Meditation: Body in Parts

The individual components of our anatomy define both who we are and also how we experience as well as impact the world.

Your feet. Your roots. They keep you planted on the ground, connected to the Earth. Along with your legs, they make up the majority of your height which alone serves as a powerful indicator of how you are perceived. They perform the Lord's share of your locomotion, carving out the paths and vectors that deliver every experience possible. However, this isn't just a trajectory that brings you in contact with events, it is an object itself, a creation of its own. This is your legacy, your footprints. These limbs define the how and where of your life, and they offer a physical statement to others of your precedence, your existence and a materialized representation of you.

Your hands are sensitive. They perform the physical dialogue your vision wished it could. You greet others with your hands, a touch, a hug, a handshake. You declare your civility with these flippers. They are also the most valuable tool in your chest, as a result, you develop an intimacy with them unlike any other companion in your life. Think of your hands, and you immediately think of you. Look at them - always present before you. When you cannot see them, you still feel them, but you long for their return. In darkness, they are your eyes. Were you to look at yourself in a mirror (where light can be reflected), you will find that looking at your hands in the reflection is a similar experience to looking at the reflection of your eyes. They are known to you, as you are known to them. Your hands prove the reality in the fiction your eyes perceive.

Your mouth, opened or closed, is incredibly versatile. It is your spokesperson, both verbal and non-verbal. You can tell someone that you are happy with words or you can just smile (which actually is a more genuine indicator of how you are). Most energy to feed your body enters through this portal, the central repository for nutrients, which places the mouth at the top of the food chain - it feeds before anyone else. The Alpha gateway broadcasts your voice, the single denominator of your person. Someone can hear your voice without you present, and immediately receive an image of you (the slipperiest and yet most enigmatic part of you) in their mind. You sing songs, praise and erudition through this channel. Your mouth reacts to the world.

Your eyes are the first location anyone will seek in order to intuit your emotions. Your eyes hold a lofty and somewhat snobbishly dominant position in your appearance. They effectuate your experience, porting it to the here, now, real. Through them, all light must pass, otherwise fall under deep suspicion and scrutiny. They tell your mind a story of the world around you - listen to them preach the brightest shimmers to the darkest shadows. They are so powerful and fragile that they are the only thing you hide when you fall into slumber. Everything else remains revealed and exposed. You have a different experience, rather dramatic actually, when you use both as opposed to just one of them - the world moves from flat and narrow to alive and full of depth in complete visual binary stereo. Your eyes are greedy, striving to possess and consume an object, memorizing every fine microscopic detail. Images last in your mind long after the last savory taste of a 5-course meal expires from your palette.

Your ears are your sidekicks. They are perpendicular neighbors to your mighty eyes, pointing in complete right angles to your activity, behaviors and observations - never taking any of it on directly. Your ears deceptively lead you to believe they play a more active, engaged role in your experiences, but rather offer everything you do a crucial harmony. They are passive, the only passive appendage you have, not producing any single output. Strictly absorbing, taking in, standing by, your ears placate the more domineering parts. Despite this, your ears are not mere stepping stones to perception, but in fact the final statement. Once they contribute to the interaction, little can refute their authority.

Your genitalia prescribes the most wicked, torturous and explosive impact on your life, acting as the single most important and symbolic aspect of your body. Without it, you do not get to weigh in on the quality of the human race. They are your singularity, defining your biologic (which comes before your social and cultural) role. Uncontrollable appetites dictate their behavior that none of your other appendages can simulate. They are the greediest (yes, more than even then primordial mouth) of your fractionals, and if customs didn't prevail, you would use them far more than you do now. Due to this heavily-weighted limitation on their purpose, they cause the most vulnerability and struggle. We hide them. We ignore them. We chastise them. We're endlessly fascinated with them. We want to play with them. We want to play with others (we do not have this fixation to play with someone else's eyes, mouth, hands, feet). We drive towards their fulfillment, slowly, quickly, repeatedly, shamefully, boisterously, primally - at our peril, pleasure or pain. They are the only parts that can change shape (and must in order to accomplish their function) without any risk to you. They will come in far less contact with others than any of your other fixtures. They also act as the exit passage for your body's waste, yet, despite the importance of this function, it feels completely secondary. The word genitalia is imbued with erotic, sensual/sexual connotations, sought for by society to contradictorally reinforce and weaken the power they command over us. Your genitalia has been more responsible than anything else for your time spent at this site. The same exact goes for me.