Root Canals and Holy Company

01.29.09
I laid back in my dentist's chair this afternoon and opened my mouth wide.
Needles, drills and files all took their turns destroying and rebuilding a bad tooth. I felt nothing. I took no part in the process.

In fact, I had been given so much anesthesia that I was numb from my jaw bone, all the way up into my ear. On my way out the door, he told me that I wouldn't experience much more pain after it wore off, but he proceeded to write me a prescription for Vicodin, "just in case."

And as my numb self walked out of the building, my mind wandered to a time, back when the full affect of pain would have been felt, accepted, and coped with. Not only dental pains, but birth pains, travel pains, sickness pains, depression pains, surgery pains. We no longer have to feel these things in their fullness. We expect numbing comfort. We do not often have to consider in our spirits how to sit in the discomfort and bear its fullness.

And I have to wonder...
Are we better off for it, or worse?

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I have been forgetting to consult the mirror lately.
I didn't even realize until a few days ago.
It's weird how certain life experiences can bring you so inside yourself that you forget that there is a self you wear on the outside, too.
Who knows, I may have looked like this for the past couple of weeks:

But you would tell me if I did...right?
I should've taken a hint when one of my students guessed that I was 61.
"Hmm. Close..."

On top of everything...I have a cold. Just a little baby one. But still, a cold.
I couldn't sleep last night.
Even with the rain outside (usually works like a charm).
My skin was burning and my mind was whirling.
But I'm good today.
Stable for the moment.
The window shows me wet swirling snow outside this morning.
And I am warmly typing away at my indoor desk.
The world shows me unimaginable loss and grief.
And I am contentedly settled in my center.
Not numb, but rather holding up all of the pain in the light of Alpha and Omega.
It was a fight to find my center, and a very counter-intuitive one at that.
My anxiety tends to whisper these ideas in my ear:
Keep busy, keep occupied, keep moving.
If you stay still, you will be crushed by emotions.
When I really stop to think about it,
it's weird how much fear I associate with stillness...and emotion.
Weary of movements that never manifest into much of anything,

I let myself rest.
And find that I am not alone, after all.

Owning and bearing the fullness of my whole heart, I unfold in the company of these words, uttered by a sister long before my time:
"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well..." -Julian of Norwich