My Body As Evidence

Published in the Skyline 2017 Anthology of Virginia writers. 

For thirteen years, Michael and I had been more merged than most straight married couples I knew. We had one house, one car, one back account, one set of friends. Our bedroom had one closet with one set of clothes. We even shared just one drawer for underwear and socks. Separating now, with friendly finality, offered each of us a huge and welcome freedom to re-discover ourselves. 

For me, pulling out the attachments to him and to his mundane dreams of two old men rocking peacefully on a porch, dreams that had taken root in my body as well as my mind, seemed both overwhelming and exciting. In two weeks new owners were to move into the house we had just cleaned out for them, and I had no clear vision of where I would go or what my life from then on would be about. I knew only that I would need to go inward for a while. 

I needed to dive in and listen deeply. I needed to reconnect to what my Quaker heritage referred to "the still small voice within". This had always been a trusted and reliable guide for me, but in the bustle of domestic life, and especially in the intensity of the unsuccessful struggle to stay together with Michael, I could no longer hear it. Reclaiming my inner wisdom needed time. I knew that much. But how much time, and where I should be living during that time was not clear to me. 

Where should I set up house to rethink my life, my path, my purpose? Where should I put myself in this world to do the work of demolishing the parts of my structure, the mental constructs that I no longer wanted holding me in place? Where should I sleep while dreaming up my next life story? Where should I stand while rebuilding the foundations of my life? Wherever I chose, I wanted to build it out of my own lived experience, my own body of evidence. 

To figure all that out, I booked a week in a little summer cottage on the Outer Banks. Only $400, and right on the beach. The summer hordes were gone, and the storms of icy rain expected soon. Without insulation, the cottage was not an appealing shelter for any of the other usual beach goers, even those who like to roam the empty stretches of sand off-season. But for me, it was the perfect place to contemplate where I would rebuild my life. 

I listened to the wet sea air whistling through the cracks around the door with my feet propped up on the edge of the stove, the only heat source in the cottage. I was counting on the wind to blow through my mind, as well as through the cracks in the siding. 

Listening to the insistent pulsation of the sea was exactly what I needed in order to drown out the echoes of my discontented dickering with Michael and his angry driven efforts to right the wrongs of our physical environment. His voice was still woven into my mind. I needed the wintry blast to disentangle the warp of his dissatisfactions from the delicious weave of my sensory and emotional truths. 

I needed wild and wind and waves and weather to erode the landscape of my thinking, thinking that I knew had been partially shaped in my flattened response to Michael's frustratingly depressed mood. So I bundled up for long tearful walks on the beach, facing directly into the gale with one mittened hand shielding my cheek from the slap of frozen spray. 

I spent hours on those wide expanses of almost horizontal overlapping layers of sea, foam, sand, clouds, and color. This was not the stationary flatness of the mid-west where I grew up, but constantly shifting and flowing, vectors of no more than 2 degrees slicing my sightline. This was thrilling and inspiring spaciousness. 

I found myself thinking and feeling freely back and forth across the veil between inner sensory experience and the simple activities of each day. I played between outer activity and inner life like a child plays in the water and in the sand simultaneously. Just as I strode freely out to greet the rush of the surf as it carved new patterns into the shore, I greeted the rush of thoughts and sensations that were constantly changing the shape and texture of my emotional landscape. 

I let the clean cold cut through me. Then, to keep warm, I savored hours under layers of covers in the high double bed with the ocean view. If a receding wave left a glassy surface on the smooth sand that reflected lavender and turquoise and mauve and silver from the sky, I painted sheets of sensory color onto my skin. I scanned my body for the texture and location of sensations, and watched cautiously but without holding on as I made myself available for whatever was moving, whatever was wanting to let go, whatever was wanting to be rebuilt. Huddled inside heavy layers of clothes, I explored the random and patternless ebb and flow of micro-movements. I inhibited patterns of emotional habit, and rested my mind from the repetitive rethinking of the recently ended relationship. I untangled the overgrowth muddling my mind, and ripped free the tendrils of gnarly restriction in my inner movement; restriction that was making my thinking rigid. 

Here in this sound-washed cottage, I silently enjoyed each moment, sensation after sensation. I awakened oceans of tactile and kinetic treats. I told myself that this re-emerging access to inner movement was exactly what I wanted to use to model my new life. 

This new space in my mind felt inspiring, and hopeful, too. But I needed much more time for this process of unwinding, and the rebuilding that would have to follow. I needed months, not days. And it became apparent there really wasn't a better place than back in Charlottesville, with its welcoming communities of artists and seekers, to do all the letting go and re-inventing. So I headed back there to find myself an inexpensive but sensually supportive place to live. 

After looking at a few places in town, I settled, with the excitement of a four-year-old arriving at a new playground, on a sweet little cabin on the edge of an extensive rolling wooded acreage that was part of a sheep farm just 15 minutes from town. I had budgeted enough of the money Michael and I had made on the sale of our house to carry me through six months of this place without needing to work in the world. 

I still harbored an old fantasy that I would find peace inside if I could get to a place far enough away from human interruption, a place where aloneness was more powerful than loneliness. This cabin in the woods would not only be a sanctuary for the investigation of the experience of aloneness. It would be my experiment in being a hermit--not at the isolated edge of anything, but in the middle of Virginia, in the middle of a farm; and, I noted, exactly in the middle of my life. 

The two-level cabin was set on a hillside, with the entrance on the upper level. Only two rooms fit on that level...a wood-paneled, sun-soaked living room with hardwood floors and windows on three sides, and a small but efficient kitchen. In between, the stairs down led to the wood stove that heated the place, and to two small rooms, one on either side. The smallest would just barely handle my full-sized mattress on the floor--no bed yet, as I wasn't ready to reinvest in furniture. 

The other room downstairs would be my office. Its window looked out on the sheep paddock, a paddock that I was surprised to find also corralled a braying donkey. There was just enough room for my bodywork table behind the desk, although I wouldn't attract clients out there, out of town, and in a house so full of my own emotional debris splashed like an invisible but palpable Jackson Pollock all over the walls. 

I centered my solitary self-work up in the living room. Whether with crystal morning light streaming in, or later in the sharp silvery dusk, I invited music to fill the fresh, expectant space. My sound system and library of CDs dominated my day-life. I cranked the music up to motivate movement, as well as to drown out the sobs and wails and chuckles and screams. I let music bathe the wounds in my heart and soothe my starved skin as I writhed on the floor or wrestled with my fraught attractions to longing, arousal, and melancholy. I let emotionally stirring melodies feed my soul. 

I delighted myself by making dances and songs out of all the accidents of movement and sound I stumbled on, turning chaos into pleasing forms through repetition and variations. 

Sensing my weight grounded me in gravity, reminded me of both the sacredness and the ordinariness of my human body. Tuning my attention to the details of my inner experience, to the pleasures of slowing way down, to movement engaged at a glacial pace, and to the oceanic depths of motion and emotion reminded me that I was still anchored to my evolutionary origins and to the liquid body architecture I'd inherited. 

I had no guru, no mentor, no therapist, nor personal guide through that winter. I did the unwinding work on my own. But not without ample and reliable resources. My study with the pioneers in the fields of bodywork, mindfulness, somatics, and tantric and psychic spirituality had each left clearly marked trails for me to follow. Although I never felt devoted to the teachers themselves, their work, their methods, their attitudes, and approaches guided me. And I referenced all of it through my own body. 

In my daily meditations, my sitting posture swirled and oozed within minutes of beginning a conscious controlled breath. Keeping only a deep, slow pattern of inhale and exhale, I gave over to the primordial flow that got underneath the holding in my body. Recognizing this inner movement as an authentic need, I participated with it. I gave amplitude to the waves, and rode them out to the far edges of my fingers; then let go and let them suck me back into my gut. 

That movement back into center reminded me to power-pump the life charge coiled in my pelvis, and to focus on the subtle sensual undulations of my pelvic floor. I ignored the whispers of socially-induced shame that threatened to squelch the pleasure in my body. If that led down an erotic path, I followed it willingly. I encouraged it, even, by adding in a tantalizing brush of my fingertips on my lips, then a sensual stroking of the side of my neck with the back of my hand. And if I'd stoked the wood stove downstairs with sufficient logs from the shed outside, and if there was a patch of sun heating the carpet, I shed all my clothes to offer more skin to be caressed by fingers of warm air. 

And each day I took to the woods. The natural canopy sheltered my exposed nerves. The soft earth sponged away my yearning. The throngs of trees and undergrowth camouflaged my wandering, and masked the sound of my out-loud and unrelenting arguments with the dwindling echoes of Michael's voice in my mind. Through the snow that occasionally blew in off the Blue Ridge that winter, or in the striped slivers of sunlight that slipped sideways between the trees, I trudged along the horse trails for miles, meeting no one. 

Some days I felt great and told myself I was ready to move on. Other days I grieved heavily and loudly; grieving not for the loss of the relationship, but for the loss of my dreams. How was I ever going to realize the transformation through erotic spirituality that I longed for; that I had been hoping we would eventually get to, Michael and I? Without a steady partner to rely on, and to practice intensely with, how could I ever trust another man enough to let go into bliss? 

Part of me was desperate to have a chance encounter in those woods, with the hope it would turn into a spirited friendship or passionate tryst--the part of me that didn't want to do the hard work of self-examination and heart scouring--the part of me that wanted to ride away in another relationship, to sail smoothly over the churning sea beneath--the part of me that was still resisting the idea that the soul-building treasures I sought could only be found by diving deep into my unconscious. 

I acknowledged these parts, but didn't let them distract me for long. Day after day, more exposure, more arousal, more breathing, more movement...all blended with the sounds howling out of my hollows. Doubt and ugly despair rounded up into cackles of crazy laughter. Rising crests of juicy pleasure slid down into troughs of gurgling desire. Long hours rode steady currents of thought after swirling thought. Heaviness of body gained mass, then gave way to suspended, weightless drifting. Longer roller-coaster whirlpools sank into delirious dream-weaving. 

Surfacing again, shaking off that murky underwater world of emotions, I would find my footing again, and feel my weight back onto solid ground. I'd stride into the everyday tasks of cooking and cleaning, reinvesting in an easy, light-hearted swing and sway. A trip into town for shopping and a yoga class would anchor me back into conventional social interaction. 

Days in that cabin in the woods were wild, and rich, and full of marvelous and welcome emptiness. Day after day overflowed with both the easy and the challenging. Nights, however, were just hard. 

It was at night, after a well deserved and carefully prepared dinner, that my emotional need for companionship slammed into me. Doubts and desires and delusions wormed their way into my brain. I paced around that little cabin, looking for something to connect to, someone. I talked to myself. I argued with myself. I imagined my fantasies coming true. And worse, I imagined none of them even drawing breath. 

Night-times were harsh, and detached from comforting sense-based reality. I lost countless hours in front of my computer, my gateway to the hall of mirrors that is internet dating. I worked and reworked my own profile, trying on new definitions of who I intended to be, how I wanted to be seen. I studied profile after profile of the men there, trying to read between the lines, trying to imagine the gem of a man beneath the sad and sorry exteriors and expressionless descriptions they presented. My hope and my honesty eroded through the cautious back and forth that led nowhere--the endless fishing, hooking a nibble, reeling him in, only to find no one at the other end of the line. I got so disgusted with the amount of time I was wasting sitting in front of that little screen with no resulting skin time, I would punch off the computer and vow not to open it again. But the next night, or the one after that, I would be back. 

As the winter lost its hold on the land, and spring gave rise to even more sexual energy and desire for connection, I finally realized I needed help. I needed someone to help me sort my way back into contact with the world, someone to confirm how crazy I was and possibly offer a lifeline back to sanity. 

The wise woman I engaged for a course of short-term therapy, listened to me rant and rave and unravel my inner life for half a dozen sessions, quietly asking questions about this or that to better understand the razor's edge I had been dancing on. And then just as quietly, she pronounced me unambiguously sane and healthy. She helped me see that there was nothing wrong with the storms of doubt, heaving grief, raging desire, and now, this new surging of passion for sharing my life and my work. 

She helped me recognize that I could trust my ability to swim deeply in the transformative waters of breath and movement and sound and emotion, and then bob my head above the surface to gulp fresh perspective and chart the next tack in my flailing course. That I could howl and wallow in the darkest of emotional change, and still witness and articulate what was going on--this was a gift. I'd built a fresh and sensual sense of self as well as new inner strength by being my own guide through the chewing, churning, and digesting of a life lost and a new life emerging. But now my hermetic life no longer served me. 

So when a friend of mine needed a roommate for the house she was moving into, I jumped at the chance. Just the presence of another person each evening, with warm conversation and a good-night hug, transformed nights from hellish to earthly. 

Later that year, a particularly violent storm ravaged the North Carolina coast, hitting head-on the part of the Outer Banks where I had retreated to clear my mind. From my new, shared living room, I listened and watched more closely as newscasters detailed the damage to houses, boats, cars, roads and shoreline. With both horror and sadness, I realized that the half of a house they showed, ripped apart but still standing amidst its twisted framing and washed out foundation, was the very cottage I had huddled in. The tatters of a white bead-board wall was all that was left of the bedroom I had curled up in to watch the sea-wind lash at the windows. 

With quiet relief, I realized that the self-doubt that had thrashed at my thinking then, merely littered the edges of my mind now. Although still halfway torn apart, and with more emotional debris still to clear away, I stood ready for the next phase of my life journey. I could rebuild on newly exposed foundations. I could rely on the body of evidence that had withstood the full force of my own emotional hurricane.