The little death

img_0163img_0167

The air was cool and moisture laden at the coffee shop. I sat and felt.

The rain came last night hard and soothing and still this morning the early light was accompanied by the drumming and dripping. My sheets felt silky. I stretched out luxuriating in the awareness that I didn’t have to get up for ages. I lay flat relaxing and gently formed spinal waves to lengthen my back and felt the rain sounds circulating through my body.
I have felt in the past that there are dead bits in my body, mainly in the posterior breathing apparatus, and today I could feel the muscles flaring with the inbreathe and staying wide as I exhaled. My left leg seemed to have disappeared and I felt into the place where I thought it might be and finally felt the warmth of blood and the slight tingle of circulation.
The rain stopped and my legs carried me happily to the coffee shop. A leaf fell into my lap, an old brown leathery leaf. I left the open leaf in my lap and drank coffee and water.
I looked at my lap about 10 minutes later, the leaf had curled up. Completely cut off from its source of life, its sap, it closed into itself. I thought about my leg and how it had not felt attached or even a part of my body. If I had ignored my non-leg it might have withered a bit, died a little. I was conscious of its defection to the land of Morpheus. It wasn’t numb, it just wasn’t anything.
I searched for it and found my leg and now it aches a little but the leg and hip feel open and free, if a tad uncomfortable. Maybe that is the price I pay, for now, for ignoring the drying of the sap, the dying of the light, at least in my leg. As I get older death gets more imminent. Death means to be cut off from the processes of life, maybe we take another energy form, maybe we don’t. As I looked at the curling leaf I stood and stretched my leg and opened to the moist air, to the forces of life to the process of my breath, my first and last contact with life. The inhale stimulates and drives expansion, the exhale sedates and allows contraction always the duality.