The Silent Body Awakens

10 Days of Noble Silence: complete silence of speech, of body, of place. Here are the first written words... The floodgates change like everything else. Perhaps wordless communication would be most lovely. The first handshake. The first embrace. The first eye contact. The piercing exactitude of living life without affirmation, knowing the only condemnation arises within. Feeling your mind's conversation with apparent reality manifest in the body's sensations.

A tingle in the pinky, a heaviness on the brow, a thick soup slurping across and through the limitless terrain of Body. Earthen weight sliding along sternocleidomastoid. The right hip is blank. Ah. There's the subtle blanket of cloth touching skin, the breath of cold on my forearm. My? Wait. Whose is this anyway? Then smashing into the laminal groove, a stabbing pain takes hold of my shoulder blade, right behind the pericardium, or what the Chinese call the "Heart Protector." My awareness searches for the epicenter of this heartquake, pulsing alongside the primal history of what we call "spine." Indeed, pain becomes broken into the unnamable. The magician's trick of pulse, heat, density shifts beneath my gaze & I can't pin the center. Why suffer my mind to something so ephemeral?

I move on, charting the chop of pulsing density into lighter waters. The tides of mind meet matter on a sparkly shore. And where is the Sun? Hanging fixed in the sky like the one in a child's drawing? Not to be found. I don't find the Earthbody's star, just the drownings of a spiral galaxy. Is it night or day? Rising heat makes wavelets of the atmosphere & then I realize it's moonlight on the water. I glance over as a bird takes flight from a treetop into morning sky. And then submerged again, nearing the ocean's floor, tremendous weight closing; but I can feel the subtle thinness of my skin, the flutter of bubbles float from my lips. So even as my flesh presses closer to bone, I know liquid light casts dusty rays near the surface. Not a smile, not a tear, yet I am bouyant. I could love from this place.