Finding The Door Of The Wound: The Door Of The Body

Part one of a three-part collaborative series from Team 3

Finding the door of the wound: a choose your own adventure

THE DOOR OF THE BODY (

MariJean Elizabeth Wegert

)

THE DOOR OF THE MIND (

Sarah Spurlock

)

THE DOOR OF THE SPIRIT (

Elian M. Ortiz

)

“The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves. “If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

If you’ve been following along, you can feel the longing thrumming up in you like the deep rush of a living spring. Something needs to change. 

You’re watching it happen – around the world, we are mobilizing. We are protesting. We are writing and crying and creating and screaming and refusing and weeping and shapeshifting and rising. 

But, like any transformation, a hesitancy to join the revolution can arise from a myriad of fears – like a rough scar that coils around the fascia where the edges of the knife cut, the resistances that arise from our psyche come from centuries of being forced to cope with our own oppression by hardening our edges. We have to approach our own freedom softly – we have to woo it like a wounded animal.

What follows are three pieces written for just this tale. Like any wound, there is more than one medicine. Because trauma is so often created by the forced powerlessness of the victim, it's often the return of that stolen agency that can create space for healing. Empire has dismembered us, not only from one another, but also from ourselves – divorcing the roles of spirit, body, and mind from their roles as symbiotic forces within our psyches. Our collective healing requires the slow and patient tending and reweaving of the three. 

These pieces are designed to give you the agency to choose your door: perhaps you have been taught that your mind alone can be trusted – so start there. Perhaps you have an intellectual understanding of the dire situations at hand, you want to let the blood of revolution rush to your fingertips; your face. Start there. Perhaps you can feel your spirit orienting you like an ebbing tide; start there. You’ll have to walk through each of these doors in turn eventually, but you can choose where to start.

THE DOOR OF THE BODY:
GRIEF AS AN INVITATION TO THE FEAST

When I started trying to understand why so many of my fellow white friends were quiet about Palestine after October 7, especially as it became clearer and clearer that what unfolded was a calculated, intentional genocide of the Palestinian people, this is what they told me: It hurts too much to look. I feel like if I pay more attention, I’m going to fall apart.

When my friend Addie, who had visited Palestine during her peace studies program, told me about Gaza in 2018, I was in the middle of deconstructing from my fundamentalist evangelical – and closeted Zionist – faith roots, where I was taught that God loved Israel more than the rest of the world and that they were the Good Guys in every story. I was told that whoever protected the nation-state of Israel would be blessed by the God of the Bible, and that whoever opposed it would invoke him as their enemy. What’s more; the existence of Israel as a nation-state had to be protected at all costs because its existence would bring about the second coming of Jesus. 

This is the framework I brought to the conversation. Addie, of course, looked at me, horrified.

“It’s not like that at all,” she said. Then I got schooled.

When she told me the truth – the firsthand, eyewitness experience of someone who had been there – I could hardly believe it, either. When I dug into the historical context of the decades-long apartheid, I discovered that it was just the beginning. The propaganda and villainization of the Palestinian people had gone so deep and was so embedded into the spirits and minds of Westerners, that every inch of resistance was met with the abuser’s tactics on a worldwide scale.

There were a few small cracks, though. Addie told me about one small act of Western solidarity: “Sometimes, Americans in the peace movement go there just to stand at the checkpoints and watch,” she told me. “So that the guards treat Palestinians less brutally. They’re called witnesses,” she said. 

To witness means to look at steadily.

Right now, it hurts to look. 

As Westerners, we have been indoctrinated into a culture that, by its very structure, shields us from the consequences of our own actions. We buy food from the supermarket but don’t see the often brutal means of growing, harvesting, and processing the living beings that we make our bodies out of. We don’t bother to learn about the extractive and exploitative practices that offer us cheap clothes, cars, plastic, and cell phones. 

And we have no stomach to witness pain. We have atrophied spiritual hearts, stomachs, eyes, and ears. We claim to want our world to change – we claim to want to be a part of making it better. 

Until we build our capacity for grief, we will not be able to stomach the kind of internal shifts and external actions necessary for real change.  

I read once, in a college class on short stories: Grief is like a stone in the womb. The phrase haunted me, though I haven’t been able to find the writer since.

But grief is also like bread. There’s something substantive about it. 

In 18th and 19th century Scotland, families who lost loved ones performed the ritual of placing bread on the chest of their dead when they hadn’t had a last confession. After they died, they hired someone called a sin-eater to eat the bread, to symbolically digest the sins of the deceased. The sin-eater was a specific cultural expression of a scapegoat – the sacrificial animal we’re probably familiar with from the stories of the Old Testament Bible who carried the sins of the people, and around which the crucifixion story of Jesus centers.

“Take, eat, this is my body,” he told his disciples in the story of the Last Supper, right before he was arrested and crucified. Growing up as a Christian, I repeated this phrase – take, eat, this is my body – at the communion ritual to remind me of the weight and sacrifice of choosing a path of redemption and recreation. 

What if we saw the invitation to witness as an invitation to a feast? 

What if we started building a practice of looking long and steadily at the pain of the world? 

What if we acknowledged that we are a part of its body, too? That eating our share would nourish us, even if it wasn’t palatable at first? 

What if we accepted the invitation to join the world at the table of grief? 

I am not talking about the circles of sadness that we can eddy around, looping in shallow cycles of pain. Grief is deep. It is hearty, even. “This is the dark bread of the poem,” Mary Oliver wrote in her grieving poem, Flare. 

Grief is the thick dark bread of love, the rich, hollow place where love rushes in. We have to build a stomach for it.

One of the primary ways my body started healing from a years-long autoimmune illness was through animal foods that Western eating habits often discard. I’d been taught that food was “healthy” or “not healthy,” that certain foods were too rich or red, and that the foods I needed to eat were lean. Stringy. Cholesterol-free. From watery, nutrient-leeched plants shipped from faraway places where strong and competent hands and the soil they tended had been exploited to bring me my “health.”

What actually began to nourish my body, though, was the opposite: rich cuts of untrimmed meat and glistening organs like liver and heart. Egg yolks. Broth from heavy center bones full of marrow. Sauerkraut bubbling with microscopic bugs that I ate by the mouthful. Produce from fields unsprayed with chemicals and lingering with probiotic-rich soil. Colostrum and cream from cows down the road from me, processed only by canning it into glass jars which I picked up from the Amish family every week. The family hailed me by name from the fields and gifted me gentle essential oils when I had my second baby.

It was all of these overlooked elements that worked together towards rebuilding my body. Healing wasn’t sanitized and sprayed and juiced from celery. It didn’t result from exotic imports of “miracle foods.”

It grew from the threads of community I wove with my neighbors. With the land. With the teeming cultures in my gut that I tended with fermented food made in the ways of our ancestors before we had factories and refrigerators.

Grief is not scraps, and grief is not sorrow. It is heavy, yes – it hurts at first.  But grief, the bread of it; the marrow of it – pins us to the ground like gravity. 

In a culture that has tried so hard to eject from the pain of the world, to “rise above” or transcend it, grief is the door that brings us back to the earth, reminding us that if we skim all the richness from something without participating in its whole life cycle, we make someone else eat the pain, instead.

We’re invited to the feast. 

“We are all witnessing the consequences of raising our voices,” writes Victoria Swift Rutledge in a recent post on sin-eaters. “Cancel culture has always been real for brown, Black, impoverished, and radical voices who draw attention to that which challenges the established power structure.”

“Let’s allow grief to sharpen our teeth, yea?” she asks. “To harden our molars. To build communities of actual solidarity, global solidarity. There are long traditions of those who imbibe the pain of others, and if the holders get turned away from, we can turn towards each other.” 

While privilege severs us from the consequences of our actions, we can build our tolerance for connection, for truth, for joy –we can watch, and learn, from those who have experienced, and modeled, drawing close to the pain – we can become witnesses, too.

 It’s time to come to the table. It’s time to eat our share. 

Here are a few voices who have been setting rich and nourishing offerings to the table of our humanity. They have been offering invitations from their rich heritage as Black, Brown, queer, and disabled women and femmes. 

Writers like Cole Arther Riley, Adrienne Marie Brown, Dr. Nichole Truesdell, Ismatu Gwendolyn, and Rosio Rosales Meza have all been modeling and sharing their embodied wisdom of grief and powerful voices and decolonial work. Dr. Ayesha Khan and Toi Smith are creating and systematizing new imaginations and drawing people together in the work. And, of course, the dear Palestinians who are risking their lives inside Gaza to share what is happening with the world are teaching the world what it means to live: Hind Koury and Bisan as well as diasporic Palestinians who have been writing, speaking, and advocating tirelessly while watching the genocide of their own people like Jenan Matari, Selma Shawa, and many, many others. 

//Part Two coming on Wednesday