been sad and bruised

make you more beautiful, more lovable to me.

Can my heart love itself?

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The Upanishads say that within the heart there is a little house.

Inside of that house there is a lotus with a thousand white petals.

This reminds us that whatever we seek out there in the macrocosm

is also right here within the microcosm.

It’s strange, you know.

We crave health and healing, we grapple with these bodies

and cells and brains and cancer,

we try to make sense of pain and agitation and time,

but none of it really makes much sense.

Lately when I teach yoga classes—

I’m so grateful to be well enough to teach, that is not lost on me—

when I teach, I’ve been channeling this message

that our breath and our bodies become a team

and show the mind how to be—

loosening that clench the mind has on our breath and body

feels important now.

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Coming to awareness of breath and body

and tucking the mind inside of my sneaker like a dirty sock—

mind wants me to be heady, qualified, authorized,

but breath and body say otherwise.

They say, look at your lungs,

you are being breathed,

you already know and are everything and nothing.

See how light the air is

and yet it fills you up to the brim

and carries you across the sky.

It empties you out and drops you down

to the bottom of the ocean with the coral and the sharks,

and then you follow that ripple,

that shaft of sunlight, back up to the sky.

YES, there is sky here

and there are stars and fairies

and there is music.

Photo by basic on Unsplash