Undone

My hands run over the soft curve of my back, the firm suppleness of my thighs, the soft warmth of my belly that is well fed and has been home to the children I love. I think about the shape of this body, and the shape of the landscape that holds and nourishes this body. Sky Top, just a hill now but once a towering foothill of the Appalachian mountains, rises above us in the north sending her living waters down through the hollow we call home. Her waters will course on to the Conewago in the southwest, to the Susquehanna, the Chesapeake Bay, the Atlantic Ocean. In the east, agricultural fields that endure the violence of plowing, planting, spraying, harvesting, and unnatural barrenness. The eastern fields bring the most dangerous weather. Sky Top splits the winds and any weather from the North rarely makes it to this little hollow. Over the years we have learned to predict the ways of our microclimate within the larger movements of wind and water.

As I trace the valleys and mounds of my own body and contemplate the movement of the living waters and fierce storms of my personal landscape, I am struck by a realization. My body is shaped by moving or stopped energy flows, just like this mountain, the spring race, the fields aching for a cover crop. The current of genetic lineage shapes this body, the wild winds and fierce storms of trauma, the flow of lymph and blood, and the places where the flow is dammed, the rising springs of emotion and dreaming, the places of deforestation and wildfire burning, the rhythms of breath and pulse, movement and stillness....

As this realization flows through my body and opens my heart, our ten year old son takes up his electric guitar and the grating cacophony of his transitional voice and novice instrumentalism pierce my nervous system. This jarring, harrowing, disruptive tension from outside stimulation has been a defining feature of the shape of my body and life. Always there seems to be a tension between the expansive liberating inner movement and the jarring, rough, sharp edges of outer reality. I gently ask our young rock star to hold off on his practice session until I finish writing. He understands me, knows that I can't hold my inner world and the outer world at the same time, and graciously puts down his guitar to wait. When I am finished here, he will take up his practice again, and I will busy myself cleaning or moving my body or taking a walk outside, keeping the overstimulated energy moving through me. If I try and hold the stimulation still, it feels like it will tear me apart from the inside.

Maybe this is neurodivergence. Maybe it is trauma. Maybe it is just the way I am designed. The first half of my life was spent denying this reality, internalizing shame for my sensitivity, and pushing down my rising terror that I would come unglued by the loud chewing, the heavy breathing of the student behind me in class, the small slice of the tag against my neck every time I breathed, the buzz and flicker of the overhead lights....

I created a shape for my face, for my body, that communicated mastery, peace, serenity, utter control, while inside I contained wildfire and gale force winds. This performance of containment and denial of my inner reality led me to the brink of fracture. The earth of me began to quake. Volcanic magma threatened to melt down the whole of what I knew to be myself. They call this "burnout" but that word is so gentle compared to the experience. Lightbulbs burn out. Candles burn out. It is a soft flicker, and then the light is gone. Maybe that is what would have eventually happened if I let the course of burnout have its way with me. I would have flickered and disappeared. Instead, I cupped my hands around that little light, and I built a sanctuary for its flame.

The creature of my body is shaped by this utter need to contain the inner world. The stoop of my shoulders to hold in the scream. The sturdiness of my legs to plant me to earth when every inch of me wants to run, or kick. The softness of my features to communicate ease and safety. You are safe with me. I am safe. Pay no mind to the swirling gales you see in my eyes, I won't let them hurt you.

My shape is changing now. I am no longer a container for a rising force that I must protect the world against. No, no. Not a mask of serenity to bind the growling, hissing, screaming. I can see my sisters who still shape themselves into clay pots to hold the tempest. I want to help them break free, as I am endeavoring to break free myself.

This landscape will not endure as a dam, a fortress, a mountain capping a deep pocket of magma. I am being reshaped by the movement of life force, not the containment of it. This has felt like being dismantled. The dam burst. The tower fell. The volcano erupted. The walls of the fortress crumbled. And now, now the force inside me that screamed and howled and hissed and eroded the container of my body through sheer pressure, is blowing through and over me like a spring wind. And like the spring wind, it is green and moist and fertile and carries seeds from another time, another season, another place. Seeds it will plant in the fertile volcanic soil of this body that has survived.

The force I was desperate to contain is Her. The Wild Knowing of the ancient mothers that has been imprisoned, tortured, sent underground, violated, but never destroyed. Some of us fail at containing this force, though we are trained from infancy in the art of repressing, denying, and amputating this Knowing. Those of us who fail carry her embers. She lives through us, within us. The shape of my landscape, the shape of containment, is like the auroch horn that carried the fire ember from one campsite to the next. And now, at midlife, I can take the ember from its safe container, and set the world ablaze. I am no longer the shape of containment, but the licking tongues of fire itself. And the gentle green breezes. And the fertile soil to receive the seeds. And the rising springs full of dreams and memories.

Our inability to perform containment is the beginning of the end of our imprisonment. In this season of life, we are not shaped by human hands and their needs and expectations. No. We are shaped by fire and water and breath. May the rising fires free you, and together, may we birth Her wild power into this world.

Art by Tarn Ellis.