Gratitude Monday: bones, muscles, nerves & ligaments

Last week I came across this video on Twitter.

There is always a reason to enjoy life ❤️
Glory to the heroes 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/9mV6INhpTN

— Oriannalyla 🇺🇦 (@Lyla_lilas) August 9, 2023

Given my recent surgical history, I have to confess that as I watched it, my initial thought was, “These guys for sure are doing their PT exercises and their physical therapists are completely badass.”

Because I understand all too well how much a difference it makes that you do your damned exercises every single day, to keep the muscles and ligaments strong and in alignment to support whatever bone or joint issue you have. (I've come to the realization that I'll have to do my damned exercises every day. Forever.)

And these guys have some issues.

(TBH, the first time I watched, I was so focused on their legs I didn’t even notice the guy on the left has also lost both arms.)

Yet they dance with absolute joy, with whatever limbs, bones, muscles, nerves and ligaments they have left. What an inspiration.

Last week I also had a convo with my yoga instructor about mountain pose: the one with both feet strong on the ground (parallel on the outside edges) and all joints stacked all the way up to the head. Here’s what populates my mind whenever I prepare for mountain pose:

Christopher David, a Navy veteran, doing nothing to provoke federal “law enforcement” thugs at a Black Lives Matter protest in August of 2020. Look at the way he stands as they pummel him with their nightsticks and spray pepper gas on him. (The beating broke bones in his hand, somewhat similar to the fractures I sustained back in April.) That is mountain pose. He held it through the pounding, only turning away when he got the pepper spray blast. The videographer blurred out his hands when he flipped them the bird(s).

When I saw the video of David, I’d only been practicing yoga for less then two months. Perhaps that’s why the image imprinted on my cortex. Certainly, yoga is not meant to incorporate violence or pain, so possibly my bad.

But—as with the Ukrainian amputees—I look to him as inspiration for what a person can endure and restore within the confines of bones, muscles, nerves and ligaments. And I consider these reminders as graces; unasked and unlooked for (in the words of the daily prayer of the Novena to Saint Bartholomew).

And I am grateful.