Coming back into our bodies isn’t always the lubricated pleasure bloom therapists and self-help gurus promise. Mostly it burns and prickles and hurts.

We do not bring in priests to exorcise this ghost. Instead, we make it our Holy Spirit. We sacrifice our lives, our time, our money, and our attention at the altar of a body that never existed.

My body was sick, yes. But maybe not in the way I had thought it was. Maybe it was sick of human time. It needed glacial time. Microbial time. Mineral time.

I was ascending, mind-balloon on a string, floating on helium up and out of my body.

A decay sentence.

What happens to the screams we silence?

I look at Western culture and how it has terraformed the world, paving rainforests and marshes and wildflower fields under concrete. I’m struck that the way we live seems like a magnified version of dissociation on a culture-wide scale.

Sometimes the answer is not to problematize our wounding, but to slip through it like a doorway into otherness. Other minds. Other types of anguish. Other animals and insects going extinct.

The way we talk about trauma easily reveals its theological undertones. In fact, the cataphatic impulse to name everything as trauma rearticulates the medieval impulse to circumscribe God through intellectual acrobatics. Just as medieval theologians pored over scripture, seeking God, so we have become paranoid readers of our own bodies, taking any