Sunday evening I returned from a week of spiritual training and retreat in the Colorado Rockies, a Wisdom School, with the gentle and wise Rabbi Nadya Gross. In my travels and on the Retreat, I was plagued with lower back pain, the likes of which I had not known since I gave birth nearly twenty years ago. This time a combination of yoga followed by an intense bout of weeding on our Co-op farm shortly before my travels caused the present injury. The two day train ride, and a misstep on the funky staircase in the lodge where we stayed, exacerbated it.
Here I was, away from home,chiropractor and my usual comforts, doing something I longed to do, but hurting. I could not move myself in anything like my usual ways. My motions were, had to be, slow, deliberate, and supremely careful. I didn’t like it, but I adjusted as best I could. And, new for me, I chose not to let the discomfort dominate my experience, but to open instead to new ways of healing, new levels of health that I sensed were waiting on the other side of this injury.
I am truly proud of this new skill: becoming bigger than my symptom. No doubt it will serve me well in the years of aging undeniably ahead of me. But this morning, back in Philadelphia, slowly re-tethering myself to the news, I learn that the NYPD removed the protesters from Zucotti Park, catching them unawares in the middle of the night. I want to talk about the Occupy Movement, the urge toward health in the body politic I believe the encampments, with their slow, deliberate consensual politics, represent. Actually I don’t want to talk, I want to affirm, bless, encourage, support. I’ll do it with a poem.
Pain
Every movement is a birthing. Each
slow rising stretches the membrane, becomes
a world you have not seen yet
in quite this way. Your slightest turn:
an accomplishment, intimacy
heretofore unrealized, unknown,
within the now that is your
true becoming.
Pain? Yes, you have it. Fear?
What will you make of it?
This is your day, your clay,
your earth, your ground, your given
matter: material to mold, shape
into whatever it is you long for.
You are free to ignore the longing,
refuse the heart of the gift.
Free to be lonely, desperate,
isolate, mean.
I want you to choose me.
I want you to want what you want.
© 2011 by Susan Windle
Other cities similarly try to remove their encampments. But the protesters are the wise ones. They want what they want. They want what we want, a truly democratic society. They may be suppressed for a bit, but they will return. In other places and ways perhaps, but they will return. They are the urge toward political and cultural health, wholeness, all parts included. Since they represent the pain of an unjust and out of whack economic system, they will not go away. Ever. They will persist and show up time and time again, until we, all of us together, are healed. Because I choose the side of healing, I will help them.
Blessings of health to us all.
Gratefully yours,
Susan Windle