The last ten months have been one long lesson. My malformed hip socket which was an inheritance gave me trouble at 46 when I had to cease taking jazz dance. My hip “tore” and I could not walk so I retreated to taking only necessary steps. After six weeks, I was no longer in pain. I returned to the dance studio and within the first 15 minutes, I once again felt the pop-rip of my right hip.
It was then I went to the doctor and received the news that the cup that was supposed to provide a nice swivel surface for movement on that side was not as it should be.

And so I gave up the dance lessons I had taken since I was four. But then, as I do so well, I adjusted by forgetting. I forgot the deformation, the freedom of dancing, the joy of moving in a studio with others. It was all dropped down into the deep well of the past.

Last year, I gave up walking up hills and continued monitoring and retreating from physical activities. I said to myself it was my knee because I had forgotten.

In October I got into the surgeon and was told I needed a new hip joint. By now, I was in constant pain stabbing at the top of my leg, in my knee cap and what felt like a shin splint on fire shot down the front of my leg. Sleep was hit or miss. Sitting became impossible for extended periods of time. At first, I monitored the situation and then I gave up.

My world retracted when I had to measure out movement and could only bend myself up to get in the car one day a week. There were times when only the thought of asking for help to get out of the car drove me on to push through and manually unfold my leg.

So then the real lesson began.

I watched my emotions which wanted to explode like a burst pipe and just spray all over the inside of my mind.

Over the years since 2010, I had been wading hip deep into the swamp of my childhood prison camp. I faced, again and again, the brutality my conscious mind decided to leave behind in the land of amnesia.

I went to sit ayahuasca ceremonies, sat in a circle with Gabor Mate, and learned. I listened to teachers on YouTube, and extended my eight years of seeking various counselors into the next six years. I learned to sleep peacefully, to not struggle in the present like a fly caught in a spider web. I got deeper into my body and learned to live without the jagged knifing of fear.

But now, now I was restricted, alone, challenged, and tempted repeatedly by self-pity and anger.

Why? Why? I asked myself. And then the image came to me of the booster shot. I had vaccinated myself against despair, hidden anger, and flaring grief. But the issue of living at peace with my body was still a struggle.

My body holds pain. It holds memories of violence and broken bones. I holds memories of being choked until I passed out. It is still hidden in there. 

When I began to step further back, I could see that this ten months of chronic grinding affliction asked me to surrender. There was only one way of dealing with the sense that living was just a torment and that was to submit to what is. My ego always wants to make plans, to take action, to get back into the game of proving to myself that I am worthy. But, now, that choice is impossible.

Who am I if I am not work? Who am I if I am not action? Who am I if I don’t throw the axe of desire into the bulls eye of achievement?

My booster shot is to make me stronger. Every day I ask, “Do you trust the universe?”
My answer is always,”Yes.”

And so I release the attachment to the future as a way of pulling me out of now. I am not pulling myself white-knuckled and anxious toward someday on the calender, some promise of tomorrow. When people ask when I will have the surgery I say, “I don’t know.”

The predictable world has collapsed. And so the last vestiges of my work addiction fall away. 

One cannot tidy up during an earthquake. One cannot focus on an unformed future during a period of chaotic destruction. I remind myself to come back to now.

I sit on the deck this morning knowing my hip will soon refuse to allow me to sit much longer. I hear the birds sing around me and am grateful for the cool wind before the blasting heat of a full-on day.

I am not assessing or monitoring how I am doing. It is the last stage of recovery from work addiction. It is the last stage of leaving behind patterns and habits that blocked me from being fully present.

I did not pay for this lesson or go to a retreat in the mountains for this shedding time. It came to me. I won’t get a certificate on glossy paper with a golden seal. I will simply develop into more of who I was meant to be. 

And I trust that I am somehow growing and becoming stronger and softer as I simply allow whatever is happening to me. One day, I will understand.

It has been an extended period of floating in deep, black space since I last posted. COVID came and I retreated to my tower of a bedroom high above the street. I was at first afraid. My cohort were dying off at a higher rate than any other ages so I only walked alone at night while wearing a mask.

And then the vaccine came and I gradually felt more assured that I would survive. But still I was reluctant to go into crowds or be around others. The habit of the hermit imprinted on my behavior.

I was happy to be able to go for long, extended walks under the trees and watch my neighbourhood shift through seasons. And then my world became a prison of pain. My hip failed. The joint refused to slide easily. Bone on bone with my padding sent me into months of pain. Each step was punishment.

asking the universe

The presence of COVID rising and falling out side my door, and the inability to move easily kept me isolated. Each day I sent out wishes for the prince charming surgeon to call me and invite me to the hospital to get a new hip installed.

So much has happened. Nothing has happened. I have been sitting with my thoughts trying to stay in a place of calm acceptance. It has been a difficult, challenging time. I have yearned for human closeness. I have experienced the cold howling wind without comfort of company.

I have given in to the distraction and addiction of streaming services. My life is not satisfying so I am a voyeur watching other’s narratives unfold. It has kept me numbed out and helped erase the heavy weight of time that spreads out in front of me as empty as an ocean, a desert, an arctic snowscape.

My victories are miniscule. Did I sleep? Did I eat mindfully? Did I engage in my meditation practice?

I have received recognition for my writing in two local festivals and that is a great pleasure. I have coached thirty clients to help them through the challenges of this chaotic time. And every day I have sought out the wisdom of teachers to expand my knowledge of the human condition.

To live without knowing, is the new normal. I wait. I visualize the life beyond when I can walk easily and move through the world again. I do the best I can.

I am reminded when the staff of the high school where I was teaching voted to improve the lighting. The delegated agent of change made sure that the new lights were installed by a Monday morning. I opened the door and the entire vast staff room felt like an aquarium. Grow lights had replaced the fluorescents. And as each new individual came in he or she put a defensive hand up above the eyes, bent the knees and moved forward in a hunting posture.

What was this place?

It was the first time I saw the shock of disorientation so clearly.

It was the first time I observed the effect of disorientation on individuals, one after another. Left without references we are put on alert. We are so shaken to the core that we cannot trust what we are seeing.

We blink our eyes in resistance.

We ask ourselves, “What am I seeing? Is this thing a chair, a table. Were they always there, in that place?”

And so it is with every startlingly new element in our experience. How do we acculturate ourselves to the introduction of a new element of belief/behaviour?

“I do not like it,” we will say. We will resist. “This new element, this new style, this new belief, this new required behaviour does not fit me.”

We feel it too tight across the shoulder, the waistband feels too high or too low. We mock the new fashion and strike back by mocking those who dare to sport it in public. We call them fools but really we see them as a threat to our construct of reality. I observe this behavior around the issue of wearing masks.

We tell ourselves that they cause us to feel as if the scaffolding, the supports in place around our structures of belief has been weakened, if not totally removed. How will we stand up now?

“What if everything that I believe is wrong?” we silently ask ourselves.

What if the cosmology, the configuration of the stars, the rituals of self-protection I call upon to sustain my life as a mortal are all in error. What if I am as clumsy, as primitive, as reliant on superstition as the ancestor tribesmen wrapped in the furs stripped from the hunt.

We seek the solace of superiority. It is the way of the mind. We seek the reassurance that even though we have built our house of sticks in an earthquake zone that we, at least, have had the wisdom to build on bedrock. The firm and correct beliefs will stand no matter what the disruptions of the earth.

Our ancestors looked at the stars or cast bones or viewed the tangle of entrails spilling out on the ground from the abdominal openings of animals. They had rituals of assurance.
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But we now find ourselves clinging to a mere, thin vine on the cliffside. It is like a scene from a movie. If we could see ourselves like viewing a movie we would say, “This is impossible. It isn’t enough to hold us in place.”

The belief that only a few deserve to survive persists. We cling to our idea as the hand grows more and more numb from closing tightly around a thin green thread of belief.

We do not have the legends of our forefather, our connection to nature and spirit that sustained those who lived in a mythic world.

There is no spiritual sense of connection to the earth’s damp heart, to the sky’s delicacy of cloud messages, to the voices talking to us in the forest, to the shifting moods of the ocean’s waves.

We can, at least, have the sense not to trust what we have been told to cling to. We can at least know we will inevitably fall into a new world unknown.

We remember the many times our legs have jerked ourselves awake as we dreamed of plummeting down from the substantial rin of the land and are pulled by dream land’s gravity towards what we cannot possibly see. Images are pulled past us as we are out of time for recognition. We are out of control. We lie still as we awaken. We should have had thoughts, we think. But there were none.

We should have had ideas or realizations, we imagine. But there was nothing other than falling. We were dropped over the edge into a vacuum where the only truth was the sensation of falling hard and fast.

We were unearthed. All references were gone. It was too fast to keep up with mere questions: Where am I? What will happen next: Will I die?

The legs jerk us awake. We reach back into the dream to try to retrieve some clue. But there is nothing there.

My art. Reconfiguration

Everything changes but more and more it is everything at once changing. Our greatest fear is landing in an open space. Will we be called upon to strip off all of the garments of belief, all of the costumes of normalcy and leave them discarded on the floor?

Who wrote this move?