The Dreams of Your Body

October 1, 2007 · by Christine

Humpbacks

There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.

Off Stellwagan
off the Cape,
the humbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.

They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.

Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.

We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash thorugh the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky —
like nothing you’ve ever imagined —
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then

they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.

I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.

I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living.

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

-Mary Oliver from American Primitive

Mary Oliver is one of the great mystics of our time.   About five years ago I had the privilege of witnessing a pod of humpback whales in Alaska.  They were bubble feeding which is this marvelous choreographed effort, where the whales swim in a circle to create bubbles and disorient a school of fish.  Then the whales dive down deep and then come straight back up out of the water with mouths wide open catching a mouthful of fish.  Watching them dive and rise was exactly as Oliver describes — extended moments where I felt their longing and was lost in their beauty.

“Listen, whatever it is you try / to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you /like the dreams of your body” is the line of her poem that speaks most profoundly to me.   Last week I read a post at Velveteen Rabbi about embodied trust which has lingered in my imagination.  She writes:

“Rabbi Shalom Noah Barzovsky, the previous Slonimer Rebbe, teaches that there are three kinds of emunah (elemental trust): trusting mind, trusting heart, and trusting body. And the highest of these is emunat ha-evarim, trusting with one’s limbs, where deep trust penetrates every fibre of one’s being. The classic example he offers is the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. In that moment of leaping, he writes (in his commentary on parashat Beshalach), the children of Israel trusted fully in the One, and therefore the holy spirit rested upon them and sang in them (this is a Hebrew pun — שרתה / shartah, rested, relates aurally to שירה / shirah, song) and song burst forth not only from their lips but in their very limbs.” 

Emunat ha-evarim — trusting with one’s limbs — what an amazing image.  I believe this kind of elemental trust is tied up with the dreams of the body Mary Oliver talks about in her poem. As I move through this world, what are the practices that help me to cultivate this profound sense of knowing, trusting, and being that my body offers?  We are not encouraged to trust our bodies in this culture, for they forever need improving.  We can buy an endless variety of products and programs geared solely at responding to the message that our bodies are somehow not good enough, not beautiful enough, not wise enough on their own.  This undermining of the body works in subtle ways, often I am not even aware of the messages I ingest.

This season ahead for me is one of profound trust, trust I can feel in my sinews and muscles.  There is a pulsing within me that longs to bring me deeper into mystery if I will only surrender.  In this time of openness, I am listening for the practices that will sustain me, guide me through.  I wrote last week of being drawn to live more deeply into the monastic hours of the day.   Woven together with this is a desire to let my prayer arise from my body, to listen to her dreams, to trust those dreams as sacred. 

What is your body singing to you this day?  What are the dreams it holds for you carrying you forward into the night?

-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

(view of the Olympics from the cottage on a clear evening over the Hood Canal)

Posted in Embodiment, Photos, Poetry, Season by the Sea | 7 Comments »