Vocation

yo la espero y me envuelve,
y así tú, pan y luz
y sombra eres.

(Pablo Neruda, Oda y germinaciones)

I’ve talked about the slow viscous drip of winter before, but it lives within me too, permanently hollowed into my right shoulder. A hollow: an inch and a half wide, my labrum separated from bone. And another, my bicipital tendon dislocated above my rotator cuff. The dull roar of pain. If you’ve ever had an injury that involves the bone especially, you know: it’s a tender, unrelenting thing. I think of it like white noise. A crackle of static that dilutes my attention at any given moment. In this pain there is a meditation. And it sounds ridiculous or maybe even masochistic. But when you have to take slow, the passing of time boiled down into a series of motions, there’s a sort of transcendence. Something very quiet in that space despite the static. I don’t know what else to call it.

In the first weeks after starting physical therapy – before I really knew anything about the damage –  I felt like I had broken a wing. I lay face down on a table and practiced pulling my shoulder blades back, relax, back. This was the fundamental motion to be relearned. (Maybe if I flapped hard enough I would lift off the table and fly, I thought.) It was of course not my first time being injured; I’d dislocated my left shoulder a few months earlier. But it was my first time starting from scratch. Like I was learning somebody else’s right arm. It felt foreign in a way that was terrifying. And it was so noisy. The night I dislocated my other shoulder I had cradled it, refused to use it, carried myself defensively. But now it was like doing that all the time. The static in my head dialed up to eleven. Navigating my daily life was a minefield. And yet, in those simple motions, the relearning of the essentials, there was a quiet, a fluidity, a gracefulness, though it must have looked awkward. Each movement was so well calculated that I felt rooted in my self-awareness. As if I moved through a world meant just for me.

Perhaps it is a silly self-devotion, but I find it a devotional act nonetheless. I am so concretely settled within myself, and in my old friend my new shoulder, that I find meditation in my every movement. To learn oneself anew is an exercise in consciousness. It’s hardly romantic: it’s also an exercise in fear, and sadness, and in loss. When you permanently damage your shoulder at nineteen, of course there’s loss. In that inch-and-a-half hollow rests entire meditations of loss, that have lasted unendingly and worn down. Worn down to my unwinged back, to bone. A quiet place. A self-devotion. I pull my shoulder blades back. I am borne, anew.

In a murderous time
      the heart breaks and breaks
and lives by breaking.

—STANLEY KUNITZ, “The Testing-Tree”

When the sun rises it sings as Udgâtri for the sake of all creatures. When it rises it destroys the fear of darkness.
This (the breath in the mouth) and that (the sun) are the same. This is hot and that is hot. This they call svara (sound), and that they call pratyâsvara (reflected sound). Therefore let a man meditate on the udgîtha (Om) as this and that (as breath and as sun).

–The Upanishads, third kanda

The massacre in Christchurch punched the breath right out of me. I am shattered. I am in a heartbroken solidarity. When a tragedy is so large you cannot swallow it, where does it go? The world is in shock, in grief, over and over and over again. How many times have we had to ask ourselves: What next?

However right now I feel that this grief, because it cannot sit stagnant within me, must be channelled elsewhere, into action, into advocacy. What happens next is what I make happen next. I am bitter sour afraid. For all my Muslim brothers and sisters I am seeing with eyes wide open. I am educating myself. I am wondering, what is my role as a brown non-Muslim person? What is Hindu-Muslim solidarity? What can I do and what will I do? I am questioning, relentlessly, and I am seeking answers. If there are no answers I will create them myself with my own two hands. My breath the sun. An entire world within me. I believe this, that my hands can create, deep in the soil where all life is.

Grief is a powerful thing, so powerful it destroys us, it takes us prisoner, it punches the breath right out of our gut. But in this time a heart lives by breaking, and it is forged again, and breaks again. We too must dig our hands deep into the hard work of carving out safe spaces, no matter what it takes. Ready to break. Ready to put ourselves back together. Within me there is a strength that cannot be laid to rest even in grief. Make no mistake: this is not resilience. This is survival. In the cracked earth breath whistles through.

It is an incomprehensibly murderous time. We are breaking against within through free and we live by this and we will keep living by this, holding steady, digging deep.