Feb 16, 2022

Folding in 19

what are you forgetting?

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Sarah Blondin
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I've been waking up abruptly the last few months to the same reoccurring feeling and sense: there is something I've forgotten, and I must urgently remember. I lay staring up at my ceiling, half awake and half dreaming, straining to recall just what it is I’m neglecting. No answers come. I can only compare it to a suffocating feeling of dread.

In the light of day, I've taken to asking myself, what is it that I have forgotten. I wrote a list of things that came to mind. There are many important tasks left undone and words unsaid. Cards you have failed to write, bills you have left unpaid. The time you haven't made to spend with someone you care for. Friends you haven't called; dreams you haven't notched away at. It turns out there was a long list of things I was forgetting. On that list, there was one that stood out to me. I need more slowness and attentiveness, more tranquility and reverence. I want to fold the laundry without the charge. Listen to my kids without half of my attention on some plan. I want to do what I love without pressure and goals. I want to stay in this one room, with the whole of me here, and have that be enough. If honest, I recognize the parts occupying an addicted and anesthetized way of being. This over-consumption of content and goods, the hustle, the scurry, the scramble, the push, the chase, the surge, all this speeding up, this making haste needs to stop. I have forgotten my body with all this matter of the mind occupying me. One thought too many stacked on top of the other, and the seam begins to tear. Exhaustion slips through the fray and dilates in my body, and I am finally able to feel that I have been steadily trying to outrun something nipping at my heels. I have forgotten about home.

Naturally, the body grows in anxiety and dis-ease, only as a way to call our attention back to ourselves. But we are most afraid of how our bodies talk to us, and the cycle of evasion is vicious. Anxiety tends to push us farther away from ourselves when it is only looking for the owner of its home. Deep soulful care and intimate time spent without distraction is the antidote. The fruit of this practice doesn't grow sweet without genuine effort and engagement. Our relationship with our soul is not a one-and-done exchange; it is a rapport built over time and with sincerity. To nurture the soul, we must know the soul. To know the soul, we must be moving very slowly, tuning our ears for the finespun sounds of its voice. This line from John O'donohue's poem 'for one who is exhausted, a blessing" sent sparks through me: "Learn to linger around someone of ease, who feels they have all the time in the world." My wish is to be so solidly home in each moment there is nowhere else to be.

I lay in my son's bed last night in the comfort of a darkened room, tracing my fingers across his smooth bareback and squeezing his ears. The ears are his favorite spot. He says it feels like his lobes are tiny men getting full-body massages. So, I spend extra time there, watching with a smile as he quiets and stills his little body, to receive the pleasure of the kind hand tending carefully to him. We sang together our favorite song. He made me memorize a song Thich Nhat Hanh would sing to the dying to bring them comfort. The first few lines say: "this body is not mine. I am not caught in this body. I am a life without limits. I was never born; I have never died."

The first time I sang this song to Hugo, he shuttered and smiled. He told me how relieved he was to hear someone tell him he was not trapped in his body. He always felt caught, even telling me once he thought some part of him was in "a prison." Tremendous relief came from being confirmed and allowed to see himself not small and contained but vast and expansive like the oceans and galaxies. When I told him Thay had died, he quietly said, "thank you for his life," as he looked out his window. I asked him what he was grateful for, and he said, "without him, I would have never known I was not just my body." I happened to sing the exact words my young son needed to hear by way of grace.

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