Alive

Photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash

Tonight, I thought I'd share a taste of a new project's murmurings that have been circulating through my insides for a while now and I finally captured on paper last weekend and may have read aloud at an art sharing event. Enjoy "Alive"!

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Once, I was frozen.

My lips formed smiles and frowns, my arms embraced and pushed away, but inside I was frozen.

Up north, we say the key to staying warm in the cold winter is keeping your core warm.

What do you do if your core is frozen, though?

We never talked about that. We joked and laughed and hunkered down to bear the weight of it all, but we never talked about the freezing.

It happened bit by bit on each drive to the hospital to see Mom. Every trip I froze another layer. I couldn’t let myself melt in front of her. Sometimes when I got home I tried to thaw myself out under the hot shower water, but flesh doesn’t thaw that way.

For years after Mom died, I was frozen inside and I didn’t know it. I still cried sometimes and felt the knife-in-the-chest grief. I couldn’t feel anything else, though. I forgot that I’d ever felt anything else in my chest aside from the numb frozen and the piercing grief.

One day, I saw a depiction of the person I had become in the form of a movie protagonist and, for the first time, I didn’t want to be her. The curtain fell and I saw her stable-at-all-cost competence and blazing independence for what they were: isolating, unnecessary torment. As I watched her give them up in exchange for connection with another human being, I remembered my own failed attempts at connection and suddenly, I felt something. It was tiny. The size of a quarter. But I FELT something. I felt it in the upper right side of my chest. In that tiny, quarter-sized spot, I could FEEL.

In the months to come, the feeling began to spread. It happened sporadically, though, and there were plenty of days when I couldn’t even feel that little quarter-sized spot anymore. The more I felt, the more terrified I became when I lost part of that feeling, because I now KNEW what I was missing. I KNEW there was more.

Bit by bit, as I learned to feel the overwhelming, hard-to-breathe pain and the sweet, soothing warmth and so many things in between, it was as though I crept down from my head – the place I had escaped to during the freezing – and I began to take up residence in this whole temple I had been given.

Several years ago, as part of a longer essay draft, I wrote an aphorism; “To be full of life is not necessarily to be full of action.”

I froze myself for so long that I lost the ability to be active. Yet, the slowing in and of itself did not bring the thawing I needed. Indeed, it wasn’t just the thawing I needed so I could resume action. I needed to learn to LIVE.

I used to think feeling alive meant feeling the buzz of accomplishing hundreds of things, or even doing something that I found enjoyable. However, in the journey of learning to feel again, I have discovered life comes from the inside out – from muscle fibers breaking and reshaping themselves to blood vessels running faster and faster or slower and slower to carry oxygen throughout the highways of the human body. My spirit has tiptoed down from my brain and taken up residence in my trunk, my limbs, and even my fingertips and toes some days.

I hope I never forget the first time my body ever felt happy. It happened after I went bouldering for the first time. I had surprised the socks off my best friend at the climbing gym and hour away from my house by showing up when I knew she’d be there. We developed a routine on the plastic rocks. She’d find a problem she thought I could tackle and climb it first. Then, I would give it a go. We did this for a few hours until my muscles were so tired I couldn’t push and pull my body up the walls anymore. Then we filled up with food and headed back to her house. Several hours later as I laid next to her in bed, I couldn’t fall asleep because my body felt like an auditorium of middle-schoolers waiting for a concert to start – every part from my toes to my shoulders was buzzing with life and excitement.

The same friend and I walked the West Highland Way last fall – 96 miles across the Highlands of Scotland in eight days – and a similar thing happened the first several nights. We arrived at our hostels after hiking over ten miles, exhausted and hungry, but after eating food and stretching, I found myself lying in bed awake because my body was so energized and happy. 

Life to me is more than feeling the tingly sensations of happiness in my body, though. It has come to mean forcing myself to be still enough to hear the four-part harmony of the waterfall. It’s closing my eyes as I dance across the floor with my partner because our physical connection has united us, and we move as one, my body responding to the rotation and momentum cues before they even reach my brain for deciphering. And it is allowing myself to be completely disarmed by tenderness, meeting someone and realizing the very sound of his voice causes me to take a deep breath and relax, and his touch deactivates my sensitized nervous system.

To be alive is to sing and feel the vibrating resonance of my voice inside my belly. It is to be a branch connected to the vine – dwelling in Him as He dwells in the Father.

This life is contagious. As I look people with a similar life in the eyes, our sparks feed each other's fires as our wells overflow into the atmosphere around us. Inside this life, art is conceived and brought to bear, then nurtured and raised up by vulnerability and tenderness.

Truly, this is what it means to be alive.