By Mary Reddy
When I hike, sometimes I hear my thigh muscles thank me, excited at the challenge of going up and up and up. I believe the loudest thank you comes from my quadriceps—they are the ones I feel the most in an uphill stride. I studied anatomy in art school and was fascinated by the interweaving of hamstring, quadricep, and adductor muscles around the long bone of the thigh. But the adductor muscles in particular caught my fancy. They snug in close to the bone, braiding themselves under the longer quad muscles. What I most love is the curve they create on the inner thigh and the way they pull inward, a movement back to the center.
When I hike for hours and hours, I am more a body than not. I am knitted into moments in the life of a pile of leaves, the breathe of a cloud, the wetness of a puddle, the dew-weighted tangle of tall wild grasses. I cross fields where I watch every step I take, hoping to avoid the cow patties. Or if on boggy stretches, I look for the clumps of heather or grasses to use as my stepping stones around sinkholes. I know exactly when the rain begins and walk through its drumming to when it fades to a mist, the breeze spraying droplets on my cheeks like a thousand tiny kisses.
Day passes and grows into soft dusk more majestically. Everything on earth matters. Where on earth can I sit to rest and grab a bite? Where is the safest route up a slippery, rocky trail? Now, here on earth, I am in a deep hollow walking beneath a copse of trees, sensing the resident troll who eyes me with detachment. Now, here on earth, I am on a rise overlooking the flooded river basin, muddy clay-colored waters singing their swelling notes, swirling around trees that once stood yards from the river bank. Now, here on earth, I approach the last mile to the little village, blessedly before nightfall, walking through the cornflower blue of twilight.
Today I am indoors while the rain pounds the earth outside. I have a cold, a sore throat, and low energy. It’s only a few days into the new year. I’ve been embodied for a long time. I know these physical ailments come and go. I am familiar with the ebb and flow of my energy. I know how it can affect my moods. The mood today is impending grief, as though some loss is just over the horizon. Is the grief partly caused by my inactivity? I have not taken hours-long hikes for many days. Is the grief related to the tyranny of habit? Illness isn’t the only thing that takes me away from the moment-to-moment aliveness and love that floods me on long walks, on days spent out of doors. My habit is to feel more task-oriented, more mental, less in my body when closeted indoors and facing the return of work and routine.
The many wondrous challenges of being embodied, of accepting existence as an incarnate spirit, are intimately related to our tendency to compartmentalize experiences. Can I only feel so alive and in love if I am out walking? Or only if I have no other responsibilities tugging at my heels? No, often enough I have known moments of joy in the very routine, indoor activities of my working day. But when I have a peak experience, by the very fact of being a human in time, I later will have lost it. And grief follows loss. Yes, compartmentalization might be a factor for me. Another, that I cannot deny, is the very real grief demons flying like banshees around our globe as lives are burnt away in Australia and lives are ended and others put at risk in the Middle East. Perhaps I feel those demons knocking on my protective wall, the one I erect when trying not to sink into despair.
I spoke on the phone this morning with a dear elder family member. Age has thinned her bones and she’s grown quite fragile. Three falls in the past year. Three fractures needing repair followed by physical therapy. She speaks with equanimity about her recent difficulties, commenting that everyone experiences old age differently. Her father was quick-witted and mobile until he died. One night, some months after losing his wife, he went to sleep and did not wake up. It’s evident she envies his peaceful death, but her spirit is a loving one. She acknowledges the wistful, negative emotions and moves right through them to gush about how wonderful her doctors and therapists have been. She taught her nurses a song about God that she wrote years ago for her children. They were delighted and asked for the music and words to share with their own little ones. In her nineties, this woman is appreciating every moment and she is offering the gift of her light to all around her. Even pain-filled, broken-bone days can be fully inhabited.
Incarnational spirituality reminds me again and again that the door is open to a state where every moment counts. I can embrace myself in my body, in sickness and in health. Whether indoors or out, I have the capacity to shine my human light into the world. Even a human with a bad head cold is full of grace. Even in the face of this year’s known catastrophes and its dire unknowns, I can love this earth and all its creatures—love them well and devotedly. My quest for this new year will be to stand open-eyed with wonder at all earth’s gifts but also with protective love and honorable resistance in the face of all the destruction. The flow of moments, the very alive, here-on-earth-ness of my days and nights invites me to fully inhabit every experience, whether it's just an exhausting head cold or the painful death of a loved one. Joy and grief bookend a spectrum of fun, frustration, sorrow, mirth, comfort, pain—the you-name-it of being in a human body.
Love well that which you know you will lose. That’s a pretty incarnate situation, isn’t it? Knowing we are here now but will not always be. Do we secretly know that nothing is ever truly lost? In the midst of a moody indulgence, in a flirtation with grief, I hug to myself the clear awareness that I can feel this way because I know how precious everything is.