...as we watch the comfort zone growing smaller in the rear-view mirror

Guided by intuition, on Wednesday I landed on a podcast phone call talking, by turn, to women whose titles were, respectively, Intuitive Life Coach and Medical Intuitive. I have never done this before, never listened to these programs or speakers before. And, in a life that, at one time, included visits to many psychics, I have never been so clearly seen, been unmasked, with great kindness and compassion, so that hiding from myself no longer seems an option. My belief is that spiritual and emotional affliction manifest in the body; my difficulty with mobility I see as an example of that, but one for which I had no answer.

With the intention of trusting my inner wisdom, not drowning my enthusiasms - which are more accurately passions - before they can draw breath, I've made a first attempt to translate the interior process into text. It is here because thumb-tacking it to the phone pole seemed indicated.

HEAD AND FOOT

Connect, the intuitive said, your head and feet. No problem there, other than all the ME that dwells between them. I blame the head, the mind which throws its weight around - thinks it's so smart. There is always information, some might say facts. It never shows up intending a fair fight, the mind. It is the impossible squabble that says, "you ALWAYS" or "you NEVER" and all your reserves go into defending, dispirited. There isn't enough fortitude, starch, to see the debate through to resolution...in your favor. That mind was present at the scene of every crime. It knows and relishes moments of failure, of fragile and unwise choices. The encyclopedic memory replays with sadistic glee scenes of shame and humiliation, betrayal of self or others, weak and crazy longing or terror or futile surrender. It is a shrewd organ, misinterpreting its assignment which is to know, to be the reliable source, repository of what matters, of what grows us, rather than the source of poison that reduces us to trembling, wobbling specters of our magnificent selves.

In China's cultural revolution, citizens too steeped in the old ways were sent for re-education. I have volunteered my mind, tattler that I am, for such a program, deep in a rural province. While it may not have been entirely effective in China, hard as it is to impose in any lasting fashion a bureaucratically-generated national amnesia, I am willing to try. Some amnesia allows healing. It is the seed that grows forgiveness. It is the pardon, the reprieve, the mercy so deserved, so essential for any forward movement. The quality of mercy falling, down, down, past organs and systems, trickling, filtering, washing away all that blocks the mind's wisdom of love and grace from reaching the feet, to watch them uncurl, move and flex, wiggle and leap and dance.