Slowing Poetry: On Learning to Walk and Write in a Changing, Ill Body

My calves ached with a pleasant pain. My hip ached with wrongness. I pulled the water bottle from the hiking backpack and poured some in the pop up bowl for the dog and took a long deep swig for myself.

I looked around the side of the mountain ridge—the thin trail showing how far I’d come, the car below toy-sized and reflecting the sun. I checked the rocks for rattlesnakes and took a seat, careful to tuck my shorts around my legs so my thighs wouldn’t burn in the Wyoming summer heat. Everything ached as I lowered myself, and I assessed each joint and muscle as I sat, trying to sense which pains were the right ones and which ones signaled an autoimmune flare.

In the zippered side pocket I pulled out a small homemade book that listed the name of the hiking trail and the date. I opened to a random page and wrote “You can’t ask a cottonwood about your future. They are too famous for breaking.”. Other pages were already filled will observations on flora, fauna, and the precise nature of the sky’s uncluttered blue this afternoon.

Flipping to a new random page, I wrote “Just when you think yellow won’t happen again, the water gets still enough to hold the sun.” Writing without a plan or order was key to my new process—to make without expectation or even desire. I wanted to be entirely where I was, to notice actively rather than reflectively, to use my body to write and not just write about my body.

I sent my thoughts into my shoulders and knees. I tested each finger joint and curled my toes in my hiking boots with orthopedic inserts. “Yes, your body can still climb as loud as your heart. And yes, it will also ache all night and remind you that you are slow to heal these days.”

I wanted to be entirely where I was, to notice actively rather than reflectively, to use my body to write and not just write about my body.

I tucked the homemade book and pencil into the backpacks small zippered pocket again and watched the dog try to befriend a small lizard before finding a rock and scrubby bush to mark with his own messages. I drink some more water and tilt my face to the sun for a moment, enjoying the overly warm feeling, the sweat on my legs drying to salt I brush off.

My body quieted and hydrated, I sighed and scouted the blazes on boulders still above me, wondering how many more miles my body could comfortably and safely accomplish. My muscles thrilled at the idea of more. My joints suggested caution.

Just to the next view, I thought, and hoisted my pack back up on my shoulders.

The pain began years ago, arriving in my hands first, curling them into claws at first. Then came the needles in my feet, the horrifying first steps of morning that might not support me in standing.

It eased through the day, but before the ease, stairs one at a time, the uselessness of my hands trying to pour a cup of coffee, the whimpering in the shower where my son wouldn’t see.

Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor begins with “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” My passport stamps had once been brief visits, but now I crossed the border each day.

Or perhaps more accurately, I lived in a new country but by the end of the day I could see—so clearly it was like I was there—the kingdom of the well. That kingdom without its organized system of pills and anti-inflammation diets and insomniac nights where I’d cry and try to move my joints and forget the dreams of animals trying to swallow me joint by joint.

I am just one of the fifty million adults in America who live with chronic pain. Diagnosed and medicated, it’s almost easy to forget that my body can still make its pains surface above the drugs at times.

I used to love to push my body to its limits—to conquer mountains, run distances, haul myself up climbing walls, leap from cliffs. But now my body is something new, something strange to me but still capable and in need of different kinds of care and tenderness.

In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank says: “Stories have to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she may be going. Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” Making my writing process involve my body more helped me draw the map with my pained hands, walk the map with my pained feet and hips. My body started to connect its experiences with my life’s story.

My small homemade books didn’t have anything to do with my body at first. My New Year’s resolution was to be more unproductive with my writing. I wanted to figure out what it meant to play again, wanted to let myself experiment without fear of outcome, to let the process itself be beautiful without concerning myself with whether or not the product was beautiful.

One of the most abiding pieces of advice I ever received was: Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions. So I watched YouTube videos and took book arts classes, learning about a paper’s tooth and what a bone folder was for. I bought boxes and bags worth of washi tape, delighting in the erasure potential of my black and white ones, pleasuring in the colorful florals, and rubbing my fingers over the rough glitters.

Each tiny book got its own unique makeover with washi tape, paint markers, and stamps. Even before I scrawled my lines about grasshoppers and waterfalls and clouds, I thought they were lovely and full of so many gorgeous mistakes.

The dog makes it to the top of the ridge before I do, though he doesn’t seem to care much for the view. We can see the lake, the canyon, our campsite, even the herd of wild horses in the distance. The dog is less impressed and finds another rock to mark with a message of his arrival.

I fill his bowl and drink so much my belly starts to ache, though I am still parched somehow. I test my hips and find that they need stretching. I unbuckle my pack, drop it to the rocks, and begin to feel out the aches. The relief of wind on my back, the groan of finding the right stretch and holding it.

One of the most abiding pieces of advice I ever received was: Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions.

The regular afternoon storm is gathering in the distance, but I pull out the journal quickly to write “I love the big beauties too—the dark rain veil making a bride of the mountain,” and “Let’s go be alive like that, like the rattlesnakes making a cursive communion on the road at night.”

Yes, I say out loud. Yes.

All of it still hurting and joyous and messy and unfinished and inexpressibly beautiful. All of it still a little slower than it used to be, more careful, more grateful. Still miraculous.

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Love Prodigal by Traci Brimhall is available via Copper Canyon Press.