I rode my bicycle into the hills of Southwest Portland this afternoon. I was visiting the International Rose Test Garden - a beautiful spot with more types of roses than I cared to count. I sat in the sun, people watched, and took a bit of a look at this left side of mine.
I watched people walking around and watched myself. Somehow I was reminded of Dante's journeys. I never did quite understand that book. Maybe I'm not filled with the pious wonder of so many of his readers.
I realized that my left side is far weaker than I cared to admit. More often than not, I compensate for it with my right side. I focused on it longer, and something inside me started to yell out. This is the scream of repressed fear. It's a strange thought to think of one's issues becoming physically present in the body, but less strange when I consider the change in posture in a child 3 years old to 12. He begins perfectly aligned and upright, and only when he learns of the cares of this world - or rather when they are necessarily imposed upon him - does that perfect alignment change. In the movie, The Matrix, they refer to their bodies in the Matrix as mental projections of their true self. It seems to me that that might not be so far from the truth. I watched more and more people walk around, specifically observing their posture and gait. It was fascinating to see so much revealed in each person. I think that I rarely take the time to really watch a person, but when I do, I realize that each person has their own baggage like me - their own wound in the side, if you will. The problem, it seems to me, is that we tend to ignore our wounds, and this lets them continue to fester. By focusing on them, we can observe their effects and hopefully begin the healing process.
I feel a bit like the walking wounded today, but at the same time, I feel wonderfully healthy. When I look at myself in the mirror, I seem to be radiating health, but this instrument of mine is still not functioning at capacity. I feel a bit like one of those rosebuds on the hill - beginning to surge with maybe a peek of petal showing, but so far from blooming. It's strange to be walking on this path and thinking these things. Sometimes I think I'm full of it; other times, I know this "wound" in my side to be as real as if Thomas had put his finger inside.
I had another thought while riding to the rose garden. I thought maybe all these thoughts about energy, posture, food, health, love... I thought that maybe I'm just distracting myself from the real, visible world in front of me. Maybe I'm wanting to see something behind it all, but missing the visceral connection. For a long time, I've felt that the only world of any import is the one in front of me. Whether there is more and how I relate to it will take care of itself if I can order my life and thoughts here. Jesus said, the kingdom of heaven is here in front of you. This bolsters my belief in the need to focus on the world as it presents itself. But in the midst of this desire, I realized that that first series of thoughts is not what distracts me from the present. Fear and hope, the connections my brain tends to make from all these immediate sensations is what distracts me. My brain seems to undertake a continuous analysis of everything that might happen in the future, or a continual review of everything that already happened in the past. Rarely am I present enough to examine my side.
I'm not sure what it would be like to live fully in the present. It seems to me this would be the man who completely forgot about the kingdom of heaven, but the one who lived it most fully. Paradoxical? I don't understand what it means to live in accordance with the words of the Sermon on the Mount or the Tao te Ching. Lao Tzu said, if people did not laugh at the teachings of the Tao, it would not be the Tao.
"The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice."
I suppose what I fear most of all is not that few have the courage to put it into practice, but that we have entirely misunderstood the meaning of "overcome." I'm rambling today. It's just that I stare at my body, the people around me, the world, and I feel like just under the surface there is some simple sense to it all. Somehow I can't quite see it, just as I can't quite let my body weight fall evenly through my left side.
