You say goodbye, I say hello

Another week of fascination with the intimate union of body and soul.

This didn't happen to me this week, but how many times has it happened when someone you know, someone you sort-of know, or someone you don't even know waves in your general direction? Your soul screams aloud, "YES!!! YES!!! (with every side-to-side motion), somebody is acknowledging my existence!" You wave back. And then it happens. 1.5 seconds later someone comes up from behind you, really he or she just comes out of nowhere, waving to the initiator of this whole exchange, and proceeds to hug and laugh the day along with the person you so most badly wished would desire to do the same with you.

But we don't acknowledge that. Instead we mumble to ourselves "uh...um" and then pretend to run our fingers through our hair in a "side-to-side" motion, pretending as if this in fact is what we were really doing the entire time. If that other person thought we were waving back at her, well really she's just as wrong as...as...as well, as wrong as we were.

Back to the tag: you say goodbye, I say hello.

Our bodies our not just instruments. My mind doesn't just tell my hand to move back and forth really fast, while simultaneously spreading my fingers apart. It just so happens that this historically conditioned culture that we live in has agreed upon the meaning of this gesture. Sometimes it means, "hello" and at other times "goodbye." Still sometimes it means--when coupled with a facial expression in the "oooh"-formation--"stop" or "no, no, no not right now."

What am I getting at? Body language of course. You all see it. Sometimes we don't always pick up what the other person is "saying"; everything somehow gets lost in translation. And somehow in the Providence of it all, the Lord uses this albeit sometimes clumsy way, to show us that we can't not communicate. Even if we use no words, our bodies at times betray us. How many times have I blushed (ok, ok so I've blushed before. Sheesh, get over it), or how many times have I tried not to cry and boom it hits (geez, would you get off that already? Yeah, so what?)?

The body is at the service of the soul and serves our humility, but also our need for communion. I'd be a wreck if there weren't people in my life that could "read" me despite my acting.

Ah! The unspoken blessings of body language.

-I don't know why [I] say goodbye...