A Redeemable Injury

Two weeks of limited movement and a lot of stillness. Two weeks of forced sitting, mandatory repose, elevating an injured foot.  Two weeks of watching the garden grow, the weather moving through it. Examining where and when the light and shadows hit the raised beds at what time of day and subsequent thoughts on what plant would want to go where.  Listening to rain fall on new leaves, gutters pouring their contents upon porous brick, cats claiming territory on dark nights. Two weeks watching the foot, touching the foot, wondering about the surprising green areas and the purple stria surfacing in the most unlikely places.  How the swelling increases than subtly improves, how small indications of articulation return.  Two weeks of quiet fascination of the body's adaptation and mending process, of nature's burgeoning insistence.  Seeing, hearing and sensing things I never would have known if I wasn't glued to a chair, leg propped for hours a day, looking at the same things in a near empty room over and over,  obligingly renewing themselves for me.  Upon arrival to the acupuncturist, I uncharacteristically zero in on the same therapy chair several days a week.  I depend upon that chair.  The chair with a view of the under canopy of a tall tree seen through a skylight.  I depend upon that chair with a view.


And then there was the gross motor movement experience.  The strange sensations of the rest of the body making the compensations necessary to walk, accommodating the injury. Two weeks of not experiencing grace or flow or a right relationship with the other functioning parts.  Two weeks of a host of new and unfamiliar tensions. Missing flow in myself.  Watching much older people move in their own semblance of grace and having a longing for what I remember to be myself in movement.


And some unexpected things happened.  The forced stillness and the watching had me falling in love, or at least appreciation, with the house, specifically the light in the house coming through the tall windows in various beguiling ways through the day.  I fell in love with the dear foot and all its surprising revelations and its natural knowing.  The miraculous tendency to go toward healing and return as it does, in its quietly triumphant way, to Function. I realized a benefit of a 35 year meditation practice, the experience of moving in and out of a busy mind back to the body over and over and over.  Somehow, a tendency for an active inquiry and an interest in the Now had become planted in willing soil along the way.  And that somehow, transferred onto a life off the sitting cushion.  These days show me I am interested in what Is, frequently.  There is a curiosity inextricably linked to a type of joy that actively lives in me. Even in somewhat bleak circumstances for a kinesthetic-based person to be made to grossly limit her movement for days on end, I somehow fell in-interest if not in love with intriguing aspects of the ordinary.  Incredible.


Depending upon that chair with a view.  The (healing) touchstone, the place that helps a resonance with Other, nature. The place that softens the accumulated tensions, allows breath to surface into its rightful rhythm. The place of Return.

"Seeing what is small is called insight.

Abiding in softness is called strength."- Lao Tzu