Guest Post: What We Put In The Ground

Today’s post is excerpted from a recent email I received from my friend E, a fantastic writer and a fantastic person. It was inspired in part by a recent entry here. While I am like a puppy faced with a truckload of bones when it comes to praise (more please, no, really, more), I am posting this with her permission mainly because I find it so touching and beautifully written. Identifying and other details have been removed. Thank you, E.

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Yesterday while stretching after a particularly strenuous run I realized that my neck, which had not been troubling me during the run, was totally aching. It came when I tried to lower my head to the ground, bending forwards, to place my hands there and ease open the muscles in the backs of my legs.

The fact is that earlier this year, I learned that the bones in my neck were not stacking up in the way that they should. Like some kind of nearly-toppling tower, they were too unsteady to do their job. To help, my neck muscles were in a state of spasm, trying to keep things upright. Good intentions, bad results. So when the pain started while I was bending over, I at least knew what it was: my neck muscles, trying, as usual, to keep my head on.

When I first got the diagnosis, I called my husband. “I can’t hold my head up,” I said. “You couldn’t invent a better condition for me at this moment.” His mother died a year ago while we sat beside her in the house that she raised him in, the house that we now live in. We lost her at the end of a period during which we watched and heard lung cancer make its way up to her neck. For the entirety of her illness and the period that followed, when I watched my husband’s heart break, I did not feel I could hold my head up at all.

Yesterday, when I tried to lower myself towards the floor of this room, in this apartment where a woman I loved very much raised two children that I love very much, one of whom I married, I realized that my neck was working too hard, working against me as I tried to place my hands on the ground.

I thought of the entry you had done about this, about why we place our hands on the ground and what it means. I thought that it is terribly important how we get to the ground. I was bending over but my neck was craning out, like a not very intelligent ostrich. I could not let it hang.

I stood up again, and did the kind of thing that I have a body memory of from being in first grade, kindergarten, having kind teachers and a rubbery little self. I rolled my spine one vertebrae at a time down and when my head wanted to turtle its way out I thought no, just let it go.

When I got to place my hands on the ground, all of me was there. My head had come along for the ride, too. I was alone in the house that we’d been fighting to bring back to life after this impossible year, and had my hands on the ground giving something back. It was quite beautiful and it was a moment that you helped to create with your writing, which was with me as I leaned over and let go.

What We Want

I'm exhausted and yet I can seemingly keep going. That's all the miracle I need for today.

I've been thinking about what I've been asking for here, and what others have been asking for. This blog was born out of strange twins of grief and hope, a plain human need to will the buds open when everything is bone cold and withered.

Looking at this blog so far as the most informal of surveys, I'd say we need to know the sick can get well, the odds can be overcome, the dead still love us even if we can never again slip our hand into theirs, unthinkingly, as we take their presence for granted. We need to know we can survive our personal horrors, and that the world can survive all the horrors that people visit on eachother. We need to know that what seems impossible, on any given day, can happen, from our own effort and from powers beyond us, because we are deserving and somehow loved. We need to know that when we ask for help, the universe is listening and the universe will grant it.

With all our electric light, we're still this little group of people in the darkness praying that the sun will come up over the hill again, that we'll get through the winter, that the crops will come in.

I don't know what it means that we live in a relatively physically stable society with our souls still fighting for survival this way. I also don't know, at this moment, if this is all just me.