The Body
Broken
My sick body is still good. She is still me. She is still wise and strong. My female body—to which others believe they are entitled—is still my home. She is still my power. Our stressed and strained bodies are waiting for us to return to them.
Life, abundantly: on everyday Easters, resurrection, and time travel
Octavia Butler said God is Change. She also said our destiny is to take root among the stars. Did she know back then that we are rooted in the stars at a molecular level, made up of remnants of explosions at the universe’s birth?
Every Moment Grace to Me
The medicine that saved my life was no longer saving me, and so the darkness came. The summer passed. Now I am in the in-between...I am in the not-knowing.
Faith and Femininity
When I watched my ponytail fall to the floor, I was surprised by the lurch in my stomach. The definite markings of my femininity would soon be swept into the forest, leaving uncertainty: How would I embody femininity now that I had chosen to withdraw from traditional feminine expectations?
Rebuilding My Life: Making Sense of Burnout and Depression
After 14 years of teaching, I finally decided that it was time for me to leave the profession. A few days after I handed in my resignation, I broke down. I didn't return to work again. Since then, I have been trying to function daily with a body and mind that is challenged by limitations, pain, and struggle.
For the Faint of Heart
The light that emanates from the heart is not likened to the breath of ripe plums or the fire of life. The heart’s job is steady, caged and bloody. To see the heart’s work, one must hold an elite membership, must be willing to cut and pull back the flesh.
How to Love Your Ugly Feet
Against your white wood ceiling, your feet and ankles framed in the dark denim, there’s a little beauty. This is strange because your feet are the last thing on your body you’d acknowledge as beautiful....they tell you, We carry you. We will keep carrying you.
Sacred Spaces
Uncertainty remains. My womb may or may not be empty. I think of all the women who’ve sat on the toilet over the years, imagining that sacred space inside of them. Hoping one way. Hoping another.
To Stop and Consider What it Means
Someone once told me that when you bite your nails, it means something. It means something bad. That every time you stick your fingers in your mouth, you’re not just enjoying the chewiness of your flesh, the clean peel of the skin, the crisp cut of your nail that clicks down with your teeth.
It Is This by Craig Reinbold
I would charge that tree at sixty miles per hour, the following curve rated for thirty-five. Headed home after school, in the after-practice gloam, in the dark after work—to turn, or not to turn? That was the question. It was an option. Something to consider. I suspect most of us don’t think of this as a decision, per se, but it is. Every day, we decide, even if for most of us the answer has become reflex.
The Blessing and Burden of Knowledge
Do I enjoy having this knowledge about myself? The knowledge that I have anxiety and another bout of depression could be waiting a few months down the road? No, I can’t say that I do....However, knowing that I will eventually have a good day and I will come out of my depression has steadied me.
You Must Change Your Life
I must change my life, I thought. Is this what Rilke meant? That I should “get healthy?” I should eat better, drink better? I jumped to this conclusion in the aisle at my grocery store.
Chronic Illness: The Power of Silence
For the next several months I watched my own silence as though I had no power over it. I didn’t tell my boyfriend, though it might have been relevant to our conversations about getting married. I didn’t tell my mother back home, or anyone I worked with. I cut my foot fetching water, bled on the front steps, and said nothing to my sisters as they helped me clean it up.
The Physicality of Things
I’ve spent much of my adulthood astonished by what I was supposed to learn in school but didn’t or forgot. The earth’s mantle, stardust and the miraculous heart, which pumps two thousand gallons of blood every day. Did God make me forgetful of the body and the earth or is forgetting my sin, a feature of the fall?
The Anatomy of Aging (or, The Best Year Ever!)
In about eight months, I’ll turn fifty. I didn’t think it bothered me all that much. Aging and the ascending number on the pull-down menus were just a nuisance more than anything else but this past year I’ve been noticing the ticking clock, the changing calendar.
Embracing the Body and What the Body Knows
ALL THAT HE HAD MADE (all) was very good. These are not complicated words, and yet for many centuries, it seems, we have failed to receive them. Cautioned by New Testament exhortations, we’ve assumed the Genesis writer’s generosity and inclusion of every part of creation to be poetic device, quietly maintaining that...
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.