Bum knee

Injuring one’s knee at 62 is not going to build character. It’s just plain stupid.

I stepped up on a log with gusto and lust for life and fell after a wobble of the log transferred to a wobble in my knee.

Here I am. Laid up on my back deck in Montreal while the city vibes with sun and jazz and pools and soccer and picnics in parks and ice coffee sur les terrasses. The FOMO is real even for someone not so prone to it in normal times. But enough self-pity.

How can I keep up my walking practice with an injured knee that I must rest and ice and elevate regularly to bring down the swelling? It leads me to reflect on how relatively few injuries I’ve had as a dancer. I assign this to my rather cautious nature. Reckless I am not. Which might partly explain the lack of virtuosity in my dancing.

I am blessed with some time to rest and reflect. Where will my mind-walks take me?

I notice the incremental daily improvements in mobility. Out of bed, down the hall. Two days ago: hobbling. Today, smoother. With some glitches. And I consider my usual ease of walking. Its simplicity, its essentialness. Walking for me is neutral ground. The physical grounding of my feet and the literal grounding of my thoughts. My ambulation through the world. No pedals, no motor. A swing of a leg bone, pelvis propulsion, print of the foot — heel, ball, toe, press, repeat.

How I look forward to the smooth transfer of weight.

In the meantime, my urban garden after a welcome rain.

As I heal, I can appreciate the (not so) gentle reminder of aging and the eventual deterioration of my mobility. But for now, I feel lucky that it wasn’t worse and that there is the opportunity for a full recovery.

But I do notice that the halting, sometimes painful steps I take translate to halting, unfulfilled thought patterns. It is difficult to see something through when there is no steady base rhythm to accompany me. Does thinking follow a linear stream because walking flows forward along a line? What happens to thoughts when my feet start and stop and turn to sit and rest. I have to go down stairs sideways as I don’t trust my left knee with a full weight transfer. My attention is brought back to the mechanics, the bone structure, the ligaments, the parts of the whole. Difficult to rise above the practical towards the imaginary…

As a firm believer in the body-mind with the body informing the mind at least as much as the other way around, I’m convinced that the particular focus I’m giving to my anatomy feeds my mind and colours the reception of my surrounding landscape. It’s another flow of information. Perhaps on a smaller-scale, but no less important.

As dancers, we might choose to warm up our bodies somatically through breath and humming to stimulate the cells. In guiding our inner awareness to our experiential anatomy, we shine light on new connections between the intimacy of internal spaces and the cosmic scale of external spaces. I relish the idea that, upon my return to an easier walking flow, I can tune into these rich lines of communication to feed my walking.

More to come.