Prime time

 

My bodymind has hands and the hands have fingers and the right hand has an index finger that touches the screen of an iPad to spell words and to coordinate with my eyes to hunt and peck for meanings.

My body was pulled out of my mother’s body seventy one years ago. 

I feed my body but I have to be smarter about what I eat. My doctor said to start with vegetables. I have to think about my bones and about my heart when I choose my food.

Last week I learned I have osteopenia. I need more calcium and vitamin D. 

My body gets tired at work. By midafternoon my body struggles to stay awake. I stand behind a cash register and close my eyes and catch myself before I fall. If I sit in the chair I will go to sleep. You are no spring chicken, a coworker reminds me, as if I have forgotten. 

My body gets up several times during the night to pass water. There is a brief conflict with my self over my body’s need to sleep and it’s need to urinate complicated by the need I learned as a child to not wet the bed. Sometimes I dream about the ocean or a flood and wake up needing to go to the bathroom. Other dreams are less obvious in their messaging. My nervous system produces dreams. I don’t know if it’s just random neural noise sometimes or if part of me is telling another part of me something. 

I dream I am arguing with my father, who died seventeen years ago, and I don’t know if I was really arguing with my self. Am I arguing with my self about fatherhood itself or about my own childhood? Am I arguing with the Heavenly Father? 

A long time ago my body impregnated another person’s body. Our bodies knew how to reproduce but our minds were stupid. We went to a clinic to terminate the process. A copy of the book Our Bodies Ourselves was on the table in the waiting room and I started reading it, hoping to become less stupid. I was so stupid I was a stranger to myself despite my selfishness. 

I don’t think I am the kind of person meant to be a father but I was slow to reach that conclusion. I finally fell in love with a woman who wasn’t meant to be a mother and learned something about what it means to be a husband. 

Every morning for the past ten years I get out of bed and carry my bodymind to the couch in my studio, I brew some Bustelo and pour a mug and meditate and pray to the creator spirit Mother/Father and my mind presents its confusion to itself. Am I talking to myself? Or God talking to Godself? 

I consider that just essential awareness and the self of the consciousness united are the Mother/Father and unconditioned condition of body/mind.

Or more neural noise.

A little more clarity, a little more courage or resolve, I ask. 

Then, then I drink the coffee and the day begins. 

At least 71 is a prime number, divisible only by one and by itself. 

I’m in my prime and this is prime time.