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.
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