The Body’s Knowing

In April 2023, we hosted our first CAMPFIRE gathering at the Virginian: an experiment in reimagining how we gather as community. Our featured conversation partner was Zahan Billimoria, a renowned mountain guide with Exum. “Z” holds numerous mountaineering records, including the fastest ‘link-up’ ski of the south, middle, and grand Tetons (10h 39m, a number that still astounds me). Yet of all the endless things that inspire me about Z and his resumé, it was something he said that evening that has impacted me most lastingly. I asked him if he felt connected to the transcendent in a different way when he’s climbing peaks than when he’s down here in the valley. He paused, then answered,, “No; because my body is a part of nature. Even when I’m training in my garage ‘dojo,’ or sitting here talking to you, I’m still connected to nature — because my body is a part of nature.”

I’ve pondered that assertion so many times. My body is a part of nature, an aspect of this wild and wondrous world. According to the creation poem that begins the book of Genesis, God speaks all things into being — the moon and sun and other stars, mountains and forests, bison and birds and narwhal. And each thing God creates, God calls good. Good is where we start from — is our inheritance as embodied beings, this part of nature.

Yet the goodness of our bodies, and the body’s wisdom, is not something our faith has always celebrated. Over the centuries, many strands within Christian theological tradition have told us our bodies are something to be hidden, tamed, or be ashamed of. Yet our bodies are part of nature — part of that goodness that God breathed into everything.

I wonder what it would look like to recover a sense of love and veneration for our bodies as part of nature — to rely more fully on the instincts and intuitions that our bodies hold, to sink more deeply into our bodies’ sense of knowing. Aristotle said that humans are ‘rational animals.’ And often, I find it’s my relentlessly reeling “rational” mind that gets in the way, creating the little daily dramas that ensnare me. My heart, though — marvelous muscle — knows what to do, which is to say my body does.

This summer, I want to learn to better heed my body’s wisdom, to practice the invitation Mary Oliver extends in a much-beloved poem, “Wild Geese”:

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves."

For our bodies are a part of nature, wise and good: part of this marvelous mystery that is always,

“announcing your place
in the family of things.”

Love,

Travis