Learning To Break Elbows

The sticky hot wrapping warping heat draped town I live in was unbearable today.  Weather.com may have reported the temperatures at a mere 105° but the bank temperature read 109° and our car claimed 114°.  Does it really matter once it gets above 105°?  This is our third day in the triple digits.  You can use my skin for a barometer if you like.  It takes about three days of triple digit heat to bring the heat rash on.  I have got it spread all across my neck, in the crooks of my arms, where my bra straps rested, and a little under my boobs.  It is stinging right now. 

We leave for California in two days.  I am so very fortunate that the ladies I work with are going to cover my Friday shift and two days of my trip next week.  There is so much to do and I come to a screeching halt in this kind of heat.  I was upstairs trying to stitch up a pair of pants to wear.  I have no pants to wear and though I tried to buy a pair I couldn't afford this weekend, all I could find was denim.  I don't wear denim.

Today I saw the psychiatrist.  I hate the first meeting with any new psyche doctor.  Nothing makes me feel more exposed, small, shameful, and gross.  Yet it was good too because I now have new prescriptions and a new plan for tackling my mental torture.

This evening, in spite of the oppressive impressive heat, we all went to Kung Fu.  Max asked a mom in the waiting room if she took Kung Fu and when she said "no", he informed her proudly that his mom did.  I may be fat, middle aged, and falling apart, but there is never a moment when a mom doesn't enjoy hearing her child express pride in her.

Tonight we practiced very complex joint locking exercises in which the whole purpose is to rip other people's joints to shreds so that they will stop attacking you.  You learn how to twist them into positions that they can't extricate themselves from and if you were serious you could break wrists, elbows, and fingers.  It seems so strange at first to grasp strangers by the hands and practice graceful fluid movements trying to feel their joints lock- trying to feel that point at which they would beg you to let them go.  But as I practiced the moves I begin to feel I'm a part of some very old language and that's exactly what my teacher starts saying in class.  He describes Kung Fu as a language of the body.  I know about languages. 

Math is a language.  Logic is a language.  Why shouldn't martial arts also be a language in which each movement is a word: some are verbs, some are adjectives, some are possessive, some are subjective...it works, it fits.  I see it so before he says it's so.  I am learning sentences that might save my own life.  I am learning very old sentences and as I am wrapping my hands around other people's wrists and contorting them so that I might possibly find the strenth to break them I am aware that millions of people have made these same motions in a timeless stretch across the universe.

I have to shut my nose, shut my anxiety, shut my rigid sense of body proximity to people I don't know well.  A few years ago and I might have died letting some stranger take my own arms and hands in a cage of movements, in positions that could break my elbows, I would have walked out, ashamed but determined.  I see now that staying means that I get to shake the feeling of powerlessness.  It means that if I can let someone pretend to throw me to the mat I will also have my turn and should it ever be unexpected, the more I know the language the faster I'll be able to spit sentences out in order to keep my own skin from splitting.

Tonight I let my arm be taken, twisted, pulled in, pushed out, and turned.  I watched for the rain in the muscles, I looked for the bending bones, the shifting tides, and I found an exquisite wealth of pretty dance in this maiming killing ritual.  So many people think the most beautiful thing in the world is love.  The love between mother and child.  Between husand and wife.  Between nagging and request. 

It becomes merely the languafe of love.

Good night my blog friends


Note:  I wrote this very late at night and observe that the sentence "Between nagging and request." makes no sense.  We can all conjecture what the hell I meant there.  Your guess is as good as mine.  The heat steals all my reason.