Take This and Eat
I’ve heard the body described as baggage. A humid, heavy skin stretched over the soul. I’ve heard it called a gift. Something sacred, and by sacred I mean savored. Take this – take this and eat. And that may be true. But if disability has taught me anything, it is that my body, this body – is first and foremost, a place. It is a place I cannot leave. A place I must learn. A place I must love.
Two years ago, I was hired by the Pilgrimage Innovation Hub and became the first student researcher on their team. That summer, we met every Tuesday at 11:00 AM. And one Tuesday morning in July, I decided to take a quick trip to CVS before my meeting with Montague. On the way back from my errand, I accidentally drove through a red light. At the intersection of Brookhurst and Adams, I was T-boned on the driver's side, and crashed into a streetlight so hard it bent and swung off its hinge.
When violence rushes through a physical place, that place is forever changed. It’s no secret that places can be hurt – drilled and gutted, sides of buildings bearing the black cough of smoke for decades, patches of cracked, sucked dirt where seeds will fall and can’t grow. The body is no different.
In that second, that rage, that impact – trauma shuddered through my blood like tectonic plates shifting beneath riverbeds. When I was pulled from the car, the world around me hummed. The sun, a bright shot in the sky, I blinked, stumbled toward the curve. I did not know where I was.
Now – understand, I knew that I was at the intersection of Brookhurst and Adams. I had bought a pin-striped bikini and face wash from the Target right across the street 48 hours earlier. I was ten minutes from the nearest hospital. Three minutes from home. I did not know where I was. Because where I was was in a body completely foreign to me. The body is a place you inhabit. A place you are. When violence rushes through it, you are forever changed.
In the haze, I emailed Montague. I typed with hands covered in small cuts from exploded glass – “Was in an accident. Don’t think I’m going to make it to the meeting. So sorry for the inconvenience.” The rest of that summer I studied pilgrimage while bedbound. I listened to people's stories about walking the Camino, knowing that my knees buckled every time I crossed the threshold of my driveway. People talked about sitting in and with sacred spaces. Churches, elementary schools, little hillsides where wild horses run. Places to protect.
To be honest – that individual practice of meditation is so far from me. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to feel the Spirit from my bedside but all I feel is the hot pulse of migraine. I can’t protect my body from pain, which makes me wonder if my body is sacred at all. Constantly gnawed away by spasms and clenches and tics and ringing and sleeping and vomit and aura and flutters and sweat and vomit again. How do you sit in and with a space that harms you and loves you so deeply at the same time?
My dad asked me once: where was God in the car crash? I replied: the shotgun seat. No one asks me where God is now.
My uber driver says I sound older than I am. He hears a timbre, a sad sort of wisdom sitting heavy in my throat. We pull up to the curb. Just before I can step out of the car, he turns around, he sees me– my arms, my legs, my cane, my face and he says: “You are good. You are good.”
This body, my body – is a good place. Not everyone can meet me here. At physical therapy, an elderly patient points his thick ruddy finger in my face and says “Could be worse. Smile.” Another Uber driver confesses that he can’t stand being around hurt people because it makes him too sad, and another says he’d rather end it all then live the life I have. He is afraid. Afraid of a young woman with a cane. Afraid of her body, my body – because he has only ever visited suffering. Covered it over a weekend, roamed it like a tourist city, and left. He has never lived in it. Lived in this place, this good place.
But there are others. Friends. Even strangers. Who meet me in mine and let me meet them in theirs. You did not ask, but I’ll tell you:
God is wherever we pour peppermint tea and never ask for gas money. Where we let the dishes pile up, unwashed. Where we do not mind. Small graces. Feeling the holes in each other's hands.Touching the wounds on our sides. Where we walk slower, or don’t walk at all. Lie down. Breathe shallow, before breathing deep. Add subtitles to the TV. Where we dim the lights and buy more coffee than we should, and hold doors open with our hips and pack extras of everything. Zofran, Tylenol, Imitrex, Emergen-c, Electrolytes, Magnesium, Menthol, Melatonin, Ibuprofen — take this, take this and eat. Daily bread. Sacred space.
