Category: Richard Rohr

Physical Therapies

Published on by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments
PT After Heart Surgery

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A few weeks ago, after seeing a doctor about increased soreness in her knee, my wife Mary Lee began a new regimen of physical therapy: quad stretches, hamstring stretches, mini squats, wall sits, looped elastic band hip extensions. These to go with exercises she’s been doing for years to restore movement to her right shoulder. (I like the one where her hands look like frightened spiders scampering up the wall, and another one where she uses a can of Great Northern beans.)

Because I’ve been doing various daily exercises since back surgery in 1977, mornings at the Wile residence resound with creaking bones, tendons rubbing on cartilage, occasional grunts punctuated by yawns and a “meow” or two from our cat, who has taken on the role of personal trainer.

“Faster! Move it, move it!”

Our bedroom looks a bit like Rick’s Sporting Goods, with two sizes of exercise mats, two sizes of weights (in addition to the can of beans), rubber stretch bands, and folding chairs. A treadmill resides in the guest bedroom across the hall. 

Physical therapy after my back fusion was deceptively simple: walk ten miles a day for three months. Every day. Sun, rain, snow, sleet, hail. And since I was operated on at the end of December, I walked through it all. Sometimes in the same day. But you know, I grew to love those walks (Well, Route One got a little boring but at least it was clear after a snowstorm), and I kept walking—maybe not ten miles every day, but often five or six. 

Twenty years later, after bi-lateral hip surgery, my physical therapy involved water exercises; walking back and forth for 30-45 minutes in the shallow end of a pool, pool dumb bells, and gloves that made me look and feel like Aqua-Man. But it worked. On a trip to Florida to visit my parents over school vacation, two months after the surgery, Mary Lee pushed me through Newark Airport in a wheelchair to get to our connecting flight. On our return a week later, after spending most of my time walking the swimming pool, I strode through the same airport feeling like Hercules Unchained. 

That led to yoga, tai-chi, back to walking, this time with my hiking poles that I named Waldo & Henry (To learn why, go to https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2020/02/07/waldo-and-henry/), which led to the hikes and pilgrimages that became the blog you’re reading.

Flash ahead another twenty years: open heart surgery, and more physical therapy at a rehabilitation center, where three times a week for six weeks, I taped on my heart monitor, rode a stationary bike, walked a treadmill, and lifted weights. When the program ended, I bought the treadmill that sits in the guest bedroom (great for watching TED talks, but I still miss those cute nurses at ReHab) and the weights that I use instead of cans of Great Northern Beans.

I don’t do the Kettlebell Squat Swings

But I’m falling apart more quickly these days. Over the last two years I’ve added breathing exercises to help my “moderate” COPD, more stretches to help with the bursitis that seems to have camped out next to both my bionic hips, daily exercises at the computer to ward off Carpel Tunnel and something called Ulna Nerve Entrapment, and weekly sessions with a Feldenkrais instructor.

As Thomas Jefferson said, the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Or in the words of my old PCP, move it or lose it.

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Before Mary Lee and I begin our morning grunting, stretching, creaking, and moaning, we sit in contemplative prayer for twenty minutes, a practice I’ve maintained since my daughter died 35 years ago, when, after raging at God for several years, I decided I needed to listen to what God had to say back. This listening—with my whole body, with all my senses—is what I continue to try to do. As I think about it, this, too, is a kind of physical therapy. 

Starting the day

I’m reading a lot these days about quantum physics and spirituality. As I understand it, quantum physics posits that the universe is conscious, if by “conscious,” one means a system that can communicate or process information and then use this information to organize itself (which is what all those protons, neutrons, and electrons that make up the atoms that make up all matter do). So, mind and body aren’t two separate things but rather two aspects of the same cosmic material. 

Modern writers about spirituality, such as Richard Rohr, Diana Butler Bass, Phillip Clayton, and Ilia Delio, seem to me to propose that this cosmic material, this “consciousness” that resides within me as well as around me, is the incarnational presence of God. So that in meditation, I am trying, as I am when I do my stretches and lift my weights, to reestablish pathways, strengthen relationship with what 12-steppers call a Higher Power. 

Besides meditation, I do other exercises to strengthen my spiritual muscles. My Feldenkrais sessions, focusing on integrating eyes, head, shoulders, ribs, pelvis, legs, and feet to facilitate ease of movement, remind me that one of the great spiritual lessons is that everything is connected. And that my job—my “exercise,” if you will—is to recognize and facilitate these connections.(And for more about the importance of connecting, go to https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2024/02/01/connecting-the-dots/)

One of my character defects that keeps me from connecting is trying to control everything and everybody. So, at the suggestion of my Al Anon sponsor, I’ve been taking Waldo and Henry for walks without having a destination. When I first started doing this, I felt lost. I walked in circles. But as I persisted, I discovered roads in the neighborhood and paths in the woods I’d never noticed before. Which is leading me to try to approach other activities, such as meetings, book readings, and potential confrontations with family and acquaintances with the same curiosity, trying to surrender presumptions, looking for the sacred in situations I’ve always avoided and spiritual teachers in people I’ve always disliked.

Probably more than anything else, it’s the physical act of writing which connects me with the Sacred. The only way I can even begin to understand concepts such as quantum physics and the ideas of those spiritual writers I’ve mentioned is to first put the ideas down in my own words on a yellow legal pad with my bold-ink pen. I can write second/ third/ fourth/ ad infinitum drafts of my blogs on a computer. I can edit on a computer. But first I need to work those pen and paper muscles.

Of course, the ultimate integration of mind and body (and what I’ve been working my pen and paper muscles on for the last eight-plus years) is the pilgrimage. Last week, a friend sent me a recent article in The Guardian about the increasing numbers of people making pilgrimages. (In the early 1980s, for example, the number of people who walked the Camino de Santiago—the most famous of all pilgrimages—was in the low hundreds; last year, the number was 446,000.) I’m delighted that people are finding that this combination of physical and spiritual activity can be healthy, healing, and holy.

It sure is for me.

In a California red wood forest

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A Musical Pilgrimage

Published on by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments

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It’s Saturday, January 28, 1956, and I’m twelve years old sitting comfortably with my family watching “The Dorsey Brothers Stage Show” on TV. Tonight, however, instead of the usual big band number, a young singer with the strange name of Elvis Presley comes on stage in a black shirt and white tie. He’s got shiny hair, sideburns, and a wise-ass smirk on his face. Beating on a white guitar, he half-moans, half-yells, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” and wiggles his hips.

“Good God! What the hell is that?” says my father.

I love it.

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A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a blog by Paul Cannon, an Anglican priest in Australia, called “Songs Lift my Soul,” (http://pvcann.com/2018/04/15/songs-lift-my-soul/). That same week, two of my Facebook friends posted the names of their ten favorite musical albums. I started thinking about the importance of music to my earthly pilgrimage and wondering just what it is that makes music so important to so many of us.

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In high school, I worshipped Elvis and his disciples: Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Carl Perkins, Fats Domino, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Ricky Nelson, Brenda Lee, Wanda Jackson, The Everly Brothers, and Ray Charles. In college I listened to the jazz of Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, and George Shearing, as well as the folk songs of Bob  Dylan, Joan Baez, and Odetta. Rock ‘n roll, jazz, and folk music tapped into my longing for romance and freedom—my need to rebel against the small- town Maine culture I’d grown up in—while at the same time remaining safely wrapped in a security blanket of likeminded peers. In other words, I could be independent and dependent at the same time.

But almost overnight, it seems now, my love of music went from being about the promise of the future to nostalgia for the past. Perhaps because I’m just a little too old to be a Baby Boomer or because growing up in an alcoholic family made me diffident and fearful, I, for all intents and purposes, opted out of the rebellious 60s, choosing the security of marriage and a steady teaching job. For me the Beatles were about how much they reminded me of the rhythm and blues of early Elvis. I never cared for their psychedelic stuff, but I did like the rawness of the last albums, which, along with what became known in the 70s as Outlaw Music—Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Jerry Reed—had that sense of romance and rebellion I remembered from my teenage years.

When I think of the music from the 80s and 90s, I think of my daughter Laurie. I listened to her tapes of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Paul Simon, Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega, and Joan Armatrading not only with my ears, but hers—heard the promise, the passion for change. Laurie was also a self-proclaimed “flower child,” and after I’d divorced and remarried, her interest in the Grateful Dead, Pete Seeger, and the electric Bob Dylan made me feel as if I had finally entered the 60s.

When Laurie died in 1988, everything changed, including my musical tastes. I became obsessed with the requiems of Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, and Britten. I saw how grief can be given a structure, and I later used some of that structure for my novel, Requiem in Stones. My interest in spirituality led me to Elvis’s gospel music and the songs of Leonard Cohen, who along with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon continue to guide me as I age.

I also became more interested in playing music. In my early high school years, even as I’d followed Elvis, I’d also played trombone in a Dixieland band “The Ivy Leaguers.” Later in high school, I’d swapped my trombone for a guitar because of the Kingston Trio, who introduced me to folk songs. I became a member of the “The Fish Factory Trio”:

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During my first teaching job in Woodstock, Vermont, I played guitar and sang Ian and Sylvia songs with “The Faculty Three.” After Laurie’s death I took up the banjo (see https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2016/07/25/joy-and-the-banjo/), the instrument of black slaves and impoverished whites, a sound of sorrow and longing, yet at the same time, joy and gutsiness.

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One reason I don’t think I could exist without music is that both listening to and playing music let me escape for a time what Hamlet called “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Or, put another way, music takes me out of what some of the writers I read call my “small,” or “false” self, leaving behind those anxieties to which I’m usually addicted. At the same time, I actually become more myself. Playing in an old-time string band, I am one of a group of musicians, all playing the same song, and yet, my part is individual; in fact, without the others playing their parts, my part makes no sense. I learn that I am the most authentic me only in relationship to others—what Courage to Change: One Day at a Time in AlAnon, calls “unity in diversity.”

And it’s this synthesis that helps me better understand that while spirituality is discovered in solitude, it is fulfilled in community. “Union differentiates,” wrote priest, philosopher, and paleologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We find our true “personhood,” he said, only by uniting with others.

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But I wonder if music’s almost universal appeal doesn’t go even deeper. As I was writing this blog, I decided to take a break and go for a walk in the woods behind my house. Perhaps because of what I’d been writing, I found myself aware of the music around me—the birds’ various songs; the wind through the trees. I thought of the music from some of my pilgrimages through the years: the Sanctus of sheep bleating at sunset on the island of Iona in Scotland, the dies irae of coyotes’ wailing in Arizona, and the Kyrie eleison of rain and wind through the branches of trees outside my hermitage at Emery House in Massachusetts.

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Feeling my feet tramping through the leaves, I thought of how I have always been drawn to the rhythms of music (which is why I like the later Paul Simon more than the earlier Paul Simon), and how music connects us—well, me at least—to the earth through its tempos: the ebb and flow of tides, the pulsating whistle of the cardinal, the percussion of rain on the roof. In contemplative prayer, I feel the rhythm of my breathing, which sometimes becomes part of a much larger breathing, almost as if someone or something is breathing in me.

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 These days I’m often found, as my wife says, “down the rabbit hole” of You Tube. I look at old videos of my early rock ‘n roll idols—Oh, hey, here’s Fats Domino singing with Ricky Nelson!—reliving my life’s ups and downs. I watch clips from old-time music festivals and artists like John Hartford and Dom Flemons, slowing the videos down as I try to learn “new” old-time tunes. And then, I might watch a lecture by Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating, or Cynthia Bourgeault on spirituality.

They aren’t as different from one other as you might think.

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