Well I woke up early this morning because I didn't sleep well but still better than the night before. Most of last night was spent dancing with pain. I'm a lousy dancer. All night, sometimes I would lead, sometimes I couldn't. I wouldn't mind that so much if I only got a chance to sit a couple out now and again. Especially the slow ones.
Chronic pain is what it's called, though it usually refers to a state that would be more ongoing than my situation (I hope). For instance, last night I really couldn't find a position in which I was totally comfortable. Of course I was positionally challenged by doctors orders. I could only lie on my back, my right leg could not be rotated, and my right hip could not be bent more than 90 degrees. I think I must have fidgeted all night. I bet I looked like a worm that just went through shovel mitosis (I was a mean and nasty little child in the garden) to that big spider in the ceiling corner.
There's more to pain control than pharmaceuticals. Last night I began to meditate. I tried to rise above my earthly plane and get onto a loftier plane. Perhaps not eliminating the pain but being outside of it. I half hoped that I would reach that Zen state of total acceptance, rising above my concerns and pain, feeling my transfiguration into a spirit without any bodily cares or worries. That's what all those Japanese and Southeast Asian Buddhas promise. You can see it there in their expressions and poses, the ease in which they inhabit their temporary earthly visage. The best I could do is the Chinese Buddhas, You know the ones. They are way overweight, mostly naked and bald, just smiling like they just the joke about the priest, the construction wok er and the prostitute. They are the people's Buddhas, not some light emanating ethereal being but just like us. They seem really happy for some reason, just like we are capable of. What they don't show is that other face, the one lined with pain and sadness, careworn and starving, the Buddha of hopelessness and defeat. Last night I found my personal Buddha. At least for last night.
What is it about pain that is so universal yet so reviled? When I was a wee tot, I remember watching an old black and white movie on our black and white TV. It was the inspiring story of Saint Bernadette. She saw the Virgin Mary in a vision and heard her say among other things, "I am the immaculate conception." Of course that was way canonically wrong. Mary wasn't any conception at all, really. All the church hierarchy tried to re-instruct and correct the little peasant girl but she persisted. They tried to make her recant. She would not. She stuck to her faith and eventually was placed in a convent. After she was older, I recall another, jealous nun (are their a lot of those, I wonder?) much older and world weary, worn from prostrating herself before her God, bent from the selfless and endless chores that harshly stole the youth and beauty from her finally approached our young heroine. In the past this same nun would give Bernadette the poorest and meanest of chores, scrubbing the stone floors on hands and knees, cleaning toilets with q-tips, slopping the pigs, cleaning the horse stalls, that sort of thing. She confronted Bernadette as a liar and prideful in that the young nun would claim that the most Holy Virgin would appear to such a selfish child rather than herself, a true sufferer for the faith. Good old Saint Bernadette, unfazed, said that she did not care what the old bag thought. But being a saint and all, she knew her obligation to relieve as many as she could of the demons that wrack their unilluminated lives. She told the green eyed nun to check out her legs. We never see it but the old nun just fell down in shock and tears. It appears that for the last few years, never complaining once, the future saint was suffering from some withering horrifying disease like polio or worse. OK so here's the point so wake up: All these years she bore her pain and infirmaries as the cost of having communed with the Holy Virgin. She rose above the daily mortal plane, beyond human suffering and become something better.
I have no immediate plans to do so.
That movie may have been formative for me in my early years but I learned to be okay imperfect, at least sometimes. I've learned that pain is a teacher, not an enemy. It is, for me the surest and often the only way to get my attention and my old, tattered, and beat up body is telling me something. I could ignore it and aspire to Buddha or saint hood or just be human and bitch about the pain.
Somehow the later makes the pain a bit more bearable. Go figure.
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