This Embodied Life – The Spirit Likes to Dress Up (with a poem by Mary Oliver)

This embodied life is not a mistake, and the body is not the enemy.  The poetry of interweaving multiple dimensions, the abilities and insights and relationships the body gives, are great gifts. We may imagine a freedom from restrictions attributed to the body, but the actualization of true freedom is not obstructed by the body.  True freedom is freedom unconditioned, un-dependent on circumstances, issuing from the actuality of who you really are, not what you’ve been told you are. The stimulus of the embodied life is to find true freedom, to be able to respond and not just react.  Without mortality, how would humans be driven to look deeper than appearances and circumstances?  Without the body, how would we be able to find a way to go beyond a self-centered view and experience the reality check of this life and our actual relationships with others?  The opportunity of the body gives you an ever-present way to bring attention back to here and now, and to experience life deeply and intensely, permeated through and through with spirit, fully alive.

© 2023 Shanti Natania Grace

      Poem

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,

shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning

in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather

plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,

lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct

and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,

to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is—

so it enters us—
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;

and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.

– Mary Oliver –

from Dream Work