The Storm in my Body

It's almost as if someone replaces the water in the lake every day. Every day, I swim. Every day, the water is different.; color, clarity, texture, temperature, flavor, ferocity, I feel with my mouth, I see with my eyes, I sense in my body. The expression of season changes daily, a slow tick toward its finality; a windy summer, a bright and still fall, a cloudy warm morning. The seasons stir the water, and stir something in me. Particles, born from dead bits and tiny living bits fill the waters throughout the daily seasons. What is growing and what is dying, is here. They float up to me. As I swim, I feel them on my face. They float past me, through me. I am a particle, too.

Do not insult the body

I went to bed last night like a good, sick girl. Do not insult the body. Do not insult the body. Eat the right thing at the right interval of the day. Fall asleep before energy is at a deficit. Do not dwell on problems that translate themselves into pain. Breathe deeply, and most importantly, do not insult the body. Yet, my careful T-crossing and I-dotting didn’t quiet the monkey this time. I woke up in pain. I woke up in a fog-like I’d labored the day before. I woke up with weights on my arms and my legs. The weights tug at my nerve roots, pulling me to the floor. I must have missed something. This is my fault.

Sensing everything

Pain, pain, pain. I move through the world with a constant hot buzz in my skin. My senses, they didn’t ask for this. A song in the air rattles my back, angry scratching. A sight travels through my optic nerve like a dry turkey dinner stuck in my throat. A change in temperature is a grand announcement, prompting everything to shuffle its order. I feel the shape of all things traveling in my nervous system.

It all simply floats away

I stand at the edge of a wildy stormy lake and decide that the storm in my body is bigger. I carry my pain and fear to the water’s edge and as the water rises up my body, the fire, the ants swarming my body, simply float away.

Stroke and cadence transport me to breath and I’ve officially left it all behind on land. I am spacious, I am risen, I am as eternal as this body of water who regularly exchanges itself for a voyage into the sky. Returning as rain, returning to holding me as I breathe and stroke and cadence. It is here that the constant pain is muted enough that I can realize myself.

One with the water

Today, the water is warm on the surface and cold beneath. The wind makes sharp, small, silver peaks on the water’s surface that threaten to jump in my mouth when I open to breathe. It’s grey like the sky until arms depth. Then the belly of the water transforms into clear turquoise until it fades into deep darkness. Midsummer plants grow tall from the depths. Bright green shoots rise from a murky brown bed, reaching towards the sky. They tickle me, they tangle in my fingers and I stroke and cadence past them towards freedom. Little bits of electric green, tiny particles, tiny deaths, lift and dance and twirl away from my arms as they slice through the water.

In my freedom state, I realize that I am like the waters. This storm I feel in my skin today, is conjured by many forces. I do not control the weather, I do not control the seasons. Some days, no matter what kind of temple I’ve built, the weather is a more powerful master.