I lie on a body worker's table. It is many years after having had the disc between C5 and C6 crushed nearly to nothing, paralyzing muscles that lift my arm. The body worker's hands perform angelic voodoo, unearthing a deep sigh from my tissues - I have been fretting without realizing it. Though I have recovered from my paralysis as much as possible, I may never be able to lift my arm properly and continually seek to understand the significance of my injury. A succession of chiropractors and physical therapists has given me clues over the years, all assuring me the injury was too severe to self-inflict, even through the abuse of professional dancing. I must have had an early childhood trauma. Had I been dropped on my head? Been in a car accident getting whiplash? Could it be forceps delivery? My mother says nothing like that ever happened.

I float in ease as the body worker works. The room feels distant, my body gargantuan. My skull falls open and little thoughts skitter into corners like ants from an overturned anthill. Half dreaming, I see a barn on the edge of a field. In the top window is a small boy, his mouth rounding an "ohhhhhhh!" The barn recedes, pulling back, back, back, shrinking like boiled wool around him. He cries. His face and right hand press against the smothering square. As if his woeful diminution is an usher, the veils between worlds momentarily part and I see it. In my neck, in my neck...I see a shape in my neck. It hovers like a filament of smoke. It is an energetic shape - a physical karma, curving delicately. I know, am certain, that I was born with this shape in my neck. As I lay dreamily here, I perceive the invisible shapes that structure and move my life on a subtle strata.

For many years this shape in my neck has been a beacon whispering a beautiful code, waiting for me. But I could not hear it. This is because I have been ensconced in my obsessions. I'm like my dog. She is so passionate. I take her for a walk, putting a noose-like choke chain on her. She darts at flitting birds and inaudible sounds, or lunges at strangers, wagging, yanking and sputtering all at once. I pat her flank reassuringly, apologizing to the passer-by. She almost muddied their clean jeans with her paws. She cannot understand how her love of mud and humans may not be a perfect combination. She just doesn't grasp that we have different value systems.

I look at the shape in my neck as a kind of spiritual choke collar. When I am too rambunctious, or take a huge hunky obvious wrong turn, the Shape, twines inside my vertebrae. It torques them off their axis, nearly snapping me at the head stem.

Eugene O'Neill said, "Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue." I like that - it is so pat, so Christian, so 'original sin'. Yet I was born, apparently, in one piece, all toes, fingers and heads accounted for. The potential of my life stood ready, imprinted in my core. All I had to do was listen and obey a flawless pre-destined flow, but I couldn't resist resisting my destiny and so got injured. But if O'Neill was right, perhaps my destiny was to resist destiny. In this case my injury was designed, inevitable, the outer edge of subtle calligraphy drawn inside my body's energy by a Master Hand containing both my breaking and my mending.

Mostly I think my twisted neck is bait in a love story. It gets me to quiet down inside and feel how luscious I am, how loved. I hush, hush, get beyond my surface senses, and go in to find myself. My Love is waiting there, like for a tryst in an abandoned cloister with walls falling, and Bittersweet vines overtaking.

The body worker has long since left the room. I have been sleeping, without shape. My eyes drift open, sifting a ceiling out of shadows. An edge of blanket grazes my bare throat, lifting then touching as I breathe, the way the cat's tongue licks her kitten clean.