Poetics of Bruising
"No [one] was ever born who could stop [their] body one moment from changing. 'Body' is the name of a series of changes. As in a river the masses of water are changing before you every moment, and new masses are coming yet taking similar form, so it is with this body."
Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga
This week I had a panic attack, my first one in years. It was after a couple of hours of somatic movement lessons dedicated to unwinding the pattern of anxiety in the body,1 and singing to God about my fear of death. It was brief, over almost as soon as it started. The fear sprang up from old, old tensions being released. To release, the anxiety had to move up and out.
These bruises are slow, so slow to clear. I feel porous, connected to the breath of life and the foundation underpinning my life. No problem, except for the bleeding. I flossed my teeth and my gums bled for minutes. In my panic I thought of rushing to the ER, like I had done a hundred times over two decades. I decided against it. I'm working with a herbalist and an acupuncturist instead. This is not an emergency–I’ve learned to discern those.
A bruise is stagnation after excess motion. It's a misplaced accumulation of spilled life-force, a change in state after insult.2 I learn from bruises by experience rather than about contusions in theory. What’s a welt? Shouldn't it be obvious? Blood, first and foremost, having leaked into the interstitial space outside of blood vessels but still in the body. I've never questioned the blue marks before. I just took them for granted. After a long absence, their appearance now has the quality of an event.
This is a return to an old and familiar place, with a new map in hand. The rusty compass traded for a sextant and a chart of the skies. A bruise is night installed on the body of water.
A bruise is the thunder rolling through valleys. Low and slow, yet sudden. The lightning strike may not have had a witness, but thunder sticks around long enough for all to hear; it is full of stories. I hear lessons about the need for rest, the need to stop running, the need to take a break, the need to cease with this attempt to prove anything to anyone. You're bleeding. What is there to do but staunch it and recuperate?
Bruising is to be heeded as a message, not to be taken lightly. Listen, and the depths of bone's wisdom rise to the surface. Have you ever considered that blood bares its soul in a bruise?
Bones birth blood cells. They take all the nutrients and cook them down into their most essential form. We call this hematopoiesis, the poetry of blood.
Bone marrow creates the agents of oxygenation, actors of immunity—those liquid tissues keeping me alive and fluid. From the deposits of earth and stone carried from food through blood into bone, transmuted in the marrow and spat back out as cells with a clear task to accomplish.
It's a movement: to bruise. An action verb meaning to injure. The new information leaves a mark and takes time to integrate. The purple-blue-green constellation on your skin erupts, sends a clear message: tread with care; what needs to change?
The lesson is learned, its galactic network resorbs into the fabric of the whole self, and the bruise disperses. The injury is merely a call to present-moment immediacy. How much more care is taken when injury could happen at any instant? Operating a table saw, downhill skiing, full-contact sparring, trail running, or shoveling snow off the roof of a barn?
Danger breeds presence. Being at risk asks of me that I pause, stop bouldering and dancing contact improv for now. I cannot chance a fall. Instead, I take each step with a heightened awareness that momentary distraction might bring always more blood to the surface. I’m focusing on Qigong and Yoga.
The bruise isn't an enemy. My immediate tendency is to anger, frustration, rejection. Desire to shun and shout and pretend my blood isn't really seeping to the surface. Hematoma speaks beyond the bounds of the skin, it gestures for attention. It asks for taking care, for soft herbal compresses and long nights of sleep. Oh, does it ever ask for sleep.
The shape of ecchymosis3 draws art injuriously. Abstract depictions of pain in pointillism and watercolour, ink deposits right below the surface leaking through the canvas, asking far too much of the few cells swimming through vessels and capillaries.
The night sky constellates the body and the long dark invites dreams. Oneiric visions of ocean-faring ships, of meals shared with friends, of conflicts arisen and resolved. The bruise is grief and mourning. Compassion, then, is all that remains to enact. Love for those tender veins and channels holding so much life.
It isn't a problem and there isn't a solution. It lives as a testament to itself. There's only waiting—rest and wait, and rest more. Move, stretch, create space in soft places, open a channel and discover what comes through it.
I gave so much attention to black-and-blue this week that other facets of life got drowned out.
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Next time: Earth, Plants, Bones
In medical terms, an insult is the cause of some kind of physical or mental injury. For example, a burn on the skin (the injury) may be the result of a thermal, chemical, radioactive, or electrical event (the insult).
Ecchymosis is the medical term for a bruise