Day Three: Bones
- Jay Berghuis
- Sep 9, 2024
- 2 min read
Update on Carol from Uli: No surgery at this point. One fracture on her left tibia, so she is now wearing a major brace in lieu of a cast, probably for the next few months. No weight bearing is allowed on that leg. Her right leg has a minor fracture on the fibula (which is not weight-bearing), but she can’t currently handle much weight on it. Recovery is probably 6-8 weeks dependent on a lot of things. Mostly really good news: They don’t think surgery is needed. But a tough and long-sounding recovery ahead. She is told to expect to be released from hospital tomorrow.
Hospital days are packed with a stream of medical departments doing their rounds, offering their specific gifts, and testing my acumen. I’m asked many times: What year is it? Who is the president? It all feels like a bit of a joke unless I honor with gratitude that my brain really is intact. It could have been so bad. So, so much worse.
Everyone tells me how lucky I am. I say it’s because of the angels. Because this is a soul story and no accident.
I recall those minutes lying on the sidewalk, feeling utterly at peace in a shocked calm, aware of being right in the center of the storm. It was clear then as it is now, a few days later. This experience is not just about me: It’s linked to a web of evidence of a cosmic community. My path now is to welcome and stir up the healing bone energy of life-in-relation to All that Is. Spirit alive in me. Through you. For Us. And especially for Mother Earth in her agonizing breakdown of relationship with our sadly injured selves-in-relationship.
I imagine us humans as a network of bones
mostly lying down on our work and place in the
world, and uselessly clacking like Ezekiel’s field of dry bones (Ezekiel 37). unless enlivened and fixed in place to move together as an organism; attuned by spiritual sinews, mobile muscles and enlivened psyches, and so much more hidden, embodied infrastructure. Bones as a foundation of relationship. As protection and as strength. Bones waiting for the breath of Spirit to move as a body on the land.
Bones have been speaking to me for decades.
Ask my family! They have so much more to say to me, to us. I’m fully aware this rattling, shaking-up, personal-earthquake experience is all about not only waiting and writing while my bones heal but offering a unique healing path for the bones of community.
Savage Daughter
by Sarah Hester Ross
I am my mother’s savage daughter ….
In the dancing of fire
In the curve of old bones
We are brought forth out of darkness into this world, through
blood and the rough pain
And deep in our bones, the old songs are waking
So sing them with voices of thunder and rain
We are our mother’s savage daughters.
Stop. Look. Listen.
Do you hear the sounds of wild Spirit waking up our dry bones?
What are they whispering to you about the bones of your communal relationship with humans and the more-than-human world? With God?
With All that Is.
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