Light as a Feather. Stiff as a Board.

After the last post, I have been thinking about blockage and flow even more.  If I take Rachel’s idea and fill it out a bit, then digestive constipation occurs simultaneously with mental, emotional, and potentially other types of physical constipation.  (It doesn’t necessarily say which one starts the ball rolling though.)  As I sat with this hypothesis, I remembered the time in Paraguay when I had been having particular troubles.

There was one month during my first year when I was only able to go to the bathroom once a week.  Whatever was happening was stopping everything up.  It was June (winter), the rainy season of my first year.  I remember losing the ability to twist and bend to my normal capacity. It was constantly painful and my Paraguayan friends and family were continuously adding herbs that were supposed to help to our mate and terere for me. 

I can still picture leaving the bathroom after one of my few successful trips that month. (A 4 by 4 by 20 foot deep hole covered with boards and surrounded by walls and roof at the edge of the yard and the field.)  I felt soo light.  I wanted to write poetry to capture the moment.  In fact, it was such a big deal I remember writing in my journal. 

So today, I looked for that poem in my journal from that special moment.  Over the years I have built up that day in my mind.  This is what I found.

6/18

FATHER’S DAY

THERE IS NOTHING QUITE AS SATISFYING AS A GOOD S%*T

It lifts the weight and life’s pressures and allows freedom of movement and thought once again.

Well, it wasn’t quite as amazing of a poem as I remember it, but it does get the point across.  

If the original hypothesis is correct, then this physical constipation would represent a certain ‘stuck-ness’ in life.  Although, there were many things about Paraguay and Peace Corps that I could not control or change, I remember that first June as the time when I started to feel fully embraced by and embrace my community.  Just the week before, I had made my first joke in Guarani (the indigenous language that is really the language of heart and home) by understanding what was said, thinking of what I wanted to say, responding in a timely manner (in Guarani, not just gestures), and everyone laughing with me (not at me. . . at least, that is the story that I am sticking with).  My journal that month is full of insights, new understandings, and many lines that when I look back on them today I am pretty impressed with myself and wish that I had been able to hold a little more closely to some of those thoughts during the last 10 years.

So, if my initial hypothesis is not necessarily correct, here is another one.  Sometimes constipation (digestive or other), holds everything in so that it can do some very important sorting and shifting.  If the stool or ideas were let out too early, the quality of nutrients and depth of learning would not have time to filter out and sink in.

I guess now the question is how to be able to process, filter, and take in what I need and expel what I don’t need in a less painful way.  There's the big question.  How to make letting go an easier process?