Blessing for the Body

All you have is your body. An assembly of limbs and a floating skull and a ribcage to hold all that softness.

All you have is your body. Your feet carrying you from threshold to threshold, set, sturdy, asking for no praise.

All you have is your body. Your elbows that slip over holy pages, that hold open doors for the next person and the next. These bony sentries, their slivered tenacity insisting on your place in the world.

All you have is your body. Your knees that bend, bob into bodily praise, then raise you up again, ready to meet God, ready to meet the day.

All you have is your body. Your heart, your first organ that is with you til the last. Your heart, that carries the lessons of accumulated loves – and losses that only scratched it or losses that caused it almost to stop.

Bless your heart’s chambers, all fluid and muscle and flux. Bless your heart’s beat of open and close and open. Bless your heart for how it blooms unabashedly like a peony on the tenth of May, like a hothouse flower that has no memory of the word frost. Bless your wise heart.

Bless your vivid brain, and its many hungers.

Bless your gut, how it is fed by memories that precede you, how it offers up truth and fear and waits for you to decide which is which.

Bless your hands, articulate, angry, gentle. Carrying you into the world

All you have is your holy body.

May it be for you a blessing and a vessel. May you uncover its many truths. May it acquaint you with stricture and with freedom. May you treat it as a beloved. May it move you through darkness and always, again, into light.