I am learning how to trust the wisdom of my body.
I also hate waiting.
The two do not always go well together. I am a creature of what I want, I want now and patience is my least favourite virtue. So for me, learning to trust the wisdom of my body is in as sense going against who I have come to know myself to be. It is coming to trust alongside patience, and listening to hear when my body tells me about the seasons.
There’s this chapter in Ecclesiastes; ‘A time for everything’ that comes to mind. The recovering Catholic in me is grateful for the reminders wherever she can find them. A time for everything. That this time, which encompasses everything must be understood as a time of seasons, in the way the moon wanes, and the sun sets, and the pauses that are in between. To know this is to learn how to wait, and rest, and trust. It is a precarious ask in this world so fast paced and urgent. I too, who is in the practice of remembering and urging us to remember find myself in need of this lesson. I find myself caught up in the sway of anxiety that comes from feeling rushed, almost as if you were being chased, but without real clarity of what for, and where to. My people call it, okupapa. You say to someone, nopapa nozahi when you want to know, where are you rushing to so frazzled?
The feeling of being in a state of constant urgency and or movement is one that is easy to become too accustomed to. It is almost as if that is what it means to be able to survive in this world. You must rush, you must hurry. there is not enough after all. Those are the words that accompany the feeling. The feeling will differ at times, and it is almost too fluid for me to fully describe, but you are likely familiar with it. It feels like Monday dread that starts with a slow creeping ping in your stomach and continues on to a spiral that wants of you not to be at ease, and therefore, with no time to listen when your body is demanding of you to stop, and or, trust the seasons.
It is as if that is how to survive in this world. And yet, my body has been teaching me that it is not. That if we have learned it, we can once again unlearn it. That it has not always been the way. So I have been asking her, where did we learn this idea that we have no time, that there might not be enough? The answers come back clear. It is the way that has been adopted. That is what systems that extract of us our time, and take from us the connection to our bodies and each other, and the earth demand. You must always be rushing. you must always be in a hurry. there is not enough after all.
My body, she says to me, you have forgotten the ways of your people. Owanyu murya abihingi. And as those who farm with the land, we have to be in a communion of sorts with the seasons, trusting that what has been planted will come to fruition yes, and trusting in the in between still. It is not so much a resistance, not entirely, as it is part of the practices of reclamation. And my body, she remembers.
So, I am learning to trust the wisdom of my body. And with that, the pauses she needs, the joys that come with taking a cup of coffee un-rushed in the morning, and deep breaths that ask of me to move a little slower. And as I lean more in this trust, and to familiarise myself with this feeling I am asking, more and more,
What does it mean to be
Liberated, free.
Large.
Larger than this.
Less Limited.
Free.
Spacious?
Spacious. That’s one of my words of the year.
I would explain it to you as the process of learning to love, and trust the in between. Insisting on it. I say insisting on it because in this world that demands of us to give of ourselves so much, so that we can not feel or be in our bodies, to have and be spacious is my act of reclamation to myself. It is a freedom I must cultivate, and after growing accustomed to the feeling of liberation that comes from the practice of demanding and trusting that there is enough. enough space, enough time, enough that we do not have to rush towards it all, all at once, I must now insist to have.