A BRIEF STORY OF MY BONES

My bones torture me in the night. They make pains in my neck and back beyond my imagination. I can literally hear them twisting and growing there, as though they are aliens moving within me, causing my bones to be as a cage that closes tighter and tighter upon my body, crushing me totally. Though, with the proper medication, I am able to sleep for six hours if I am fortunate, before the pain enters into my dreams first, making them into nightmares of true pain in which I am wounded and tortured, being twisted and stabbed and burned, and then I am awakened as I realize the dream is not a dream but is actually happening to my body. Realizing the actual pain I am in, I rise and only then does it subside a bit as I do my best to move my body around, stretching here and there. My bones, it appears, are to subdue my spirit, to kill my creativity if they can. This disappoints me for my bones have always been my allies, my friends. It is true that I have put them on the front lines of my physically demanding existence. It is true that I have at times stretched my body to the limit chopping, chain­-sawing, carrying and splitting with a hand-held axe very big blocks of wood, with nary a thought of the effect on my body and my bones. I have done insanely dangerous and stressful activities with my body and its skeleton time and time again when I was younger and even not so young. And my father also flayed my back and ribs as hard as he could hit with a thick belt upon my back and ribs for years on an almost daily basis. I know that this damage my spine and cracked my ribs; my spine, to protect itself, started creating new bone over and within the old to strengthen and protect itself. My whole body sought to protect itself since I could not. And so I should feel compassion and love for this body and these bones that tried to protect the child of which they comprised, but they could only do so much. So, though my bones seem to literally crush me now, they have only functioned to help and protect me all along. I have no real right to condemn them or what they are doing, the action upon which they have been set for a very long time, which I only became aware of ten years ago. And, in their steady movement, I am crushed though not smothered. The pain distracts a great deal but I remain able to think and to write. And so I am grateful to this body for its loving action and overstated protection. It has, time and again, saved me from literal death. As a young child, my body moved in the water, even though I had not yet learned to swim, and moved me back to land where I could safely stand. I have had more than nine lives, my guardian angel, my instinctual second sense has always been right there at my side and in my body instantly. So much of the universe moves for my benefit and safety. Perhaps it is even what is called God. Either way, I am grateful and will remain grateful, for my body now bends under the pressure and the pain in my neck and spine, and now both shoulders and arms. Of course I always hope for improvement and believe that it will come. I have prayed when the pain has been utterly unbearable in the middle of the night. I thought even that my prayer had been answered by the next morning and I was grateful and willing to believe in the God though not in the religion. Now the pain is back on an even greater scale and I feel it torturing my body. Moving this way or that, even slightly, brings it to the fore in my neck, back, and arms. However, it was in the nerves in my head and it is not there now, and I am very grateful for that, for that causes a severe headache. With all this I will take a walk in the redwood forest today and sit on my redwood “perch” quietly and peacefully without moving in the enveloping great silence of the forest. One must know how to suffer properly and with gratefulness and understanding.

INTERLUDES

At times I experience what I call an interlude in my train of thought which is essentially constant. In this interlude it is as though my thinking stops, though I am aware that it has stopped. The interlude expresses as a kind of suspended animation, as if I suddenly find myself floating soundlessly in deep space. In this interlude I see with my eyes but do not define or register; I just see trees moving (in the wind) or even people moving their mouths and making sounds (words). It is a most pleasant experience in the sense that everything just stops and I find myself floating soundlessly, without gravity holding me down, without thought driving me on. I hope this is what happens at death—that everything just stops and one floats without thought in pure silence; without worry, without even any sense of oneself at all. I can generate such an interlude when I go deep into the redwood forest at Nisene Marks, walk up the trail, and sit on my redwood “perch” high above the remote trail below. The silence and stillness there are so palpable that I find myself in an interlude. But today, as I worked at my desk here in my office, I looked out my window, saw the trees moving silently and it happened again without having to go into the forest. I suppose the forest, with its silence and stillness, has been somehow “absorbed” into me, even into my being, as it were, and now emerges into my consciousness when reminded by certain natural occurrences, such as the trees moving in the wind. And I suppose that this is not particularly new to my experience, since, as I was once told by my mother, I would lie in my baby carriage for hours, mesmerized, watching the leaves fall from the maple and oak trees in the park where she brought me. It may be that I have always had such interludes occur but was never aware of it as I am now. These interludes are almost trancelike, like a form of hypnosis—one which I prefer to being perpetually occupied by thoughts and at their mercy. Such interludes have also occurred, now that I think about it, during my long practice of Zen meditation, which is simply sitting and letting thoughts flow without following them, just kind of watching them and watching oneself as if from a distance. Such interludes were never intended but simply occurred when there was a sudden “break” in the clouds of constant thought. I would prefer to be able to live in this kind of thoughtless mind, which is quite peaceful and clear: one is able to see things simply as they are. One still has the ability to relate appropriately and necessarily with the vagaries and demands of existence, but one is of a different mind as well, not getting pulled into the drama of existence or even that of one’s own life, one’s own self. And one is not aloof or withdrawn, but is still active and participant in the world, though without the “attachment,” the emotional ups and downs, the anger, the disappointment, the hopes, the despair. One remains affectionate and loving and able to express gentleness and tenderness to others, as well as able to not fall into identifying with the occupying thoughts of another, which is the general social and cultural activity that misleads societies and cultures into their own particular lost worlds, if not hells.