soft animal of your body
Mary Oliver opens her poem Wild Geese with these poignant lines:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
I spent last weekend holding people as they tended the soft animal of their bodies. And the soft animal of my body loves what it loves and what it loves is to inspire people to tend their own soft animal. To open the door for bodies to love what they love. It is a form of mothering and it often has a softening effect on me. And this weekend, as I worked, as I tended, as I touched, memories of my own mother and the cyclic nature of birth and death flooded the soft animal of my body. And this is what I wrote.
May 20, 1983: my last day on the job at Sutter General. Pregnant up the wazoo, it was finally my time to step back. As special treat, while I was at work, the house on 35th Street had been professionally cleaned and when I arrived a gaggle of five year olds, including my daughter, was sprawled on the clean floor entranced by a TV screen movie. Which was a whole new concept back then. A beta videotape of the Disney classic, Dumbo. After I had taken in a heartful of my clean and ready nest and the delighted kids, my husband of many years beckoned me aside. Relayed the news he’d been holding close to his own heart for several hours. He had stoically waited for me to complete my work at the hospital and experience this much anticipated homecoming, this transition to birthing new life.
My mother had died that morning. Not entirely unexpectedly, but sooner than we had imagined. Needless to say, the summer of 1983 was fraught. My son was born eleven days later and we drifted, he and I, tender tandem through a season of grief and heat and joy and numbness and wonder and primal instinct. Many summers have come and gone since 1983 but this weekend this memory billowed up and, in a cortical connective flash, I recalled that Dumbo is the elephant child who is suddenly wrenched from his mother. Unless my recall is worse than I thought, I truly believe this brain link up around loss of mother came to me in this very moment, more than forty years later.
Perhaps the veil is particularly thin right now. The birth death cycle surrounds me, seems vaguely visible. The significance of the age of 56, my mom’s age of passage, also dawned over me. Me at 56? A huge part of me died in that 56th year as well. And seed tendrils deeply buried began to birth their way to the surface. That year I was fired from Dreizler Physical Therapy (a whole other story!). That year was the final one of dancing the rhythms purely as a student. That year was an intense daily four a.m. Kundalini yoga practice. That year was when I chose Bella, my mother’s name, as my own.
At 56 something deeply lodged was dying inside me and a piece of that dying was my mother’s voice, my mother’s modeling, my mother’s ways and expectations. And her passage, though it had been years since, was at last clearing the way for me to muck around. Get off the path. Flounder. Somehow her death granted me the freedom to say no, allowed me to feel my longing for yes, had me shedding shackles right and left. The synchronicity of death and re-birth…this age of 56.
And now here we are, still on 35th Street, me and my husband of many years. We are the old people on this block, this real estate we landed on nearly 50 years ago. When we were the bright youngsters in the neighborhood. And now our neighbors to the north are tending a newborn and our neighbors to the south told me this morning they are pregnant. Through the years we have witnessed the old people pass away in these homes built in the 1920’s. Homes that have aged right along with us. I am full of energy, inspired in love and work and not done yet. Yet I feel sure as anything that our turn is next to slip away. Let new life bloom in our tracks. This is the way of things. And as I continue to let the soft animal of my body love what it loves, everything about that feels right.
❤️Bella