Fourth List // October 2024

To Move One's Body

The days darken. It is October, Scorpio season, spooky season, hurricane season, election season, the Season of the Witch, the Day of the Dead, the veil between the worlds is thin. Leo has become enthralled with the Halloween archetype of The Ghost. He continues to ask me Mom what’s a ghost even after I have used all of my poet’s tools to try and explain. I keep trying to help him understand even though I’m also desperate for him not to know.

I’ve had a relatively healthy death acceptance practice for most of my life. In my youth, it manifested mostly as some latent Zen Buddhist spiritual inclinations as well as a high degree of risk tolerance bordering on an occasionally life-threatening penchant for thrill seeking. In my twenties, having been placed in close proximity to death itself, my perspective evolved into a true inability to understand why anyone would be overly preoccupied with it. Guys, we’re all gonna die! Get over it! What about life and living?! In my thirties, I developed a relative stoicism about the matter, compassionately detaching (dissociating?) when creatures beloved to me actually perished. I felt above it all, at peace with mortality itself.

But you know what will really heighten one’s sensitivity to the whole mortality thing? Giving birth. Having my body be briefly in service as a portal between Leo’s non-being and being put me very much in touch with the permeability of the membrane that separates those two metaphysical fields and now, almost three years later, I move through the day with a hypervigilant awareness of it — specifically, of the infinite close calls baked into every moment, a multiverse of potential catastrophes. I regard other bodies with an intense consciousness of their tenuous enfleshedness, as though every person were a sort of meaty claymation figurine temporarily animated by the divine spirit, glooping haphazardly around planet earth in relative obliviousness to the uncanny and miraculous fragility of it all.

I will never know the experience of matrescence without the context of a global pandemic, a genocide, the rapid onset of climate catastrophe. Perhaps it goes without saying that the past five years, and in particular the last one, have been defined by bearing witness to the precarity of living in these tender bodies, the myriad ways they can be destroyed, by particles so tiny that they can float on a breath of air, by imperialist forces so massive that they cannot be stopped even by the protests of millions, by an unforeseen disaster striking at a moment’s notice. I have seen such horrors befall bodies that so resemble the body of my son that for a moment I believe I might turn back time by the sheer force of my despair, deleting these horrors not only from my mind but from the annals of history and lived experience, so grotesque and soul-shredding have they been to behold. Flesh separates from bone and spirit is carried away. The threat of loss looms at scales both vast and intimate, and oftentimes I think I fear grief more than I fear death itself. At the time of this writing, I am so filled with desperate gratitude for the wellness of the bodies of the people I love that I urgently want to put each and every one of them under a little glass dome like the rose in Beauty and the Beast, though I suppose that didn’t stop it from wilting, either.

My own personal wilting process seems to be rather nonlinear. My body, now firmly ensconced in what can only be called middle age, is betwixt and between: nose rings and wrinkle creams, the occasional crop top and the occasional stray gray. I can no longer do a backhandspring on the ground, and can’t remember the last time that I did (how many times have we unknowingly done the last of something?!) but I can still do one on a trampoline which gives me an inflated sense of self-confidence in my athleticism, and then I do dumb shit like the other day when I rode a mechanical bull at the Autry Museum Block Party and it tossed me onto the inflated padding underneath where I heard a chorus of cracks in my neck that seemed to herald something terrible and potentially irreparable. In many such moments I realize that the muscle memory is intact, but the muscles.. less so.

Much has been written lately about my generation, the Millennials, the sandwich generation (do they call us that because we love sandwiches? I fucking love sandwiches) arriving at midlife and straddling the extremes of birth and death: considering both child care and elder care needs, financially planning our own living-will-irrevocable-trust-whatever-thing for our dependents while counseling our parents to do the same. It’s funny, identifying as a midlife person now: I was hit on at a bar recently and told the kind man that I was a Married Middle-Aged Mom and it felt… amazing?! And sometimes not so funny, like when Ewen was watching Euphoria during Leo’s newborn night-feeds and we realized that we were the same distance from the insanity of being 18/19 ourselves as we were from from the insanity of Leo being 18/19. YIKES.

Waiting until my late 30’s to have a child was a great decision for me, in particular because I was able to cultivate my Buddhist mindfulness practice in my early 30’s (which I truly recommend to all parents and people everywhere - talk about death acceptance!). But the drawback to this inadvertently late-in-life decision is that my body has now been on the planet for 40 years of very intense and mostly ill-advised physical activity and now has to lift a toddler in-and-out of a carseat every day. MY BACK HURTS, Y’ALL. I want to run and tumble and jump and play with him like the young fit parents in the ball-pit gym place but my musculoskeletal system says Girl: If you want to be here for the long run you need to play the long game. At least stretch first.

And I think I do want to be here for the long run! Despite the awfully bleak reports about what might await us, I do want to stick around and see what happens. Despite “our body politic (being) subject to the same gravitational pull of feminine obsolescence, the uneasiness that swirls like dry autumn leaves around a woman past her childbearing years, the suspicion that anything she may possess of intellectual or economic or sexual potency somehow perverts the natural order of things” I still believe that it is worth investing in my own futurity. I spent much of last June dysphorically self-identifying as the dead husk of an octopus clinging pathetically to an undersea rock, having been evacuated of any meaningful contribution to the world. But now that I’ve emerged from that mental cave and shaken off the last remaining debris of postpartum mood dysfunction I actually see quite clearly that I am, in no uncertain terms, a fucking G at so many types of work and labor that contribute greatly to the wellbeing of humankind and I would very much like the opportunity to continue to participate.

Joanna Newsom sings “Hey hey hey, the end is near. On a good day you can see the end from here.” So true! BUT/AND: on a really good day, I can also see my own grandchildren. And so my death acceptance has been gently replaced by a vested interest in longevity, which I know is not guaranteed.

This month’s list is a catalogue of the ways in which I invest in that longevity. This way, I can just hand it to my doctor at our next appointment when she asks the magic three questions that seem to determine one’s health profile in the Western medical paradigm: Q1. Do you smoke? (A. God no. I mean except that pack a day habit between ages 15 and 22 WHOOPS LOL) Q2. Do you drink? (A. God no, I mean maybe like one drink a month but have you ever tried to parent a toddler while nursing a hangover? I’d rather pour the drink directly into my eyeballs) and Q3. Do you exercise? (Warning: you will be billed $7k for this conversation. Don’t pay it! Never pay a medical bill without negotiating it first! I’m a doctor I know these things.)

Here you go, Doc: an annotated list of the movement-based things I do to try and keep my corporeal form in good working order. I perform some combination of them ideally 2-3x a week, accompanied by a vegetarian diet, approx 8 hours of sleep a night on my new Avocado pillow (thanks Ewen!) and – most crucially - a constant hum of high-frequency neuroticism aka undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorder sublimated beneath a chill exterior that secretly propels my metabolism like a hamster on a wheel who is also neurotic and is also smoking meth. The paragon of health / The fountain of youth!

I’m also cheating and writing this list for accountability because so far this week I’ve done exactly none of these exercisey things. It is really hard to maintain a Fall of Fitness when you also have a toddler wading around every day in the preschool germ cesspool, making it more like the Fall of Flu, or Phlegm, or Fugue States in which I can lift nary a weight greater than my index finger to scroll the Instagram feed of Democracy Now until I gently collapse under the psychic weight of the times.

And yet somehow Caity does Orange Theory workouts multiple times a week! Amrit wakes up at 6am to lift weights! Raky and Nate work with personal trainers! Ewen goes to the gym with his app! My father, who is seventy seven, rides his bike thousands of miles through the wilderness! They execute these regimens faithfully and monogamously but I? I am a promiscuous and inconsistent exerciser, for no other reason than I have found no form of exercise to satisfy all of my needs. If I could bottle the warm-up from certain modern dance classes I took in grad school and attend that class on a regular basis, perhaps fitness monogamy would transpire, but as it stands I cycle through the following list of movement modalities over the course of a given month and, thus far, they are keeping me alive.