Embodied

Editor’s Note: Steady readers of Dark Matter will likely recall my friend and neighbor Lynne McFarland who often does me the great kindness of permitting the reprinting of her online posts here. Even wondering what Lynne might say about something I’m looking at or considering restores my sense of myself and others and our sweet old world. I hope each of you has people like that in your life. The image above comes from Lynne too. It’s an illustration from The Illuminated Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, illlustrations by Michael Green. Here’s Lynne.

For us (the beings of this world, this planet) the mode of our being is “embodied.” We are, we have, bodies. From a single cell to a whale, from a fleck of mold to a forest, we live in bodies.

Don’t get me started on us humans and our bodies. If we want to punish people, we punish their bodies. If we want to destroy, we kill the body. In passion, we yearn to possess the body of another. In the condition we could call Empire Ego, we wish to possess bodies in order to enrich ourselves.

In the Christian tradition, the story we tell is that God came to earth in a body. His body was destroyed and rose again in another, transformed, body. And then He was disembodied, became pure Spirit, and sometimes we want that too, pure indestructible Spirit, but to dust we’re born and to dust we shall return, so that’s a problem.

When we want to make an idol (a bad thing, no?), we make a body, perhaps of gold or jewels, or we find the ideal bodies of our culture and elevate these to a place of importance. But a part of us believes that we ought instead to be seeking a “higher” good, the Idea, the Ideal, Reason, the Spirit, the Absolute, the Good in all caps, and it’s always dis-embodied, right? Something we can’t quite put our fingers on, just out of grasp, an Intelligence that at most exists in words or formulae, or dare I say it, algorithms?

Back in the Old Testament, it says God created us “in His own image,” like He had a body. Like us. Embodied, yes? And if the Holy Spirit is left with us (as supposedly it is), is it not then embodied?

Birds are embodied song. Dogs are embodied love.

Just stick with me for a moment. Go with this: the mode of our being is embodied.

To know that which is embodied requires us to be open toward it, to draw near it, and be present. To be with an embodied being, not in the mode of destruction or possession, is to let it reveal itself to us and for us to perceive it.

It is a form of “being with.” Not power over.

It is opposite to the manner and method of a corporate project, what Rev. Lawson called Plantation Capitalism, in which the goal is to control, to extract, to objectify and commodify bodies of all sorts, human, animal, mineral, for gain and profit.

I get it, this manner and method of a corporate project, this possession and destruction: first, you de-sacralize it. Remove the deep being, the way that our being is an embodied being, and what remains is just “dead matter,” and who cares about that—go ahead and take it and get rich off it. Kill the Indian, save the man. Plow over Gaza for fun and profit. Detain and deport. If it’s people you’re talking about, de-humanize them, call them criminals.

Today, in the midst of smoke and death again, I will be with a group of people who lead with life and joy and power-with, who love the earth and who embrace the reality that we are body and soul, all of us. Embodied.