physicality

After he died, there was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin_The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don__ know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.

Corporeal reality is much more rich and precious than we realize. It feels good to have a body, to surge on currents of emotion, to have nerve endings, mitochondria in our cells, tangible focused energy, the embodiment of light _ given a voice.

Physical well-being necessitates listening to what you already know, and then taking it seriously enough to act accordingly. When you wake up and feel the impulse to arch your back, stretch and exhale with a loud sigh, for God__ sake, do it.

It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.

The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.

If I were to believe in God enough to call him a murderer, then I might also believe enough that he, as a spirit, exists beyond death; and therefore only he could do it righteously. For the physical being kills a man and hatefully sends him away, whereas God, the spiritual being, kills a man and lovingly draws him nigh.

I__ drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent__orming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I__ sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us.

That's the crazy thing about Christianity____he idea that the finite can contain the infinite. After all, what is the incarnation if not that? So there's an incredible physicality to the spiritual within the Christian story. There's not this weird sort of __reek separation, where there's a higher spiritual world and a corrupted, bad world of __lesh. It's all one. Because if God chose to have a body, there's a way in which spiritual things are revealed in the physical things that are all around us____read, wine, people, tears, laughter.

This world and everything in it is only temporary; eternity is out there, we swim in it. And within our temporary bodies we carry inside of us eternity. There are but atoms separating us from the everlasting. Merely atoms.

Arousal begins within the mind, then seeps out where fantasy propels physicality.