I need to write it down. I should do this before true memory fades and is replaced, as it so often is, by a recall that looks like The way I wanted it to be, or The way I think it should have been. This is what we do, being humans of great imagination and great fear. We twist and rearrange the past to suit our current longing or passion or outrage or collection of beliefs.
Here, then, is what’s left of it, the details in no order of significance. If you read it and relate, that is le cerise sur le gateau, French cherry atop French cake. I should tell you, since truth is being honored here, that writers write what first and foremost will save their sanity, which means they write for themselves, whether they tell you so, or not.
For the record, it was surgery on my dominant foot. Neither the largest reconfiguration of bone and cartilage ever, nor a mere removal of some tiny irritant. The Podiatrist called it a Big One, and said the recovery would be the hardest part. A slice was made, and ten years of free floating stuff was vacuumed out, and tattered cartilage was cut away. Bone, grown spurred and convoluted, was planed down, made smooth and then holey, ready to receive adopted titanium parts. A plate and seven screws married foot’s old bone in a ceremony of bright lights and shiny, sterile tools, officiated by a surgeon seasoned in the ways of the human foot.
It was December, and I planned as much as I could for the extended period of no weight bearing. Yes, it hurt. It was hard in all the ways you might expect, and a few you might not consider. While I was able to schedule a break of several months in my Yoga and Yogabilities™ teaching, the rest of the process was quite complicated by my role as primary caregiver to Bink, my adult daughter with special needs. But it’s the afterwards I concern myself with here.
After the first week or so, I got used to needing assistance with many activities of daily living. Superguy began to adapt to doing the chores and errands and caregiving that typically make up a good chunk of my days. As I stabilized, he felt freer to leave the house for longer periods of time. I had some visitors, but there were lots and lots of spaces in my days, stretches with no people, or very few of them.
I’m an introvert by nature, and the intensity of my care giving experience tends to add extra appreciation for solitude and quiet. I’ve never been one to shy away from being alone. That said, I’d also never had weeks of enforced couch time in a very quiet house. When Bink was at her day program and Superguy was off at work, I had hours and hours of time and space.
I read. I watched the collection of home shows I record on a regular basis. House Hunters International is my only mode of world travel, after all! I did some art, and wrote a bit. After some time I was also able to wheel myself clumsily around the house on my nifty knee scooter, but most of my time was spent sitting.
I resisted it at first, and spent a little time feeling sorry for myself. The magic—and I can’t call it anything less— began to manifest slowly, and only when I allowed myself to surrender into this lifestyle. I required the acceptance that my primary vocation for a while would be healing.
It’s taken me many months to write about this, and I am still struggling for the best words to convey the transcendent experience I had while I was confined to my house for those few months last winter.
In Yoga tradition, we all contain five bodies of life force that nest inside each other. The layers are made of increasingly finer grades of energy. During my couch sitting weeks, it was as if the edges of my energy bodies spread and became more porous. All that activity I was so used to, had been keeping my energy confined to a certain size and shape. When the structure of my life fell away, the collection of energies known as me began to expand, and in the process, I welcomed a deep peace to trickle into my being. It became flood, the landscape altering kind, unlike anything I’ve ever known.
This was a peace that needs a new name, like superpeace or hypercalm. It settled over me like the softest blanket, lightweight but warm enough to melt the frozen places in my heart and soul that hadn’t seen sunlight in years. The hours of silence and solitude were nourishing some bits of my insides that I didn’t even know existed. In circumstances that I thought would drive me nuts, I found a state of deeply serene acceptance, a wild form of being present that went beyond meditation. I didn’t realize the extent of the effect until I was exposed to the outside world again.
After weeks of confinement, the only exception being follow up visits to the foot doctor, my Superguy and I decided I could go out of the house on a little field trip. He helped me into a portable wheelchair we’d acquired to get me to and from the house for said appointments. We went down the street to Panera bread for a cup of tea.
I am not exaggerating when I tell you my senses were bombarded with haphazard grenades of color, light and noise. It was jarring, to put it mildly. I’d lost touch with how loud and chaotic and abrasive the sights and sounds, textures and energies of the cars and clerks and crowds are. I remember actually recoiling at the store signs and the speed with which all those tires on the roads kicked out snow and gravel. And the pace! Frenetic, dizzying. I was exhausted after that first outing.
Subsequent outings had similar but very gradually more muted effects on me. When I was finally able to drive again and I began doing all the things I’d been relieved of for so long, I vowed I would hold on to the peaceful state I’d been gifted through my convalescence. It faded, though. The figurative leap back into the busy swirl of my life demanded my focus and energy. I’m sad to say that I felt myself contract again, fitting back in to the expectations that my life before the big surgery was modeled upon.
I’ve not forgotten my experience, though. I’ll call this somewhat inadequate attempt to convey it to you a victory, because I’ve resisted even trying to explain this for so long.
A few years back, I wrote the following on one of my Yoga Facebook pages:
“There is a quality of fullness in silence, in emptiness, in spaces. Spaces nourish and soothe and spaces can heal. The space between sentences, between breaths. Space between footsteps and activities and thoughts. The space to be, the space to be with, the space to do small things well.”
Today I kneel before the transformational power of experiences we may dread and avoid. I bow to the possibilities that exist within the fullness of emptiness, and I testify to the immense importance of spaces between things.
–Melinda Coppola
How wonderful!!!
I can relate. Thank you.
The last especially magnificent! Such a different journey for each of us.
Thank you, Alexa!