Unburden The Senses
Wishing you peace, Community,
I began studying culture in 2004. I’d always marveled (and still do) at the containers of existence which influence how we relate to each other. I’d always wondered (and still do) about the power that imagination has on perfecting the posture of personhood - the process of legitimizing one’s existence. I’d always questioned (and still do) the “hows” and “whys” of living. Gazing into an expansive sky, or running through the woods, I’d always play in my mindscape by teleporting into the eye of the beholder - that great presence beyond the beyond.
So when I was unwell last week (navigating a recurring health condition), I found myself really sensing into the nature of life moving within my being. I lacked the strength and cognitive function to engage life as I would want to, so I really had to sense how I care for myself. Where the presence of fire lived within, I tried to bring in earth so that which burns might find refuge. Where I felt too much was being harvested from me, I tried to bring balance between the fire and water to slow down the quickening.
This is the kind of internal assessment that moves through me daily as I work to bring balance to my inner world - working to see above the tide of imbalance that seems committed to pulling us all away from the truest nature of life. Here we are, bobbing in the waters, wondering if what we are living through is above the heart (because it is definitely above the head).
How might we unburden the senses so that we trust the voice beyond the beyond to guide us to the balance we are so desperately needing? As I reorient my relationship to digital vortexes which flood our senses and disrupt the cycles of balance, I keep coming back to this poem from James Baldwin, “The giver (for Berdis)”:
If the hope of giving
is to love the living,
the giver risks madness
in the act of giving.
Some such lesson I seemed to see
in the faces that surrounded me.
Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,
what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?
The giver is no less adrift
than those who are clamouring for the gift.
I’m filled with metaphorical mapping to make sense of these moments. Surrounding us are extractive imbalances which mirror liberatory synapses of our connections. Surrounding us is a clamouring - offering noise for noise, pain for pain, harm for harm, self-righteousness for self-righteousness. In what ways are we extracting from our own gifts, our own medicine, our own ways in order to feed the insatiable cycles of unrequited giving? The cycles are loud, dense, full, and yet seem to return empty. As a belly filled with only water is a sparse meal, in what ways are we tricking ourselves into believing that what we give and receive is true? Sustaining? Efforting towards just futures? Baldwin goes on to say:
If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,
if their empty fingers beat the empty air
and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer
knows that all of his giving has been for naught
and that nothing was ever what he thought
and turns in his guilty bed to stare
at the starving multitudes standing there
and rises from bed to curse at heaven,
he must yet understand that to whom much is given
much will be taken, and justly so:
I cannot tell how much I owe.
We owe so much to each other. That might feel uncomfortable to say (as some of the vortex language resounds that we owe nothing to anyone), but we do. And this isn’t the owing that we have come to understand in the demonstrative ways of capitalistic ideals (take, debt; receive, indebted; and so on…). No, I’m speaking to the very essence of what it is to be, in all of our conditions, a part of the cycle of living which beckons us to complete the expressions of our lives in relation to one another. To commit - with gentle, loving, grace-giving effort - to sensing into our roles in the balance of all life, and to tend that in ways that are possible from our being.
Can we resist beating the empty air (that which tricks the belly into believing it is full and nourished) and listen into what is being taken here? Can we listen to what is truly needed here? And be so real with ourselves about this?
For your inquiry:
In any moment when you find your belly responding to a circumstance of life, an invitation to wonder:
What is here? In what ways is this existing for life to regenerate? In what ways is this not?
What is being extracted? How, if at all, is it being replenished? What balance is needed here?
Where within this circumstance am I finding my being? What is needed for me or from me at this moment?
