On Embodiment

In a comment on this post by Jessica, I prefaced a statement about my sleep habits by saying: "I am much more mortal, embodied, and human than I realized when I was 18...."  And then this morning, as I clicked through some links from Sarah Bessey, I found this article that put into words (ironically) some of my own struggle with using words.  And all of this made me think about embodiment.

Before I wrote this, I washed the dishes.  I put my hands in hot, soapy water, and wiped a dishrag over ceramic plates and cups.  I scrubbed a wood cutting board that smelled of the onions chopped on its surface.  I drained the water from the sink, then brought my cast iron pans over from the stove to coax the debris of breakfast cooking off their surfaces - eggs from one, bacon from the other.  I rinsed coffee grounds out of my french press.  I wiped the counters and the stovetop.

After the dishes, I took care of a diaper, left to soak before I started the dishes.  There's little that's more embodied than a dirty cloth diaper, waiting to be swished, rinsed, scrubbed, wrung out, and dropped in a pail with other diapers to await wash day.

This, here, is life.  The thoughts that I think about it in my head are not life.  The abstractions and lessons and principles that I take from it are not life.  This is life.

Embodied.  Rinsing eggs off of cast iron.  Wringing toilet water out of cotton.

I struggle with how to use the words that I have been given, because I want life to embody the abstraction of my words, instead of using the abstraction of words to convey the embodiment of life.  When I kept copious journals as a teen, they weren't so much for the purpose of pouring out life as it was, but for rationalizing life as it was with the big things that I thought life should mean.  They were for wrangling, bending, and obfuscating, not for expressing clearly.  As a coping mechanism for an emotional teen, this isn't the end of the world, but now as an adult I struggle with the place of words (which I love) in my life.  I would still like to use them to construct what I think that my life should be, instead of conveying what my life is.  I want to skip ahead.  I want to use abstraction to justify, excuse, or rationalize life.  But over and over I have heard a call to embody.  To use words to show things as they are.  I hope that in the future, this space will do a better job with that.

And now everything that I need to learn in life (embodied in my child) has woken up from his nap.  So long!