Snowfall

This morning, I sat and watched the snow fall against the backdrop of the neighbor's brick house.

It started out, just a few small flakes, barely visible.

Then it was big, thick flakes, plopping down hard.

It felt good just to watch, my eyes trying to decide whether to track individual patches as they fell, or to take in all the movement as a whole.

I felt like a poet.

They tapered off, almost stopped, and for a moment I felt lonely.

They started again, inviting me to come with them.

At that, my own tears started to flow, as I felt the kinship with this show of nature

Silently forceful

Haphazard and non-uniform

On no one's schedule but its own.

Natural beauty

Singing its own song of praise

Created just for now.

 

Embodied

"New year, new me" came with a jolt this year. It was as if the Lord woke me at midnight and said: Ok dear, buckle up. We're going for a ride right now, and you are going to need a few things for this trip -- here. 

And we were off, while I was still blinking and not even at the point where I could say I wasn't prepared for this. 

So I have a list of about 11 things that I've been incorporating into my weeks (has it been weeks already?), and one of these is from a website called EmbodiedCatholicWoman.com, called the Heart Safety Toolkit. God bless the Facebook ad that knew I was looking at resolving trauma on a somatic level. Sometimes intrusive marketing is helpful. 

At several turns in my adult life, people have told me that I need to get in touch with my feelings. My response was generally a raised eyebrow and an "ok..." because honestly I knew I had feelings. I felt them all the time, often to an overwhelming degree. I couldn't deny that I'm of an intellectual bent. Most of me shrugged off this entreaty, while the rest of me squirmed a bit, wondering if I'm just not really woman enough. 

Honestly, I had no idea how to do get into this "touch" they talked about. No one ever explained it to me. And though I am deeply intuitive, sometimes I need things spelled out super clearly before I get it, because I just don't have the ability to leap into whatever assumption the speaker is making.

Claudine at Embodied Catholic Woman spells it out, scientifically. Essentially, our bodies can go into different "gears" in response to trauma or chronic stress. These gears hang between our psychology and our physical bodies, and the effects go both ways. The key to resolving what trauma triggers is to become observers of thoughts, feelings, sensations that happen inside our bodies, and do certain physical things that can reset us over time physically and psychologically, to be better able to navigate the challenges that life brings. When we don't reset but stay in a gear where we are either unable to deal, or are hyper-dealing, we are left less and less capable of that kind of navigation, and we instead develop all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms, and we become knotty, and maybe even sick, people. 

So it hasn't been so much that I have needed to become more emotional as it is I have needed to become more embodied. By that, I mean to observe: this is what I feel happening in my body right now and eventually move to this is what I can do in response. In the past it was more like I feel x; I am x and it was as if there was no escape. So I would just avoid feeling x, by force, if necessary. Like that link I shared above about the "threat" of the women's Bible study at church. The only solution I could come up with was to guilt myself into not feeling what I felt. Or, one better, to accept, with some sadness, the way I am. What these somatic exercises have taught me (and the Lord, throwing this at me as we left on this trip) is that there's a stopping point between what I feel and who I am. And I can go there and actually accept what I feel into the fuller picture of who God made me. What a concept. I'm 57 years old, but it's better late than never to figure this out. 

This need became screamingly evident as I sat writing an email to a friend one evening, quite in a panic. I put my head in my hands and said out loud, "I'm becoming my father." What I heard was someone in a high state of anxiety, doing the social equivalent of desperately reaching for numbing alcohol to erase the pain, instead of taking courage to face it. (I'm currently reading The Shining as an exploration of the psyche of the dry drunk; more on that after I finish it, maybe.) This state of mind was, frankly, modeled to me by the adults in my life throughout my childhood, and had come to be somewhat emotionally normal for me, though I had not experienced it myself in decades. That was the moment I realized I needed what I was about to find in Claudine a few days later. 

Ok, so none of this was what I came here to even write about, but there we have it. Between Claudine and Manuela Mitevova and her somatic practices I am learning how to be whole. Now we give it time, work, and continued prayer.

Shalom, Shalom

Today was one of those rare Sundays when I had no liturgical role but to worship. Coming off of the Holy Week, Easter Week, Divine Mercy cycle I have been more than tired; I've been rather liturgically fatigued. I've been rehearsing to myself often that true prayer is not rooted in feeling but in faith. Sometimes it has seemed I've had so much less than feeling going on that I'm more at the level of consciousness. To lead music, I do normally have to tap into the foundation of sanctified autopilot I have, which I've learned to trust more than my mind. Call it liturgical instinct. But the proper balance of that seems to always have just a hint of adrenaline mixed in, not just simply turning on the machine before the opening hymn and then turning it back off again after the closing hymn, like the sound system.

Anyway, today was none of that. 

Today instead I was able to soak in the Mass (and the music) and feel life return.

The first line that snagged me was in the Psalm: 

As soon as I lie down, I fall peacefully asleep, for you alone, O Lord, bring security to my dwelling.

That line, crescendoed in the word, security, gently pierced me. And then, nicely enough, the homily basically picked up on this theme of peace, and Jesus' presence with us which makes it possible to have inner peace. And this weird reminder: how Jesus says "peace be with you," and then, as a by the way, "do you have anything to eat?" Both of these lines have always struck me as bizarre, said into the faces of apostles who were hiding and scared out of their wits and feeling very unreconciled in themselves, between themselves, and with Jesus, without a doubt. What they had just finished experiencing had pulled all their stuffing out and left them raw, vulnerable messes. 

And Jesus is hungry. At least for their fellowship.

Yeah, and this is piercing all over again.

How is Jesus' hunger resonating in me? I learned from the Carmelites some years ago that the way to go is to invite Jesus to love through me, live through me, minister through me, etc. First, because that's the Christian plan, but especially because my natural capacity -- anyone's natural capacity -- isn't the Christian plan, because it is so tiny and finite. "Christ in me, the hope of glory." 

So how about Jesus being hungry through me? 

It sends me right back to the refrain so common to me when I started grappling with becoming Catholic. What kind of God in His right mind relies so much on human beings, loves them, calls them, endures them, wants them? 

I guess it's the kind of God who is not innately like me, guarded, invulnerable, untouchable, cowardly in the face of my own desires. 

Ok, I've lost track of where I started. Shalom, shalom. The peace that Jesus gives is wholeness, entirety; it gives security to my dwelling. I don't have to guard myself. I can un-do the hypervigilance. I guess I can breathe and be brave in the face of my own desires. Selah.