stiff-necked
I am a stiff-necked woman.
I smile as I think it, laying in the floor on an exercise mat that has seen better days, head on a folded beach towel I grabbed from the closet. I count dust bunnies peeking out from their warrens—deep under the TV cabinet, beneath a wild tangle of electrical cords, at the edge of the bookcase, as though, as they tumbled along, they slammed into a wall of knowledge. They look like wispy gunmetal clouds lost in an upside-down sky. Just beneath the recliner, I spy a dead battery that rolled away and hid the other day when I changed out one set for another.
I close my eyes, remembering that I am down here to get better. Before the healing comes the kneeling, the low laying, the uncomfortable perspective on grit. Turning onto my right side (eyes still closed), I bend my knees. I extend my arms out, one atop the other, opening my eyes to line up my hands, finger to finger. I don’t know why, maybe it’s the dust bunny clouds, but the pose makes me think of an airplane wing as seen through an airplane window, a silver fin slicing through brilliant blue. Or, it could be a prayer that begins when I’m flat on my back, that turns into a cruciform life.
The physical therapist calls these exercises open books. Healing (and prevention) will require me to open the book every day, and so many times I’ll lose count. I’m meant to slowly slide my upper arm down the lower one, lift that arm into the air above my head, and then extend it down to the floor behind me, turning my head in sync with the moving arm, twisting my torso while keeping my lower body still. As I said, the prayer, and then the process of slowly opening, and then, the cruciform. Every time I do open books, every time I open The Book, every time it opens me, I feel muscles stretching and releasing all over, some in places I expect, and others in places I never would.
When I mentioned this to the physical therapist, he smiled a little conspiratorially and quietly said, “Everything’s connected.”
Slowly now—I have to tell myself, slow, I draw back my left arm, trying to trace those connections through sensations I feel as I move. It’s impossible, of course. The connections run too deep. The body–the soul, too–isn’t merely layered; it’s woven and intertwined, the systems all working in union, or, as I know all too well, in pain. The hurt in one part causes hurt in the others, or reflects it, which is why I can’t just solve for x. It doesn’t work to play detective. I am reminded: I can’t save myself, no matter what the books say.
I’m stiff-necked, as I said, and quite literally. I’ve made a joke of it, amusing myself by quoting Exodus, when God speaks to Moses about the people of Israel and says, “I have seen these people, and they are a stiff-necked people.”
As a child, I imagined the Israelites with long, rigid necks and pained expressions, always rubbing away their discomfort with one hand. I have been just like that.
My doctor believes that I have fibromyalgia, and he explains my chronic neck and shoulder pain by saying that my body basically freaks out about carrying around the weight of my head, theoretically because something in my brain fails to switch off what would be fairly reasonable anxiety were it not for the inherent strength of the muscles in my upper body. According to my doctor, my body gets mixed up about what it can and can’t handle and then just starts screaming, unnecessarily straining my neck and shoulder muscles until they become chronically stiff and sore. In some sense, it’s a problem with trust. As my muscles become inflamed, they irritate nerve clusters all over. So, I have pain I can’t quite figure out, but of course, that’s why I go to the PT.
When God said that His people were stiff-necked, He used a word that means a lot—hard, heavy, oppressive, stubborn. Elsewhere, God said that His people had a heart of stone instead of a heart of flesh, and that the situation required spiritual surgery. He would give them new hearts. “Circumcise your hearts,” God said, “and be stiff-necked no more.”
The ancient Hebrews often made tangible instead of philosophical comparisons, and for this reason, they often used physical terms to describe spiritual conditions. We understand the radiating pain of inflexible muscles, that a heart of stone is a dead, dysfunctional organ. We understand that problems such as these threaten our lives. They understood the message of God, that He alone had the knowledge and capacity to save them, and they also understood that He’d given them something radical to do in cutting away the layered coverings that trap infections in the heart. We call them walls, but the idea is the same. There is the physical therapist, working my stiff muscles with his own two hands, teaching me what exercises to do, and then there is me, opening The Book, opening my heart, moving from prayer to cruciform.
I would need a new body to find a permanent solution to the problems I have with my neck and shoulders, and one day, I will have one. In the meantime, I do exercises meant to open my chest and change my posture, and I do still more exercises to stretch and warm up all the places in me that have gone stiff and cold. They say that if I try to ignore the problem, things will just get progressively worse as time goes by, and certainly, I have found this to be true.
So instead, I get down here every day, sinking to my knees first—always first to my knees, to get better.
