What the Body Wants

The mint roots got tired of the windowsill water, so in the early afternoon today I pulled myself out of the mental bog and mire of second-guessed decisions that I’d been slogging around in and went outside to fill a cup with pebbles and dirt. There happened to be a hurricane helping water the weeds and native plant garden in the dirt parking lot. I was not particularly worried about it. I grew up on what I think is the fringe of a minor hurricane corridor (is that what they’re called? or is it a hurricane foyer? the language architecture of weather seems to be a futile exercise in imagined control- we give it names, rooms in houses, corridors, so maybe it won’t gobble so much. So maybe we’ll have a better linguistic grasp on chaos and a better literal grasp on our roofs and beech branches and car windows.) I had heard distant thunder earlier in the morning and the rain was coming down pretty much in accord with regular old gravity- psh, I thought. Not even a good, drenching lightning storm to siphon off this end-of-August frenzy we’ve all been feeling, fall whispering its evening way in. Hubristic and barefoot, I opened the mud room door and stepped out onto the harsh pebble driveway, unafraid and frankly hoping the water might rinse off some of that mental bog mud.

The dog, on the other hand, had been trying to climb onto my lap on each and every article of furniture I parked on all morning, and several times even tried to paw his way in when I was standing, lapless, in the kitchen putting blueberries into things. I have stopped checking the weather channel this summer because this dog knows when a storm is coming. And ain’t nobody getting any work or sleeping done once he knows.

I thought that he, like everyone and their newspaper, was overreacting- climbing into laps, buying water at the grocery store (is there a reason not to fill up jars with the water we already have? is it unglamorous? I probably missed that memo…), parking their cars in other people’s places to avoid the potential of a washed out road or an overenthusiastic tree branch trying to make love to the far away ground. Issuing a no-driving state of emergency at midnight the night before when it was hardly drizzling (which we ignored).

So I walked out in a t-shirt and sweatpants, holding two stems of wild mint I salvaged last week from a plowed-under row of zucchinni. The grass next to the parking lot had turned marshy and tasted delicious between my toes. Sometimes rain is all that breathing you didn’t realize you’d been forgetting to do. I enjoyed the water, thinking how perfect and ordinary it was. And then I walked around the corner.

We live and work in on a hill in a building called the Creekhouse. On one side of the house is the road, on one side woods and rose thickets, one pasture (complete with requisite cows cowbirds and flies), and at the bottom of the back hill is the ankle-deep creek. Or what used to be the creek. Because when I walked around the corner, what I saw where the creek was supposed to was a living muscle of water equal in volume and rush-rapidity to certain parts of the Nantahala river, which I used to raft back when North Carolina was still close by.

I probably said something profane and thrilling (at least to me). I probably made noises I wasn’t planning to utter. When the body sees water moving like that, busting out its banks, clamoring up the trunks of trees and frothing with intention, it starts moving too. The mouth, the tongue, the arms flail in wildness, look. Holy crap. That is a freaking river. Immature language because no language will be sufficient. The body does things, sends liquid into the blood, says run, run, whether towards or away.

When my body sees water moving like that, it wakes back up and demands a banquet with grapes, hammers on the door of the tiny room I keep it locked in most of the week, screams its way out and does wayward things with me even as I am determinedly trying to creep back to the mucky bog of self-doubt in the safe, immobile kitchen.

Umbrella. Camera. Click. Return to house. Shorts. Jacket. Waterproof sandles. I set off down the hill to see more wonders. The entire bottom of the pasture across the road, where I sat once for half an hour drawing Queen Anne’s lace intently until I suddenly realized I’d been sharing the field with a coyote, is underwater. The pasture close to the corner becomes a marsh, birds returning to it like they know this ecosystem of old, even here in the hills. I walk through a road underwater and feel phenomenal. Not a familiar feeling lately. The storm drain expels a constant Charybdis roar. The gully on the left, usually a rock and flower ditch, now contains waterfalls.

I feel like something fresh, a bucket of tomatoes with the mud still on. The way the water gnaws on the edges of the roads reminds me of that poor small winged thing wanting hope. Not that I would give up the concrete. I simply want to live places where there is something bigger trying to eat it. This kind of chaos, unlike that in my mind, does not terrify me. I have crossed rivers up to my thighs with weight on my back. I have locked eyes with wild hooved things. I have confused earthquakes with the comfort of trains and sought of mountains I knew would destroy me because I trust even the destruction. I fear it, but the feeling is not terror. Weather. Something bigger that happens. The last great uncontrol. What the body wants.

Half the farm is underwater, which should make me unhappy. It’s really going to be a problem for the crops. Instead I feel a great, lapping joy, unbound and uncouth and uncultured. I want to shout. I want to roll in the new marsh. I laugh in my throat and consider for just a moment being inside of the river (the second stream is also flooded past its own hips), what it would feel like to be that surrounded, that free. All body. No longer the one responsible for the chaos, the pounding water, the confusion. Just inside it, rush-water battered and alive.

Lately I have been angry. Or cruel, rather. Slinging slicing blades at my mind for not solving the questions of what I want. When I want. Who I want. Where I want to go to. And how. I stay inside the small house on the hill, erecting spiked fences to keep my own gentleness out, trying to force my own hurricanes into corridors because the weather looks a little grey, a little unpredictable. There is no house for a storm but the sky. I have been going about this journey the wrong way, compounding the problem, inverting and inverting. To stay inside with the mind trying to figure out what, who, where, how I want is to draw farther and farther from ever answering, to lose my boots in a that dark bog of self-doubt which turns out to have also been confined to the drawing room in this tiny house where I try to keep my chaos. My unexpected deluge.

It is the body that does wanting. Desire comes from there, not the mind. The mind is a secondary tool for desire. My particular mind is overdeveloped from years of getting in my own way. Engorged from a blessed, privileged, and terribly imbalanced education full of analysis and questions and hands folded or raised, one-at-a-time, polite and empty. My doing-things-muscles, my desire and will, my use and my wild knees that used to ride horses badly and collect bramble scars, are atrophied. And I sit here and keep taking x-rays, holding consulting sessions with experts in my head: what are all the different ways this muscle might move best, which part should move first, in which direction.

It doesn’t work that way. You don’t heal in the doctor’s office. I know this story. I once spent 4 months unmoving in a bed. You do not decide what to do with those pathetic, tiny strings you are left to move with when you get up. You just move them. Painstakingly. You run half a mile and sleep for two days. Then you make an omelete and sleep again. You don’t plan, you don’t decide how your calves or your latisimus dorsi will move in the world. You move them in the world, and the world moves back against you. You use them. And after weeks of this, when they have returned to their minimal functionality, then you start to do things because they feel good. You start to want again. That 70% of yourself that was motion, that was doing, starts to feel like it can come back in. You dance to old motown in the kitchen. You go for a run and feel windy, not winded. To do this, the muscles have to already work. To already be developed. Only then will they know how, when, where, who to move toward. What to touch. What to hold on to.

And how are you to know what you want to do if your doing-things muscles, the wanting and the building which happen in hands and hip sockets and the small of the back, don’t work yet? You have to give them practice. You have to give them flavors, things between their toes. If you keep them inside, they will starve. There is nothing to want there, only the mind, trying to plan the wanting before it happens. You have to let those sweet muscles out into the chaotic body of the world, go skinny dipping with strangers inside a hurricane and dive off the dock into water you can’t see. You have to give them input, things they might want, might be thrilled by, might despise, so they can learn about desire. So they can give you feedback: yes, this, storm, no, not that, we don’t like fennel, don’t know, try again, not sure about her, not sure about that sound or that swerve in the road.

You go to plant mint in a hurricane. Your senses come, smell the grass underwater and the crushed mint strong in your pocket. Then desire, and then the word. In that order. You start with what the body wants. You give it options, things to smell and rub up against and drown in. And then you listen to the rain on the roof of the new house you are building, with open walls, no corridors, room on the edges of the concrete for the teeth-marks of a verdant chaos you forgot you needed in order even to breathe.