Every eating day, the body has a big task. It is the most sophisticated food processor imaginable. Blood rushes, the brain signals, the muscles squeeze and churn. There is food to be deconstructed, transformed and mostly sloughed. It is a very full time job. In fact, every moment while this complex task is happening, it is a challenge to think, to compute, to read, to collect ones thoughts; as evidenced after lunch at work.
Fasting is the most counter-intuitive, unnatural, stern, delicate thing one can do to their body. It is a slow and painful pulling the plug on your food processor. Headaches begin shouting, where is my food? (loudly for sugar eaters). The whole body is slowly and unwillingly going into stasis. It is literally pulling away down from its primary activity.
But as the processing of food decreases many, many, many things escalate. By day 12, you can hear as never before. You can smell a pickle, a tic-tac, dirty sox and, mostly, bad breath as never before. The feel of your blanket is articulated; scratchy or soft. And feeling is now far beyond fingertips; as reception is amplified through one’s entire body and some radiating distance around it. Clumsy, shrill, insensitive actions are now razors that cannot be explained, as even explaining it is too hard. Such a statement, any self-serving statement is too painful to one’s conscience.
That is all that is left now - the body has fallen asleep and the spirit is fully awake. Possibly one’s spirit is always as awake but the shouter, the stumbler, the thinker, the food processor is now asleep. Tread softly around fasters, not just because they hear and feel as never before but because they are awake.
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