Visceral.
Solvitur ambulando: It is solved by walking.
~ Attributed to either Diogenes or St. Augustine
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with.
~Carl Jung
There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
I am sitting in a hermitage this cool, cloudy Sunday morning, and it is utterly silent. The damp earth is pushing up an impossible variety of lime-colored leaf and verdant bloom as a thousand squirrels forage diligently. Yesterday, sitting on a warm rock, I watched deer graze, a beefy raccoon scamper, and two long blacksnakes slither purposefully. Bees and birdsong were complemented by a deliciously cool breeze. Such is the re-grounding, re-centering gift of retreat, a gift offered to all but received by few.
If something (or someone) is hinting that a retreat would be timely for you, check out the new personal retreat offerings that Darren and I just created together at The Restored Leader (shameless plug #1).
I only had a vague intuition that I was overdue for retreat, more obvious to Kellie of course, who suggested it last minute while she stayed with her recently-widowed mom. As is my custom, day one is about doing as little as possible—allowing the cares and concerns to flake off my mind and letting the ancient wisdom of the earth apply its healing ministrations to my soul.
What I discovered within the first hours was just how weary and burdened I was by the intensity of change we have recently undergone, a compression of disorienting (albeit good) transitions packed into the last four months: moving homes (twice), changing jobs (twice), a funeral, a wedding, a new grandbaby, a new town. Oh, and my 60th, Kellie’s 60th in a couple weeks, and our 35th anniversary. And all this in the context of national tension and global trauma. Talk about psychic vertigo.
If you too find yourself reeling from recent changes, you’re in good company.
I was literally writing this when I heard a big thump outside my window, looked up, and saw that a squirrel (and the dead branch he had been standing on) had fallen some 50 feet out of a pine tree and landed in the grass underneath!
I stared, wondering how he would fare such a violent blow. He landed on his feet, cat-like, but sat unmoving about 30 seconds. Gingerly, he stretched out one leg and then another, turned slightly and paused another 30 seconds regaining his composure. Then he sat up on his haunches and looked around, still dazed but trying to get his bearings. Ever so gently he walked to the base of the tree from whence he came, and another smaller squirrel came over to greet him.
Then the funniest thing happened: They sort of wrestled around, one hopping playfully on the back of the other and they would tumble. Each time, the larger would pin the smaller on his back, evidently recovering his sensibilities and dominance. But it was like this limbic dance of squirrel healing. Something embedded in mammalian muscle memory.
My core value is meaning-making, and I admit that I generally process meaning from my head center; as a Type Six, I tend to lead with thinking. And while I’m grateful for that center, any one-centered perspective will always be slanted and a bit askew without the more comprehensive wisdom of all three—head, heart, and body.
Which is why Kellie and I are leading a Wisdom Retreat this August (shameless plug #2).
As I walked the awakening forest at St. Francis Springs Prayer Center, my head was useless, the meaning-making tantalizing close but ungraspable. Near but unnamable. “Take a break,” I periodically reassured my anxious mind. “You’re not the only game in town.”
No, it was time for my body to gently asserted its wisdom, bypassing my brain entirely for the day. Even now, I am yet to process the meaning in any way I can really comprehend or transmit; and it’s enough. It’s enough to know that I am held by the Grace embedded in this visceral container we call a body.
Visceral, adj. referencing deep, raw, instinctive emotions or reactions felt in the body rather than through intellect. Gut feelings.
I walked, I sat, I smelled the nascent aromas, I savored sun and breeze, I listened to creek noises, and I walked some more. But I kept returning to one thing: the prayer labyrinth. You already know my love for this embodied intercession [https:www.viningcenter.org/blog-feed/labyrinth], and by the time you read this, Kellie and I plan to be walking perhaps the most famous labyrinth in the world—laid into the stone floor of the immense Cathedral at Chartres, built between 1194 and 1220 outside of Paris.
This weekend, though, I am grateful for the simplicity of rough pavers set into a wooded clearing. As I walk, I’m present to the sensations and emotions and thoughts… but mostly I just move. One way in, lingering pause, one way out. Hands clasped behind, I step slowly, consciously. I walk, and I turn. My feet know what to do. Eleven circuits, 28 switchbacks.
The earliest known record of the Christian prayer labyrinth dates back to 324 at the Basilica of St. Reparatus in Algeria. What is it that the early church glimpsed and then co-crafted with the Spirit to capture such a visceral act of worship? A body-based sensibility that survived millennia only to be lost in the Enlightenment of rationality that skewed Christian practice toward the head for the last 300 years.
I share my embodied weekend with you as a Sacred Story—both the desolations and the consolations. Of all the gifts we share in our formational journeys, Story is perhaps the most fundamental to becoming who we are meant to be. Story lies at the convergence of body, mind, and heart and then becomes the connective tissue that joins one soul to another along the path of life.
I’m grateful we get to share this path together. And you can share it for real in our monthly online gatherings we call Soularium—first Sunday of each month (shameless plug #3).
finding our way home
What does your body want to tell you or do for you today?
takeaway
Be where your feet are.