#drafty very drafty

After the first of the year, we went back to school on a Monday, halfway through January, the week before MLKjr. day. It was my birthday that week. I made beef bourguignon and took it to work on the Friday before the three-day weekend. 

Waking up that next Tuesday, before work I read about Wuhan. I looked up the size, made a mental comparison to NYC. I knew* then. I “joked” at work. “This is day one.” I said. We all laughed and made the usual fun of me. Myself include. “What !?” I said, when they accused of me of being a doomsdaysayer pessimist. “You’ll want to drink as much wine as possible before it all crashes, that’s all I’m saying.”

I actually said that. Coworker reminded me this weekend. 

I bought supplies in mid February. I did it at 5 am and I felt embarrassed and exposed at the grocery. 

Over spring break, I was stretching. Doing yoga on my mat in front of the sliding glass patio door and watching the chickens. I was attending them without words. I was noticing, without words, how much more of this kind of attention was happening for me. The whole body kind. 

I kept stretching. Following the youtube routines I do daily. 

I had cleaned the coop early in the day and the hens were fussing. I noticed it to myself, nonverbally, one, two, three times. Then I noticed out loud, with words, to myself inside my head. Then I understood, without words again, they were out late.

Next thing I knew I was on my feet and in my boots and halfway across the yard  because I forgot to put the roost down and that was what all the hen’s trouble was about. 

I got back inside and sat back down on the yoga mat and then... I noticed all this about myself. I noticed all this about my own attention. I was attending it. 

The body has a way of paying attention that does not require words and leads directly to right action. 

This sequence is the opposite of a traumatized one. 

Trauma is the blockage of the direct natural adaptive curative connections between attention and right action. The blockage leaves the long evolved, ever evolving reaction interrupted. This causes paralysis of some kind in the psyche, and in the body. What we call “mental health” or “interpersonal” issues. What we call “autoimmune” disorder. The iterations in psyche and body of this unresolved, interrupted, evolutionary response to trauma. The interruption by something... “more civilized”. Pah. 

Pft. Pah. Meh. 

When I see my body’s over-reactive immune response not as a disease, but rather as a sign of some important interruption, I allow myself to attend to the body where it is. Where it got stuck often, or sometimes where it is now, pointing, cleary, sometimes symbolically in the direction it needs to go. 

The last three days my left index finger has been swollen. Seriously. Like a tight shiny sausage. Very arthritic, from joint to joint to joint. I can almost, certainly, feel it - crooking. 

But I am not seeing an upsetting disease process I worry over or feel I must stop. Not anymore. 

Now I am seeing... the communication between my conscious experience/mind/present and what my body is trying to tell me about the interruption. 

My left side is my defensive, or (as my therapist likes to say) “protective” side. In contrast to my right, connective, side. So my left index finger. 

My defensive pointer finger. 

I see the interruption of the natural flow of my evolution in response to external stress and “trauma” - I see the interruption not as the source of the trauma or even as the experience of the trauma itself. Rather the interruption is my own defensive need to point a finger of blame, to identify some wrongness, some cause that should not be, to blame for... this trauma.

The urge to blame is the interruption. The urge to blame is the trauma. 

I do not have to stop the trauma. I do not have to eliminate it. Or annihilate or erase its impact. To heal, to move on, to evolve through the natural course of things, all I have to do is allow it. Stop interrupting my natural response to challenge with blame and a need to erase. 

When there is a legit injustice in circumstances. Like children being abused. Like innocent people catching a germ that makes them deathly ill. When there is a legit injustice of circumstance, we have a social system and a “culture” that feeds us this halfass subconscious idea that... if we have a justified response to the injustice -- like anger or paralysis or fear or violent self-defense -- that somehow that justified response will erase the injustice. 

But that is never how the physics of this world work. 

We have to let the injustice be, let it alone, get on with it. Attend it. Yes. And very carefully. Fully and with great care. But we do not have to respond to it. No matter how justified a response to it may be. 

Our only hope of right action is to... respond to ourselves, to each other to our own needs. Not to the needs of the trauma. 

I do not have to stop the virus. I do not have to explain why it is wrong, I do not have to blame anyone. I just have to acknowledge it and let the right action naturally follow. 

The virus and the people who are interrupting the right action to it (by ignoring the stay home orders for example), are not the place for our attention. They are wrong. But they remain wrong whether we over-attend them or not. 

The entire situation is telling us to sit quiet, and alone. For long enough... to hear ourselves. To fully attend the moment. All of it, not just the unjustness of it. 

We have to listen well, if we want to minimize the injustice of the outcomes of this ongoing circumstance. To listen we have to resist the urge to waste energy, blaming. 

These are my notes to self. When things are shitty, it sometimes feels good/comforting to notice how bad others are fucking up. But this is happening because we have all been complicit for a long time. 

We need to listen to ourselves. We need to identify where - in our own bodies - we can feel this moment.