This Field is my Body Too

by Anne Carson

“Peace is present right here and now, in ourselves and in everything.”

-Thich Nhat Hanh

I was taking a walk in the woods recently, thinking about what it means these days to be in my body. Like lots of people, I’ve been pretty solitary and sedentary for the last couple years. And since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been singularly focused on protecting my body from the virus. This led me to consider my body as separate from nature, which is where I assume viruses come from. During the pandemic I have been placing my body squarely in the category of vulnerable.

But this past fall I experienced some contrast to this perspective. I went to the beach and followed my body’s impulse to swim in the ocean. It was late October, and the water still held remnants of the summer’s warmth. There I felt invulnerable, navigating the heavy shove and chaotic spit of each wave. All it took for me to shift from vulnerable to invulnerable was for me to change my mind. And this was a useful observation for me, because I’ve had a number of reasons across my whole life so far to consider my body as delicate or in need of protection. And if I look clearly at my life, there have been points where I decided not to be vulnerable, and so I wasn’t. This switch is not an option when serious, active illness is in play (I’ve been there too). But even then, I can still take notice of the way I’m conceptualizing my body.

It wasn’t like I began throwing all caution to the wind, though. I still wear a mask in public, and I’m vaccinated and boostered. But my concept of “vulnerable” had me frozen. And if I regard my body as vulnerable or in danger, then it can’t be a field of peace. If my concept of vulnerability was shaped in my mind, then why couldn’t I reshape it? All of life can be vulnerable or hardy, and mysteriously both – a true wilderness. My body, too is a wilderness full of mystery; unknowing. Even so I strive to know so much that my mind is sketching up concepts about how everything is … but those concepts are as unstable as sandcastles.

When I was a child, I was both vulnerable and hardy. I overcame serious illness and bloomed into what I really was – a wild animal. I climbed the holly tree and sat there for hours; I found a cave-like opening in the azalea bushes in the back of the yard and sat there too feeling my entire body sing. In these moments, I was one with the other wild things and felt a peace I wanted to return to again and again.

Recently I was reading a Ken Wilber book on Buddhism when I came across this statement: “Reality looked at through concepts and categories appears as samsara, while the same Reality looked at free of concepts and categories is nirvana. Samsara and nirvana are not-two.” And the Buddha tells us in the Heart Sutra that form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Samsara (the presence of suffering) and nirvana (the absence of suffering) are the same thing. In other words, peace is here now, as Thich Nhat Hanh says – if I can let go of my concepts and categories. And this non-duality applies to everything – because nirvana is possible in everything, every moment, even in this body. If I can be with this body as it is.

So as I took my walk in the woods, I thought about Wilber’s words, and what it means to be “not-two.” My dog and I passed a corn field, now cut down, with dry spent cobs littered about. What popped into my mind was: “This field is my body too.” A few dozen yards later, we accidentally flushed a pileated woodpecker out of some brush next to the trail. I caught the size of the bird from the volume of sound, and the sight of its red head and majestic wings in the corner of my eye. This, too, is my body, I said. And if there is no permanent self, then as I walked, my self was reconstituting with each step – including all of the beings sharing space with me in that moment. Each step, each moment is a field of experience, of sensation; and these fields are my body too.