My sister describes to me over the phone how she felt like she had to poop, stuck in the car on the way home from work; in her state, at eight and a half months pregnant, that almost qualifies as a national emergency. At the very least it was a local emergency, local to the driver’s seat of her car and her ass. So, God knows why, she decides to call me. She describes how she couldn’t stand it anymore and crossed her fingers and gently, hesitantly, let out some pressure. “Thank god it was just a fart,” she reflects. She was so relieved. “I’m living on the edge,” she muses, still regaining composure from what must have been a great scare. For those of you who don’t know, as I didn’t until Cheryl clued me in, when you are eight and a half months pregnant you go to the toilet every time you have to fart just in case it’s actually a real life honest to goodness poop trying to get through.
I thought about this for a moment then tried to understand “So what you are telling me is that you had to take a shit so badly that it felt better to fart and risk taking a dump in your pants, in your car and driving the rest of the way home than it did to hold in your poop?” She chuckled, still driving.
As I was beginning to wonder to what did I, in fact, own the pleasure of this strange phone call, Cheryl becomes urgent. “Shit, I have to pee.”
“If you were willing to poop in you car certainly you can pee in it” I tease, dismissing her pregnant urgency.
“Okay, I gotta go, I gotta concentrate.”
“Okay, bye”
“Okay, love you, bye”
“Love you, bye”
And she was gone. Welcome to the third trimester, folks, where finding the location of a bathroom is more important than, well, anything else.
I am doing the sun-gazing for a total of nine months, and this poop story that my sister just told me makes me wonder what my eight and a half month growing pains may look like. Hopefully I won’t be dealing with incontinence, but with changes in my countenance. I am awed by the knowledge that a tiny little entire human being is growing and living and breathing inside my sister. I am even more in awe as I feel the outline of little Charlotte’s head and neck when I touch my sister’s belly. Nine short months ago my sister was just my sister, now she is somebody’s mother, and also huge. The appearance of Charlotte onto the scene, seemingly from nowhere (at least from my point of view) reminds me that so much can happen and change in this short period of time. An entire human can be created from scratch!
I am aware that sun-gazing is not the same as pregnancy, however the nine-month NASA recommended program brings to mind the idea that the sunlight will be gestating inside me and transforming itself and me into something entirely new by the end; something that I give birth to, I guess. I am on one of those journey’s where you can sense there is something larger at work, like the guiding force that is always hiding behind the chaotic harmony of life tips his hand for a second and you can catch a glimpse of the strategies and patterns at work more clearly than usual. I am becoming whole as I, forgive the cliche, let the light shine in. That’s the pattern I’m in right now, and seeing that and knowing that fills me with a type of peace that is also a type of fear because it inevitably means some facet of my life or the foundation of my life is going to be drastically different by the time my experiment is through; that does sound an awful lot like pregnancy.
I’m not even sure I understand fully in what ways exactly I was broken. And I don’t think I need to understand. I broke my wrist once years ago and if the doctor told me I was going to heal I believed I was going to heal. I didn’t need to know the names of the bones that were broken, or how ligaments worked, and I didn’t need to explore the route cause of my fall either, the only thing I needed to do was relax and let the healing take place on its own. The strangest part is that I wouldn’t have even known I was broken and I certainly wouldn’t have declared it in a blog if not for the fact that I am healing now. I can tell the difference, I can see the scars from the breaks, only from here, only by comparison, only now.
I attribute this clarity of self-reflection, and my filterless willingness to vomit it out to the public a direct result of the sun light. I feel it charging me with peace, which in turn marinates into confidence, which eventually is cooked into wholeness and health. I feel fundamental shifts in my being, an overall precipitous drop in my anxiousness and an abundance of tranquility, and I’m barely three weeks pregnant. I can hear my sister now sighing, “just wait until you’re eight and a half months!”
SIDE EFFECTS: The sun was a strain again today, as I still work to regain the conditioning that has diminished during my six days of relentless clouds
BENEFITS: I can still control all my bowel movements and my bladder, sorry Cheryl, but it’s true.
