Margaret's Bench -- February 2008
“Feet and Pee —
Stories of Attention and Change”
by
Margaret D. McGee
 From
a talk delivered at Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, Port Townsend,
Washington on January 13, 2008.
Today I’m going to talk about feet and pee, in stories of attention and change.
At this time of my life—these middle years — attention, paying attention,
has emerged as a central issue, the subject that keeps coming back—in
conversations, in what I read, and in what I write, whether I’m even aware that
it is, in fact, the work’s underlying theme while I’m writing it.
In the years immediately before and after the publication of my first book,
Stumbling Toward God, I was also writing a variety of short personal essays
centering on incidents in everyday life that carried a special resonance, that
touched heart and spirit, that revealed underlying meaning—or mystery—and hinted
at something larger lying behind the surface of things.
Only after writing a number of those pieces did I even notice: each one carried
a moment of attention—a moment in which that meaning—or mystery—could appear. A
moment in which the presence that “disturbs … with joy” could rise up and make
itself known.
So those disparate personal essays came together in the chapters of my second
book, Sacred Attention, just published, though written over many years.
With so many stories about paying attention under my belt, you’d think I would
be the expert on the subject. You’d think that by now I’d be good at it, would
be in a state of heightened awareness at every waking moment, my whole being
flooded with meaning and enlightenment. And you would be wrong. In fact I’m not
very good at paying attention at all. Usually, I have to be forced into it, as
my stories about feet and pee will show.
I believe that paying attention is my subject in part because it doesn’t
come easily to me—because I do have to work at it. And I know that I’m
not the only one who has trouble focusing these days.
So why is paying attention so hard to do?
The current culture doesn’t help, with packets of information being thrown at us
at high speed from all directions. To pay attention to anything at all, we have
to choose, and then make a real effort to focus on that choice.
My husband, David, and I like to watch sports on television, but we find it hard
to follow the game with all the flashing promos and scrolling text that now
commonly appear during sports programming. Finally, David fashioned a strip of
black vinyl that we can temporarily attach to the bottom of our screen, blocking
out the scrolling text that tells about other games—the games we aren’t
watching. That way, we can have the experience of actually watching this
game.
But I can’t lay all the blame for my lack of attention on contemporary culture.
This issue has been grappled and written about as far back as anyone has written
about life of the spirit. It has always been hard to pay attention, and I think
the deeper reason has to do with reality—with the pain and loss that comes from
facing things as they are—from facing the truth.
And yet, as long as I look only for what I believe should exist, I’m
going to have a lot of difficulty seeing what does exist—with
possibilities, wonders, and even joy unimagined within the confines of my own
expectations.
Which brings me to stories of feet and pee. Feet and pee because they are about
as basic, simple, and earthy as it gets, and because it is in the simple,
ordinary everydayness of life that that the gifts of meaning and
transcendence—gifts from God—can be found in a moment of attention.
I’ll start with pee.
Every work day, I leave my house and take a short walk to a little building on
our property that I use for my work space—my studio. This building is
technically a shed sitting on concrete blocks, but we had it insulated and
wired, and it makes a good work space for me.
No phone. This is good. Also no indoor plumbing, which, during the planning and
finishing of my little studio, didn’t seem so good to me. I’m a big fan of
indoor plumbing. However, hooking the studio up to our water and septic system
would have put us in a whole different category of permits and construction
costs, costs that did not fit in the household budget. So, with pain and regret,
I said farewell to indoor plumbing in the building where I work.
My studio does contain running water of a sort. I bought an old sink from
Waste-Not-Want-Not and had it installed to drain directly into the woods. A
2-gallon plastic container with a little spigot sits on a shelf above the sink,
and I periodically fill the container from a tap in the house.
The studio also contains a small, portable camp toilet. As a
woman-of-a-certain-age, I pee a lot. If I have to run back to the house every
time nature calls, then the whole purpose of the studio is fatally undermined.
This camp toilet has two components. The upper component is the seat, which
includes a water reservoir holding maybe a gallon or two—good for ten or twenty
extremely low-volume flushes achieved by pressing down on a little attached
accordion pump. The bottom section is a small holding tank where the flushed
contents go.
Every weekend, usually on Sunday, I take the camp toilet apart, carry the bottom
section up to the house, dump the contents into a regular toilet, flush, and
then rinse out the tank. I pour in a small amount of household disinfectant and
carry it back down to the studio. If necessary, I add water to the
seat/reservoir. I put the two components back together, and I’m good to go for
another week.
All the time the studio was under construction, I worried about this
system—worried that lugging water out there for daily use would be a pain in the
neck, worried that I wouldn't like messing with my pee.
And then, to my surprise, from the first day of operation, I liked the setup
tremendously, and have liked it ever since.
I don’t deny myself water in the studio, I’m just aware of what I need and use.
That little spigot above the sink is never left running, and every teaspoonful
that comes out of it gets used in one way or another. It turns out that two
gallons of water on a shelf over a sink last much longer than expected—much
longer than any of the gallons that are invisibly pumped from our well through
pipes in the walls of our house, to come out a household faucet and pour down a
drain, out of sight and out of mind. Turns out I don’t have to fill that
container anywhere near as often as I’d feared.
And I’m never tempted to run back to the house just to pee—in fact, I like the
simplicity, the basic, obvious mechanism of my little camp toilet. I carefully
tear off just as much toilet paper as is needed, no more, because more paper is
harder to flush, and too much paper makes the tank hard to clean.
Mysteriously, this practice, this moment of attention to toilet paper, has
expanded, all on its own, to every encounter I have with toilet paper—not out of
a sense of deprivation, or obligation, or even ethics, to be honest, but because
I like the feeling of purpose it gives, the conscious connection between myself
and what I’m doing.
Also, it turns out I don't mind dealing with the contents of the tank on Sunday.
That feels good too. Like I'm taking care of myself. Taking care of my stuff. On
those Sundays when the week’s work has generated a particularly weighty tank,
then, all the while carrying it up to the house and dumping it out, I’m
thinking, “Okay then. Good week. Got something done this week.”
Forced, unwillingly, to focus on water, toilet paper, and pee, now I find myself
in new relationship with all three, and also find inherent—indwelling—in that
relationship, a mysterious presence that disturbs with joy.
Now, on to feet.
It’s a lovely midsummer afternoon. I’m taking a walk with my friend Carolyn.
Carolyn and I are both writers, and we take fairly vigorous 3-4 mile walks,
preferably with some elevation to get the heart pumping. Along the way we talk
about life and work—feeding body, soul, and mind in one efficient hour. So. Here
we are at Ft. Worden, climbing Artillery Hill. Suddenly, I’m taken up short by a
jabbing pain in my right heel and along the bottom of the foot.
Odd. My ankle didn’t twist. It’s not a stone in my shoe. I keep walking.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
I try changing my gait. Put more weight on the outside edge of my foot. On my
toes. On the inside edge of my foot. Anywhere but that painful heel and arch.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
Carolyn sets a brisk pace on these walks. Finally I have to admit to her that
I’m having trouble with my foot. We slow down a bit. Okay, that’s better. We
speed up again.
Ouch, ouch, ouch.
All my life, up to this moment, I have not given my feet a second thought.
Treated them like slaves that exist to do my bidding. Cheap shoes. Crummy arch
support. No stretching before walks. Never had a problem. So what’s happening
now is a big shock. And I think that I’m paying attention to my feet, but
the truth is, I’m still in denial. It’s pain I’m focused on, not feet. I’m even
in denial about the pain: telling myself it’s just temporary. Pretending it
isn’t happening.
Ouch, ouch, ouch.
Finally it’s Carolyn, not me, who says, “You know, we ought to stop. You need to
get off that foot.” So we turned around and slowly walked—I hobbled—back to our
cars, and I drove off into a new world.
At the doctor’s office I learned a new term: plantar fasciitis, and also learned
it was one of the most common conditions he treated these days. Once again, my
generation, the boomers, have all hit the same milestone in the same few years.
Our arches are collapsing in near unison.
He said my case wasn’t very bad and my foot could probably mend on its own. I
might even get away with over-the-counter orthotic inserts rather than the four
hundred dollar custom jobs, provided I follow his instructions, which were
detailed and involved a whole new attitude toward my feet. I happened to have a
massage appointment later that week. After I told the massage therapist about my
new problem, she asked me to wiggle my toes for her. My big toes wiggled, but
the other eight just trembled a little. She said, “Can’t you wiggle all your
toes?”
I dunno. Never thought about it. Guess not.
She placed her finger under my toes and told me to push. A faint, faint
response, four flabby little sausages softly patting her finger. She said,
“Okay, you have muscles. You can do this. Work on your toes every day. Push them
against your finger. Try to pick things up with them. Every day.”
Okay.
In the following days, I spent a shocking amount of money on good quality shoes
and orthotic inserts. Did calf, Achilles tendon, and foot stretches numerous
times a day. Exercised my toes. Never put weight on a bare foot. Gave my
feet the kind of care that they had never received in life. After three weeks of
this, I took my next serious walk. Just one mile, very slight elevation,
moderate pace. No pain. And let me tell you, the endorphins went nuts afterward.
My body wept in relief.
Today, I can wiggle all ten toes, no problem. It’s fun. It’s fun to wiggle your
toes while watching sports on television. Lends a sense of participation to the
event. It’s fun to wiggle my toes during sex. Toe wiggling has enhanced my
marital relations. Who would have thought?
And today I’m back up to the 3 or 4 mile walk with elevation—after stretching
calves, Achilles tendons, toes and arches, of course. And during those walks,
even through good quality athletic shoes and orthotic inserts, my toes grip
the earth! I am a tiger, moving forward, connected to the ground on which I
walk. You know what? It’s great.
By paying attention, I formed a new relationship with my feet, and in that
relationship, found myself again disturbed by joy.
I don’t want to over-analyze these stories—small happenings in the big scheme of
things—ordinary, common, even trivial. And yet we’re told that the flutter of a
butterfly’s wings can and does affect the weather on the other side of the
globe.
For years I've known that I could do much better by the environment by making
different decisions in small ways at home, but it's been hard to get myself to
do it. Didn’t want to think about it. Now, I know that I'm using much less water
and much less toilet paper in the course of a week, without thinking about it
much at all, just by paying attention.
And as long as my feet were ignored slaves and not valued friends, I had no idea
how much fun feet could be.
A prayer can begin with the words, Dear God, and a prayer can begin with a
moment of attention. In a prayer of attention, I become a living isthmus, a
barzakh, between God and the created world. My stories of feet and pee are
stories about prayer, about one way of engaging and conversing with whatever it
is that makes things be. A way that includes both loss and redemption, where
something broken is healed. A way that leads to the place where “we stand in awe
of things that do exist … disturbed [and surprised]… by joy.”
-- Margaret
Notes
The phrases “disturbs with joy” and “we stand in awe of things
that do exist” were taken from the January 13 QUUF service’s responsive reading,
which was adapted from Wordsworth, Watts, and Ouspenski by T. Daniel Gilmore.
The image of being an isthmus or barzakh between God and
the created world is taken from Ibn Àrabī, as explained in a paper titled
“Faith That Works in a Disbelieving World: A Mythic Re-Visioning of Religious
Experience.”by Dr. Norvene Vest, a Benedictine oblate who recently completed her
Ph.D. in Mythology in the tradition of Depth Psychology. Here’s the relevant
excerpt from Dr. Vest’s paper:
The concept of uniting the
passionate imagination with a movement toward God is
foundational to a stream of Sufi mysticism initially
developed by Ibn Àrabī in the eleventh century. In the
transforming work of imagination, Ibn Àrabī conceives
the human being as a kind isthmus, or barzakh, between
God and the created world, transmitting to the created
world the light and truth of God, while also
communicating the twinkling reflections of the created
world back to God. This barzakh, like a metaphor, links
a known to an unknown, uniting two similar but
dissimilar things. The barzakh is neither one nor the
other of the things it links, yet it shares in qualities
of both.
. . .
The lens of imagination offers a way to inform and
direct spiritual passion toward wholeness, serving a
mediating and integrating role for the sensate and the
conceptual, by bringing God’s reality into the world and
vice versa….
[This requires] a kind of dying, a relinquishment of old
certainties and a willingness to trust the living God in
what may seem to be darkness. The new vision does not
offer certainty, but rather invites an ability to live
at ease in an open story, a story that is always
renewing itself, always subject to ambiguity and
creative disorientation. The mythic vision proposed here
is a lively one, fluid and full of surprises. It rests
in the idea that the key to the spiritual life is a kind
of ongoing conversion of heart.
I love the
idea that just as the created world, including me, grows and
changes, God is also growing, changing, and that our action in
the world provides some of the "juice" for that change. This
gives me a feeling of engagement in creation—a sense that I play
a small role in the ongoing epic myth of the cosmos.
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