THE BODY IS GOOD

“The Body is good. Listen to what it tells you.”
- Thomas Merton

You might not want to hear the thoughts in my head that I woke up with this morning. You can probably guess and share your version of them. Between the virus, politics, financial challenges, and the millions of people suffering world-wide; it is easy to fall into some level of hopelessness.

My mother-in-law, Cherry Harper, slept over last night and she woke up chirping happily. I said to my wife, Julie, “I want some of what she’s having.”

Then I went to make coffee, wishing for some relief from the dark clouds. Drinking our coffee, Cherry asked me to find something for her to read as she’d finished her New Yorker yesterday.

Having run a bookstore years ago, I do love it when people ask me for book recommendations. For Cherry, I thought, these need to be with large enough type, maybe some pictures, and texts appealing to her unique imagination.

So, as I was picking out a few beauties, I opened up one that I hadn’t fully read in years, “A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton.” In the preface I read its quote from Merton, “The body is good”, he said, “Listen to what it tells you.”

And at that moment and with that invitation, I listened to what my body was telling me. And it said I was alive and fine. Obviously my hopelessness stemmed from my thought and feelings. And I felt a deep relief watching the thoughts in my head come and go, my emotions as well, but the locus of my body is more enduring and more secure than the comings and going of thought or emotion.

But bodies too will come and go. Perhaps that makes them, and their accompanying thoughts and feelings, even more precious and valued.

If anything, the gift of this life that we have the privilege of listening to overrides everything else. And perhaps then we are not even listening to the body: I’m sure Merton would have agreed with William Blake

“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”

So when we listen to the body closely, maybe when we listen to anything closely with ears, eyes and hearts wide open, we are listening as well to the soul.

p.s. the other books I chose: The Family of Man, Keep Going - Austin Kleon, Life in the Bones, Babar and Father Christmas, Albrecht Dürer: The Landscapes and Water-Colours.