Connections Smooth and Strong Like Silk (Tom VandeStadt)
Connections Smooth and Strong Like Silk
Silk-Reeling
Pain drove me into Qigong. Chronic pain in numerous joints, tendons, and muscles. I’ve suffered from chronic stress and anxiety since I was a young child, and for most of my life I’ve coped with it by pushing my body to the point of exhaustion and pain. First it was long-distance running, until painful recurring injuries made me quit. Then it was cycling and weight-lifting, which led to a whole new array of over-use injuries. Yet if I didn’t kill myself on the road or in the gym five or six days a week, I couldn’t sleep, concentrate, sit still, think straight, or string a coherent sentence together. I felt sadness and anger, fear and dread.
A year-and-a-half ago, I could hardly move my right arm because my right shoulder was so stiff and immobile. And I could barely move my head because my neck felt like a bunch of dried-out rubber bands stretched way too tight. All day, all night, the pain drove me crazy. I discovered Nick Loffree’s Qigong videos, and following his movements helped me relax and it relieved my pain. Instead of injuring my body to cope with my mind, I began healing the relationship between my mind and body, and both felt better.
In one of Nick’s videos, he says Qigong is about finding connection, balance and harmony, here. That’s a great spiritual vow—to find connection, balance and harmony, here. In another, he describes how Qigong relaxes and restores our body’s connective tissue and fascia, and how movements called silk-reeling make our connective tissue smooth and strong like silk. That’s a great vow too—restoring connective tissue, making that which holds everything together smooth and strong like silk.
The connective tissue that holds our body together is physical tissue. But connective tissue is also an apt metaphor for any element, relationship, or process that connects this to that, you to me, me to my body, us to earth. They’re the biological connections in biospheres, social connections in societies, emotional connections in relationships, cultural connections in cultures. They include the connections between mind and body, thought and feeling, human and nature. And on and on. Everything is connected to everything else, and it’s connective tissue that connects it all.
This resonates with Jeremy Lent’s work. Drawing on contemporary systems and complexity science, ancient Chinese philosophy and Indigenous wisdom, he describes how everyone and everything exists as a distinct entity only by virtue of the countless relationships and processes that create them and connect them to everyone and everything else. In this non-dualistic understanding, the One manifests as the many, and the many are connected as the One. As Lent emphasizes in his work, “the way things connect are frequently more important than the things themselves.” This observation in no way devalues the importance of any particular thing or person, but rather emphasizes the reality that relationships are the first principle and the very foundation of all that exists. As theologian Carter Heyward put it, “in the beginning is the relationship.”
These days, lots of people like the term spiritual but not religious, and I get that. But it seems to me that spirituality is by nature religious. Recall the Latin roots of the word religion: to bind fast or hold together (ligare) again (re). Religion is thus the practice of restoring damaged or severed connective tissue. As one of my spiritual mentors once told me: “if your spiritual practice isn’t making your relationships healthier, there’s something awry with your spiritual practice.” If your spirituality isn’t restoring connective tissue, if it isn’t religious, something is off.
Here's one thing I’ve learned the hard way, the painful way: living life out-of-balance and out-of-harmony damages connective tissue, and damaged connective tissue throws life out-of-balance and into disharmony. The religious imperative, as I’m discovering anew, is to restore, strengthen, and make smooth the tissue that connects, and to find balance and harmony, here. That’s the daily vow, the daily practice.
Silk-Reeled
Since early spring, my wife, Robin, and I have been sharing the backyard with a family of foxes—mom, dad, and three pups. They started piling out of their den as the last winter snow melted along the creek-bed behind our house, the pups chasing each other and rough-housing for hours at a time, the parents keeping close watch and occasionally joining the fray. When the pups got a bit older, mom and dad began leaving them by themselves to play in the yard while they went hunting. Robin and I couldn’t stop watching these wild-eyed little dogs with their red bushy tails and toothy grins as they zipped back and forth across the yard and pounced on each other from the wood pile. Now, as spring turns into summer, the whole fox family is venturing further afield during the day, so we don’t see them as often. But every now and then, we see them relaxing in the yard as the sun sets or hear them calling out from night’s darkness.
Robin read that foxes maintain the same den for multiple generations. So we both wondered, for how many generations have mom and dad fox’s ancestors, and now their children’s, lived along the creek behind our house? I bet their ancestors lived here before our house was built. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that their ancestors lived here amidst the people of the Creek Nation before the oil barons and Sooners invaded with their concept of private property and declared this land to be the State of Oklahoma. However long it has been, I have no doubt that the fox’s ancestral roots sink far deeper into the land than do mine, and that their intimacy with the land is far greater than mine. Which begs the question, who’s yard is it anyway?
According to the State of Oklahoma, Robin and I own the land, its our private property, the yard belongs to us. But if the fox’s ancestors lived on this land before the State of Oklahoma imposed itself, then the land is just as much the fox’s as it is ours, even more so. And even if the foxes moved in just six months ago, the same time we did, it is still as much their land as it is ours.
The foxes demolish the conventional conceit of private property—this land is my land, my backyard—as well as the way most people typically conceive of what belongs to who and who belongs to what. This land doesn’t belong to me at all, or to the foxes for that matter. We belong to the land, which has been here far longer than either foxes or humans have lived upon it. The foxes also challenge habitual notions of who’s family and who’s not, reminding me to trace back not only their ancestry but my own, all the way back to the common ancestors that the foxes and I both share in this single family called Life. Which means we’re kin. And what Robin and I have been enjoying all spring is a family reunion. On a shared little patch of land that Mother Earth is sharing with Robin, the foxes, and me. Which is only natural, for as Lakota scholar and psychotherapist Martin Brokenleg notes, “sharing is just what relatives do.”
Tom & Robin’s fox pups.
As I reflect on how I’ve experienced renewed connections through kinship, belonging, and sharing over the past several months, I realize that Mother Earth has been reeling me with Her own silk-reeling capacities. She too practices Qigong to make the connections in her body smooth and strong, and I’m part of Her body.
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Tom VandeStadt is co-founder of AllCreation and a former pastor in the United Church of Christ, and lead editor for our Summer Solstice 2022 collection, Restoring Connective Tissue. Tom came up with the metaphor, "Restoring Connective Tissue," via his healing journey into Qigong this year. Tom is currently restoring the land on which he lives to an urban wildlife refuge and volunteering as a citizen forester in Tusla, OK. He’s picture here with his buddy, Hastings.
This article is one of the keynote features from our Summer 2022 collection, Restoring Connective Tissue.
