Day 16: Learning to Move - Again

I’m certain many of you readers have experienced the helplessness of utter dependency in your physical body. Learning all over again to move - to go to the bathroom, have a shower, to feel the dark reality of facing another day without all the gifts of being a ‘fully-abled’ body. When I wake these mornings, grateful that I’m finally allowed to sleep more deeply without the albatross around my leg, I send prayers of gratitude into the heavens, and pleas for strength to face a significantly restricted moment-to-moment reality.

I’m also taking in the powerful testimony of Paralympic super-stars who show up on my daily news feed. What inspiration! I’m aware how unaware I’ve been of reality/accessibility issues for so many who have a life-long struggle with normalizing their bodily capacities. I’ve spent years empathizing with others in the mental health journey and yet still am awakening to my own oft-dissociated body experience. I said to a friend today, that my life right now is all about soul-story. She responded immediately, “No Carol – this is your embodied-soul-story-come-alive.”

It’s a staggering experience to know this as an initiatory life passage into another realm of cosmic experience. I have spent 75 years living life to the full: active and moving on my legs, relishing the gifts of daily walking, gardening, swimming, dancing and loving.

Martha Graham expresses this so clearly :

“There is a vitality, a lifeforce, a quickening that is translated through you onto action and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.”

Now with my body suddenly felled and bones broken, curiously, I’m tapping into a core of fresh thunder that has been waiting for this season to emerge. Divine encounters and synchronistic experiences feel like the norm these days, with flashes of insight and awareness that have previously eluded my grasp. It seems I have entered into a clarified sense of purpose as an ElderSoul.

And, as an aging being, I’m even more aware of my body. In my frailty right now, I’m dependent on wheelchairs and sturdy walkers. Shower stools that will hold my weight and balance. An exoskeleton of metal and polystyrene that supports the alignment of my bones. Of the listening to this delicate sensory organism that breathes life - and death.

---

---

"The vital life force that is suppressed and unused doesn't disappear. It is converted into dark energy and redirected elsewhere.”

Thomas Hubl

Somehow last week, it seemed vitally important for my simple well-being to have multi-colored toes! Happy feet! You may laugh, but it’s been the simple gestures, words, gifts of joy that have elevated my spirit from a place of passive, traumatic enactment, into an everblooming world. An inspiring 75-year-old trans woman I had never met before, after hearing my story through a girlfriend, offered to take me out - to the nail salon.

Simple. Joyful. Colorful. Magic.

Indeed! Vital well-being for the playful creative child inside both of us! Learning how to play all over again!

---

We all are born into destiny with a youthful elder soul.

Have you thought about your birthright gifts that call you inside and out into the long journey into learning how to walk, stand, and lie down in death, as an elder in our Western world that has mostly lost a place for true elders?

---

Back: Day 13

Next: Day 22