If you’re anything like me, you live in the zone somewhere between your chin and the crown of your head, encased in the sounds that your two ears take in, almost twenty-four hours a day.
There is a constant barrage of intellectual processing available to you: social media feeds, television, articles, books, blogs, images.
You can access, at the swipe or a tap or a press of the finger
a myriad of others’ ideas
ideas about the world
ideas about you
and how you should be.
Your mind is on hyper-over-drive. Consume consume consume
and yet it is powerful still.
Because
if your body feels tired, you can still convince it to hustle.
if your muscles long to stretch, you can shift slightly in your chair and continue returning those emails.
if your chest explodes with butterflies, you wonder if it was something you ate
not your body saying “no! no! no!”
In a world where you can be accessed at the press of a button, where you can access the world with a device you keep next to your body all day every day,
In a world where you display yourself for all to see, and live out your
ups and downs, highs and lows, uncoverings and discoveries, sadnesses and truths
through a lens, on a keyboard, to anyone who’s also turned on
(which is to say, everyone)
it is no wonder that
the edges of yourself are hard to locate. The very perimeter of your physical being seems caught in the ether somehow,
like smudged ink
or watercolour paint bleeding toward the edges of the page.
It is too many yeses. It is overriding your body’s needs with your mind’s drive. It is being surrounded by the needs of others, their physical presence or their digital demands. It is ever-so-subtly wrapping yourself amoebically around the expectations of others and the ways in which they say you are not enough until they are a part of your psychological cytoplasm,
and you can’t tell where you ended
and the constant stream of information about who you should be
what you need to accomplish
and how you can prove your (so-called) value in the world
began.
This.
This is overwhelm.
This is what it feels like to drown
with a body that is trying to tell you she can’t breathe
but you’ve forgotten how to listen.
So, my darling.
Get your feet on the grass and wrap your arms around a tree.
Feel the coolness, the roughness.
Lower your body to the earth and realize that she has
more than enough strength to hold you.
More than enough.
Eat vegetables that still taste like the earth in which they were grown.
Go to the woods, go to the ocean, go to the prairie, go to the rocks, go to the sand.
Let the clean air nourish you and realize that she has
more than enough oxygen to fill your lungs, sync your heart, enervate your mind,
More than enough.
In the earth, you might find
that her rhythms match your own.
They’ve been doing so, steadily, even without your attention.
In the earth, you might find
imperfections
that are achingly perfect
and you might realize that yours are too.
That you are enough.
You might find the edges of yourself, the container for this experience that you were given at birth and have since forgotten
You might find