Incarnation in Ordinary Time

"...And the way one can find oneself strewn

so inattentively across life, across time.

Those who touch us, those whom we touch,

we hold them or we let them go

as though it were such a small matter.

How even know in truth how much

of mind should be memory, no less

what portion of self should be others

rather than self? Across life, across time,

as though it were such a small matter."

--a portion of "Lessons" by C.K. Williams

I first read the words above while in a book shop in Palo Alto, California. It was 2009. They call to me again and again. There's some phenomenon "got at" in that poem. It's about the carelessness of physical regard, the lax way of touching and neglecting intimacy we so easily embark on as humans. I don't think it's conscious. Until it is. Even then we still do it. Why? I don't know. But it's spiritually disastrous.

There's this thing about poems: they time travel. The words from "Lessons" came back to me this morning as I recalled my father dying in 1994. (I had two fathers; he was the non-biological one) He'd slipped into a coma on a Friday night. A few days later his two biological children arrived to say their good-byes. It was like he resurrected from the dead upon their entering the room. Sat up, straight, after weeks of falling, laying flat, moaning in discomfort, being spoon-fed liquids and finger-fed ice chips--he looked like an erect embalmed mummy. Their presence lifted his dying, decaying body and he mumbled "So happy," and he wept.

There they all were: father, son and daughter, grasping each other, holding on tight, in anticipation of the end they all knew was coming. It was a reunion of the highest order. It's the physicality of that moment I can't forget. I stood by the bedside, a step daughter, witnessing the homecoming in my midst. It was homecoming of the physical. I knew in that moment that whatever relationship I had with him was not the same as the relationship they had with him. It's like my father was reconnecting to his own limbs in that moment. Like parts of his rhizomatic body came back to their primary shoot. Profound. Holy. It reminded me of a domesticated, hospice-version of the sacrament of communion. "This is my body given for you." Yep.

I wasn't his by flesh and blood. They were. Never had I realized the expansive gap between blood and choice family like I did in that moment.  Realities of blood and choice are different. We don't have to place quantitative value judgments on that difference. But failing to acknowledge that difference strikes me absurd. There is nothing like flesh reconnecting to flesh after a period of absence or in anticipation of annihilation to prove just how not separate we are when we have biological links between us. Those links matter immensely.

Why do we forget about how entangled, interconnected, inextricably bound our bodies are? Is it too much to live with/in?

My biological brother and I never laid eyes on each other, touched or met in the flesh until he was in his fifties and I was 30. But when we hugged for the first time on his doorstop in Stockton California--both as adults--there was no denying that some corporeal thread linked us together. I felt it physically when hugging him. There was "home" there. It was our (biological) father. It didn't matter that we hadn't been raised together. It didn't matter that our relationships to our father were on different planets. We were from the same physical source and when we finally found each other, that common source, still alive in our flesh, could be felt powerfully. I imagine my biological father, my ancestor who holds me from the ground up, felt his own life powerfully reconnected in that moment.

Yesterday I talked to a friend who is discerning becoming pregnant. I kept wanting to tell her about the incarnation of it. How your body becomes something else, entirely new and different, during the process of creating life. And then when birthing happens, all the illusions of planetary separations go away because the Wild Animal of Life itself takes over, you being a mere vessel of its power. Then your body moves around the world multiple from there on out. Little beings, apparently separate (but not), gaining their own life force, both from you and apart from you, making their way into some specificity that is at once recognizable and entirely mysterious.

My favorite time of day is mornings on the couch with my children. The three of us, before the rituals of day time begin, are linked by limbs. Their little bodies resting on my bigger body. The stillness of breathing in sync. The rest in reunion after a night time apart. They snuggle into my chest which protects my heart, but truly my heart bursts with the sensational convergence, albeit brief and never lasting. Just for that moment I feel like all parts of my Body are in the same place. Then they bounce away, to get dressed, to go to school and I am left wondering "those who touch us, those whom we touch, we hold them or we let them go as though it were such a small matter." And I am left "strewn so inattentively across life, across time," held together here and there by poetry, memory and brief moments of togetherness (again) in the flesh.