Notes from an Uncoiled Life

 

Notes from an Uncoiled Life

Douglas Olds

16 November 2020

“Your body is constantly replacing its cells so much so that, every 10 years your entire body has replaced itself.” -AsapScience

 "So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day." -2 Corinthians 4:16

   Conscience is the tide of the soul: it fluxes in times of stress and ebbs in times of satisfaction. Its pangs prolong in times like these. Conscience is a spur to the virtue of recollection wherein we strive to connect the details of our past with hope that it is makes sense of the whole. And that the whole is decent, and if not, recollection spurs us to repent and take steps. 

    Because humans are both embodied and ensouled, we may display our relationship with spirit and soul in a new cellular pattern of muscle memories and metabolic rhythms every decade, giving the (auto-)biographical impression not of an arrow's progress, but rather of a double-helical coiling of maturation--of body at a mirrored remove from soul, but in flux and sympathy with it. [1] What follows is a biographical sketch of how a body consisting of cellular matter manifests its linked polarities and kinematics with soul in decade-spanning, accretive processions. It is not the body that is continuous, but rather it is the soul, though we may be unaware of it.  

    I first began to discern God’s other face during my childhood. Later in adulthood, I learned to discern God in Christ in the faces and mouths of other people, but in my youth, I was enchanted by the other face of God [Ps. 80.3/Gen. 9.13] found in the woods, lakes, snow, and breezes of northern Michigan.

    There I discerned a Spirit bounteously and wonderfully clothed. I fell asleep to bullfrogs calling forth mates with staccatos of muted tubas--and woke to loons trilling in daffy hilarity at first dawn. I would hike a trail among giant white pines, making a final turn toward a lake that emerged shimmering with morning sunlight dappling the turquoise ripples stirred up by the open breeze.  Along the banks of sloshy bogs stood formal elms, maples, and aspens whose quaking leaves matched semaphore with whispers. The air smelled of damp pine and dank mushrooms. The rain that drummed on my bedroom window or tapped the flaps of my tent under the sky brought a tickling freshness to the breeze. On spring afternoons, I would lie on my back in the deep meadow grass and milkweed searching the billowy clouds for the kind of art the sky’s wind makes against the vivid blue. These sensations filled me with a sense of poignancy and awe. As a youth, I was awake to the other face of God, inviting me as by a whistling breeze. I lived inside a privileged child’s enchantment.

    At 10, I became proficient with snow skiing. The whooshing wind was my companion. I rocked my knees and ankles while I sang silently in the pull of the slopes. At 20, I swung tennis rackets matched with the thwops of never-perfectly hit balls and imaged internally through my muscle memory of team sports as I sat in large, state-university bleachers. At 30, I became a fairly adept swimmer which set my neck--where ancient Israelites located the soul--rotating in helical space to enable my gasps. At that point of my life, my body was not in harmony with my soul. As I huffed in the shoulder and neck helices of solitary distance swimming, my mind was diverted by the blur of problem solving interrupted by grievances.

    My life in the body, which I thought was the only reality, dispensed with the desire of the soul, which to me, as for C. S. Lewis, “were in the sharpest conflict... Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless.” 

    My discovery of Christianity revealed the reality of the soul, so that I began to harmonize its expressions with the experience of my body. I found both a place to stand (forth) and a story to understand myself. My onset at 40 of Christian spirituality and discovery was accompanied by a newly developed skill with partner dancing honed on a boat, its micro-balancing married to the wake of my swimmer shoulders and skier knees and ankles so that I began to be conscious of that double helix of body and soul. I communicated to partners through dance the music that bridged the beating of our hearts. Through dance, I soon synchronized hearts with the mother of my children who then added new and gratifying rhythms to my life: trembling fingers wearily grasping post-midnight bottles; to-and-fro lifting and securing of infants in and out of car seats; the gentle exertions of equalizing my efforts with my children’s furrowed-brow initiations of competitiveness. My son would dribble by me for a layup, and I would offer a delayed scale of resistance appropriate to showing what was difficult without squelching his drive. 

    At 50, I settled into a pattern of again hiking through forests and river lands, matching my steps to the plinking, like from a Javanese gamelan, of copper-colored stones percussing under gently rushing currents. As I walked in this music, I felt ever nearer to God.  

    At 60, I’ve become more introverted--and in these troubled times where God's judgment seems close--increasingly and tidally conscious of causing offense to God's favored. I have retired more and more to the cold beaches of northern California, experiencing from my chair in the damp sand the zipper surf caused by the kinematics of shore topography and back and forth angles of incoming and backwashing currents--waves that express my inner life of fear and joy in God: sounding now muffled and fizzing at the shoreline, now booming against the rocks jutting from the headlands.    

    Family built a new world for my soul and body. I began finally to perceive a deeper reality. The body in this "mortal coil" begins, gets lost, gets found, returns to God, and repeats anew this cycle lurching  forward in time. In the process, it discovers and develops and strengthens the soul while solidifying a loving relationship with the Spirit.

    Each decade’s uncoiling of my body’s facilities keeps a connection with my soul's history--with what has gone previous, a transition with continuity--to which is added a corresponding integration of perception and appreciation.  As my stamina and vigor slow, I grow in gratitude for my life in the body, the partner of my soul soon to be disrupted.  I hope that the recoil of its powers will not be matched with an unwinding of my soul's awareness or virtue.  But if unwind I must as I peer toward my 70s, let it be by returning to a childlike docility and gentleness—a body’s trust in the fecund beauty and goodness of the Living God's  pulsing and enveloping sea, land, and sky.

Note:

[1] [Christian anthropology connects body and soul in a linked and eschatologically realized [at the culmination of history] whole (as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 15.44 and as the gospels claim of the resurrected spiritual body of Jesus that came forth from the tomb on Easter). In Christ is the meeting place of soul and body, heaven and earth, God and human. This anthropology of the interlinked and intertwined moiety of soul and matter constituting the Christian self is unlike classical paganism's gnostic philosophy of the incorruptibility and eternity of soul alongside the corruption and eventual cessation of the material.]