Anam Cara

The Vulnerability and Mystery of the Body

All our knowing is tenuous and shadowed. Our bodies, too, are so fragile. An accident can suddenly visit a life and completely change one’s world. In one split second in a car crash, your whole world could be taken from you. You then have to enter the world of illness and pain and begin to learn how to reside there. Your body is your only home in the universe. When you become ill or injured, you have to become used to your body as a new dwelling. All of a sudden, it is strange, vulnerable, and injured. Up to now it worked with you and for you; now it hesitates, it must be encouraged, and often it just squats there unable to move or partake. There is a desperate poignancy in the presence of a sick body. A friend of mine who now has the companionship of illness and cannot be left alone says, “I have had to get used to living with this third thing that is always there now between me and everything.”

The body is such an intricate and complex place. The more you become aware of what a nuanced inner network it is, the more you wonder how it actually continues to function in secrecy and silence. The heart is the great warm centre of your life. All emotion and feeling lives here. Think of the faithfulness of your heart that has never once stopped. In every moment of work, relaxation, thought, pain, and sleep, it continues to keep your life flowing. Your heart reflects the movement of your experience. The heart is the place of great departure in the body. From here, all your blood flows out to every inner territory. The heart is also the place of great return, the place to where all the tired blood returns to be reinvigorated.

Though the body is splendid and mysterious, it is fragile, too. Joy and blessings, trouble and turbulence can reach us, because we are in these visible tents of clay. We live on an unseen threshold. The name of that threshold is fragility. Our courage breaks here “like a tree in a black wind,” as Yeats put it. Consequently, we need the shelter and blessing of prayer. Our language instinctively expresses this. The greeting “Hello” expresses surprise and delight that you have survived since the last meeting. “Good-bye” invokes a blessing around you until we meet again. These rituals of greeting and valediction are secretly meant to appease the deities and invoke blessing on us. Yeats adverts to this hidden seam of vulnerability when he says:

Come away o human child

To the waters and the wild

With a fairy hand in hand

For the world’s more full of weeping

Than you can understand.