Body As Landscape

Your body is a landscape. And you live in it.

Not a machine. Not a vehicle. Not a problem to be solved or a performance to be maintained. A landscape. Particular and complex and with its own weather. Its own terrains of ease and difficulty. Its own history written in the skin and the muscle and the way the breath moves through it.

Begin at the feet. Imagine the soles of your feet as ground. The very ground, the fundament, the thing you stand on. What is the ground right now? Hard or soft. Steady or unsettled. The feet carry you through a day's worth of miles and rarely receive attention. Notice them. They are bearing your entire weight right now and asking for nothing.

The legs a landscape of their own. Follow them up. The calves, which have been working, are a hilly terrain, a terrain that earns rest. The thighs. The deep muscles there that only reveal their tiredness at the end of a long day. Be in these places. Not fixing. Not improving. Witnessing.

The hips and the pelvis. A basin, in the body's geography. The place things settle. The place where so much is held that has nowhere else to go. Grief settles in the hips. So does chronic tension. So does the particular tiredness of standing your ground in the world. What is held here tonight? You do not have to change it. Just acknowledge it. The landscape acknowledges its weather without having to resolve it.

The belly. The riverine centre of the body. The gut, which processes and digests not only food but experience, which is what they mean when they say gut feeling. This is a place of intelligence that we are trained to distrust. Listen to it here, in the quiet, where the louder intelligences are resting.

The chest. The heart's country. Take a hand, in your imagination, and place it over your heart. Feel the beat under the hand. The regular, decades-long work of this muscle, which has never once asked permission to stop and rest, which has not stopped since before you were born. The heart is the most loyal thing in your life. You did not choose it and it has never left you.

The throat. The place where things are said or prevented from being said. The chest tightens here in emotion. The voice changes. The body makes the throat the boundary between interior and exterior, and it holds that boundary with tension when things are difficult. Notice the throat. Is it constricted? Let it soften even a fraction.

The face. The weather-map of the entire body. The brow, carrying its held concerns. The eyes, which have taken in so much today. The jaw. Always the jaw. Let it drop. Let the teeth part. The mouth soft. The face returning to its resting state, which nobody who has a difficult life maintains for long, so rare and good and right that it is worth coming here for.

This landscape is yours. Its difficulties are its history. The places that are tight or sore or complicated are the places that have been working or protecting or holding. Thank them. They have been doing what they knew to do.

Be in your body, tonight, not as a stranger. As a resident. Someone who lives here and knows the terrain and tends it with the care that a landscape deserves.

This is home. The oldest one. You were here before everything else.

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