Ground-Bound
Tissue Issue
The other night my body locked up. The way weeks of building digital infrastructure will calcify you into your own architecture. I had been hunched over systems, stacking skill on skill, moving data through pipelines that only exist in the invisible. Hours of that. Weeks of it. And when I finally stopped, I couldn’t feel my feet.
I knew my usual methods wouldn’t work. Something in the tissue said floor. Now. I lay down and waited for more instruction.
My legs take bicycle posture, arms rotate floating parallel, breath syncs without being asked. Then cycling made her entrance through a spiral from somewhere below the ribcage, some cartilaginous intelligence that rang supreme even before this body was born. I got caught in the release for nearly ten minutes.
Vertical again, I felt a noticeable shift. Something in the diamond of my chest cracked open. Like a window painted shut offering give after enough pressure from exactly the right angle. A severe opening through a door that had been closed for far too long. Embarrassingly moaning in relief, I rubbed my feet together like I hadn’t felt them in years.
How did my body know to do this?
No lineage I can consciously name yet the body moved with the confidence of someone who had done this before, archiving something the mind never registered. Movement, one of the oldest languages, melted me into fluency.
Shortly after, Charlie found me in the kitchen. He was barking at ambient noises, the kind of escalating agitation that usually ends with me saying his name six times before he hears me. But something in me had locked in and so something in the room copied me. I didn’t speak. I used my hands and eyes. I used whatever had come online in me during that time ground-bound.
For fifteen minutes, we were in it together. He read my gestures the way you read a face before words are available. Increasingly calm, then finally asleep, his body releasing into the trust of unbroken presence.
I was in awe of how little he needed from me. And how much he needed from me. He was not asking for words, which mostly land as detours. He was asking for felt attention, directed and steady. The same thing my body had been asking for all day.
Illuminated by the Libra full moon, I stewed on personal balance as a physical condition that either exists in the body or it doesn’t. The moon doesn’t ask for equal scales. It just lights up where they aren’t. I know I’m in flow when the clinging ceases.
May I remain available to what already knows.