My foot shattered under the weight of the world

The brokenness of the world is being lived out in my body.

Listen ~ 8 minutes

​One year and 8 months ago I broke my foot. You would think that by now it would be feeling so much better. And yet, recently, it has been feeling a level of pain and anxiety that it didn't even when it was still broken. My ankle is stiff. And it's like my foot is carrying all of the anxieties.


Today at yoga as I sat on the floor while the rest of the folks carried on with Warrior 2, I continued to flow but, leg spread wide, weight off my foot. And just in paying attention to that sense of anxiety rising from that foot I realized something.


In energy work we often talk about what is the underlying metaphoric message that our body is telling us. I broke this foot when we were just about 8 months into the pandemic. When we had believed we were coming out of it and yet a new wave was emerging. And Bill's dementia was more acute. And I had begun to need to coach him more on things, I had to pay attention more as strange things would show up in the water kettle. It was not only as if, it was the case that I was carrying extra burden.


Today as we had hoped by this point, two years plus past when we all first went into isolation. And while the world seems to be opening up again, in some ways there is caution. Some people are masked, some people are not. And certainly Covid is not gone. More and more of my friends are posting images of the two lines showing on their rapid test.


We are not past this. And yet, even as we are not past this we have hit an economic crisis that has not been seen here for so long. Inflation is as high as I can really remember. They talk about the eighties when I was in high school, high inflation. And now again. But at a time when relative incomes have dropped significantly.


And on top of that environmental devastation. This year as the atmospheric river washed out our roads, the heat dome killed wildlife. And we had the coldest freeze that I remember since my childhood here in BC, the South coast where the weather is typically mild. There have been fire, floods. Over 600 people died in that heat dome last summer and then a fire ripped through an entire town burning it to the ground ....


And now war, with Russia invading Ukraine. The world unsure how to respond. Not wanting to escalate the war and yet standing with Ukraine. And while we offer sanctions against Russia it feels a little bit too much like thoughts and prayers as yet another school in America gets shot up by a gunman. And then, again in America, the overturning of Roe vs Wade which guaranteed the rights to access to abortions for people who needed that service and it has been repealed. States are tripping over themselves to ban legal abortion sending women back underground while continuing to show no love and support for actually born children ....


And its as if all of these are coalescing in my foot. The weight, the world, that sense of the stability being taken away. It's like my body is living it out .... It’s like it is sunk into my ankle, into my foot sending waves of nausea through my whole being. Holding the weight of the world through the brokenness of the world ....