The Gift of a Broken Arm

I broke my arm on May 2, the salad days of the gardening season. When I finally hacked into the heart of the veg garden yesterday, I found 3-foot bolted spinach, a cloud of dainty yellow flowers floating over my arugula, and radishes nibbled and gnawed by a gangster chipmunk. When spring greens “bolt,” or shoot up flowers to set seed, their tender leaves — the ones we like to eat — turn bitter and mealy. At our house, that means they become bunny food.

It couldn’t have been helped. I do the cooking in my house, and with a cyborg arm bound up in a sling, fingers on my right hand swelled like sausages, there would be no fresh salads. No bending, snipping, sorting, washing, chopping, dressing. No eating, writing, grooming, scratching, typing with dominant right hand. An intimacy set in with the limits of my second-fiddle left hand and arm. Too weak to squeeze the handles of a pruner, not enough control to manage simple, every day tasks that had always been handled by the obliging right side, like buttoning a shirt or untying a knot.

In the seconds after I broke my arm, sitting on the wet asphalt of a playground parking lot, I made a choice. Or rather, I seized a choice for myself. Breaking my arm wasn’t my fault, and it certainly wasn’t what I would have wished for. Time rolled out before me, like a ball of yarn coming undone — the plans for my spring garden, the momentum of a new business, happy hours weeding, all unravelling. Breathe in. Breathe out. What hurts? Breathe in. Breath out. Make a choice.

Some things happen for a reason. Karma. Some things happen for no reason. Lila. There’s no way of knowing which force is at play, so I get to decide what this broken arm means to me. The teachings I had just received from a 10-day yoga training with Coby Kozlowski welled up in my heart. I could feel them like a force, expanding with each breath in. I couldn’t know in that moment — wet bottom, bleeding face, broken arm — what this injury would come to mean to me, but I could claim that choice as my own. And that’s when the seed was planted — I knew a gift was waiting on this journey, and I was determined to find it.

My bunnies are loving their spicy Asian mix, three kinds of arugula, flowering radishes. Sure, I’m disappointed that I didn’t get to share in the bounty. I’ve had some low moments, pregnant with pain, grief and frustration. I’ve had to dodge the occasional prescription for self-abuse from well-meaning folks — It’s a sign! You need to slow down! Pay more attention! Take better care! But I have also been swaddled in the loving kindness of dear friends, bathed and fed by my family, soothed by the haphazard, jubilant, over-the-top bounty of spring. The garden keeps growing whether I tend it or not. My body keeps healing. Breathe in. Breathe out.

So… what does this injury mean to me? What is the gift? I’m not sure yet — I may never be sure. But right now, on this morning, I think the choice itself is the gift.