Healing Crisis
We had a really lovely day yesterday here in Pahia in the Bay of Islands. Foregoing packaged activities and just striking off on our own, we discovered a beautiful Maori cemetary on a hilltop and an empty secret beach just down the other ocean-wrapped side of that tiny neck of land, our first walk on our new part of the Pacific. And we now know what Kauri trees look like. Elephants legs, Kathy says. Peaceful. beautiful, touching.
I’ve realized that when I am on my game I want to lecture, and when I am rubbed raw by inner and outer experience, then I can think and talk about how it feels. I imagine the latter is much more interesting to the home reader.
So last night I had a really good somatics session. Started trying to open up my throat, a real area of long time habitual contraction for me, very much a part of my sunken-chested posture since my back breaking accident at age 15 if not before. I felt this amazing spiral body wrap connection of the tissue all the way from the outside of my foot and calf, passing smoothly through the knee to the inside thigh, travelling through the waist up the front of the body and wrapping up the opposite side of my neck and to the back of my head. Wow.
We cooked dinner at the backpackers and met a lovely couple from Reno (Sparks). I realized that my throat was sore, and that some little glandular (?) part right there in the center just under my chin, not my lymph nodes, were =very= swollen and sore. I thought not too much about it really as we had killed our bottle of wine and were socializing.
This morning my throat was still swollen and my energy level felt slightly low. I had to do a grueling 2 ½ hour session at the internet café at ridiculous prices– $22 ($15US) was my bill when I had finished managing my finances, my US and NZ social network, and caught up on some macroeconomic reading. I felt fried afterwards and ended up just going back to the backpackers and crashing for a two hour afternoon nap. Napping isn’t something my body will let me do unless I am desperately in need of it. I woke up and, hours later, am still in a haze. And tomorrow is our arrival at our very first WWOOF where we will work four hours per day on someone’s organic permaculture farm and giant nature retreat for a week in exchange for room, board, and most importantly, knowledge. I’m trying not to freak out about how this will go over with my problematic body state.
It’s a big oncoming truck about to hit us — all of our ideas about the kind of life we hypothesize we want to lead. Do we like country living? Are we interested in growing a lot of our own food? What are the different things to do (veggies, fruit, nuts, bees, homemade alcohol, B&B or eco tourism, community ownership or commercial production)? What are the different ways of doing them? What are the better ways of doing it? Where in this beautiful country would we like to settle? And what do we have to trade off for what else? Mixed in with this is everything from our previous life that we want to integrate into our future life: the staggering views (and ideally, warm weather) from the back porch of Kathy’s former Kauai house to our =fabulous= community of friends and fellow seekers from San Francisco. And, of course, lots of unstructured time for both of us even as we build and do all of these things.
The vast amount of knowledge we must assimilate to properly make these decisions that will hopefully set the course for the next 10 years, 20 years, the rest of our lives, are staggering. It’s all about creating the proper space for the emergent behavior to occur. We must organically farm our lives—spend our time now building the soil, choosing the plants, watching nature tell us how to live harmoniously in the intersection of the sets of what we want to do and what we can do, each feeding back into the other in an upward spiral of positive feedback.
Thus, the healing crisis. Things inside my body/mind that have been rigid for years are breaking loose. Poisons held in stasis by rigid muscles are freed and must pass out. Thinking and feeling must open, open, open, letting it all pour into me and reconfigure my model of the universe. This is a journey that rubs me raw. I am suffused with great swells of feeling for the staggering intricacy of existence, humbled by the overpowering richness of the multiverse, brought under heel by the reactions to my fumblings at its strictures of existence, filled with numinous awe. It’s all so much.
-Bruce