On Embodiment

(excerpt from an essay I'm currently writing)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about embodiment. By embodiment, I’m speaking about what’s tangible, like skin, bones, flesh, and blood. And there are also things like the trees, of course, and the paper products made from the trees, the lakes and the carp that scavenge the murky bottom for food. I’ve never been a fan of the tangibles. Taste, touch, hear, smell, sound. Mostly, I’ve seen them only as limitations or, at the very most, things that must be survived or tolerated.

            I like ideas, concepts, plans, fantasies, and expectations. I’m a big fan of love and and adventure and spirituality. Spirituality, it’s always seemed to me, is the place beyond the concrete. It’s the untouchable, inexplicable, the magic of life. In all probability, this love of the ineffability of things comes from my religious upbringing, where there was a clear distinction made between things of this world and the things of God.

            I certainly don’t want to make it sound like I’m all spiritual and serious. I’m quite the opposite, really. I’m irreverent and inappropriate, and my butt crack hangs out the back of my pants way too often. It’s a problem. The lowrise-pant cut helps my figure, since I’m high-waisted and look like a spider in pants that come up too high, but really it is disastrous when I bend over. But, that kind of makes my point: God, way up over there. Sadly, me and my butt crack, right here. To me, God and butt-cracks seem vastly incongruent.