I wrote recently about Going to Seed, how my body isn’t recovering the way I want it to. I think my current discomfort goes back to August in the blackberry patch. I love the blackberry patch. I love blackberries. But it is a one-handed job, reaching into the brambles with my right, while holding a bowl in my left – a repeated twist and reach, for an hour or so each day.
I don’t mind sharing blackberries with all the other creatures who love them, but I want berries in my freezer for the winter. I can’t imagine ignoring an abundant crop of juicy blackberries. It makes sense, then, this unrelenting hip discomfort.
Hip troubles, for me, usually surface when I’m carrying too much. Imagine a young mom with a baby on her hip, tending to a pot on the stove while toddlers hang onto her legs – that kind of carrying too much – a burden of love that you don’t believe you can put down. But when I turned my inside eyes toward my hip the other day, I didn’t see the “baby”. Instead I found a bouquet of stars.
I’ve long realized how motivated I am by stars and stickers. I have a vague memory of getting a star on Sunday mornings for memorizing Bible verses. Stars on my school work. Praise for being a “good girl.” Good Girl does it all. Good Girl is like the Virtuous Woman in Proverbs 31, the one who gets up before dawn, the one who not only sews all the clothes, but makes the fabric from scratch. She’s a working mom, a housewife, a wise woman. She makes her husband proud. Beautiful and cheerful, she never stops.
So the “weight” I am carrying on my hip, I believe, is the weight of all the shoulds, that I should do “it” all, that I should carry the responsibility for making life tick along smoothly. At least that’s the belief my hip is carrying, a belief that looks like a bouquet of stars.
“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence.” This is what activist Valarie Kaur admits in her book, See No Stranger, after realizing her intense care for others was wearing out her own body. She could not be and do all she felt called to be and do, without self-care first. She goes on to say, “You don’t have to make yourself suffer in order to serve.”
The bouquet of stars represents what I have believed is expected of me, as well as the small joys that keep me going. I’ve been told to rest, to sleep on my back, to not walk as far, and to do some gentle stretches. So I’m resting. That’s a challenge. The greater challenge for all of us who work so hard for recognition is to release that bouquet of beliefs, to allow rest every day, to value ourselves in our Being not just in our Doing.
Dream Bringer’s Studio 