Marrow of My Mind

I came across this while putting together my memoir. Sometimes, I get deeply intrigued by my own writings that I don’t remember writing It’s from April of 2009 and begins with a quote from St. Augustine. I must’ve been reading Confessions at the time (a book that I did not finish then and did not finish again when I tried it a couple of years ago.)

“O Truth, Truth, how intimately even the very marrow of my mind sighed for you…”

The very marrow of my mind…

bones and sinew, flesh and blood, the marrow of my mind pulpy tissue, slippery fibers of neurons woven in and out, folded wet, layer upon layer in the bowl of skull, dark and secret in secreted juices from lower pumping vessels, all life source in the narrowness of the brainstem…

alone in the womb of itself, hidden and isolated in the belly of the deep, yet, through distant portals, light enters: shape, size, color, depth, and sound enters: high, low, loud, quiet… and aroma enters, sweet, heady, pungent, acrid, smoked, and taste: bitter, tangy, mellow, spiced… and from further moving appendages is transmitted texture, hot, cold, soft, rough, pleasure, pain…

synapse flashing from signals moving, compelling others to continue onward, onward to the wet and hidden source; and all this converted into identity, place and plan.

What can I know of you, oh God, from this?  You are not the blue of a butterfly’s wings, you are not a baby’s murmur, you are not a lilac’s perfume, you are not a strawberry’s juicy meat, you are not the downyness of a pillow upon which I lay my head… You are the creator of these, but none of these… and yet I claim to know of You… but how?  How do the fibers of my brain receive detection of your presence?  How do you enter through the portals of sense or along the pathways of appendages?  You who are most hidden and most secret, You to whom there are no inroads of flesh?  What part of me knows what part of You?

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul and with all your strength…” human brains have received the sound of these words and human hands have put them to paper that my own eyes may read the written forms of the words on the page… am I to know their meaning?  I know the meaning of up and down and left and right, I know the meaning of pleasant and unpleasant, of raw and cooked, of dark and light… but the meaning of knowing, of knowing itself?  How do I know anything?  How am I, oh God, ever to know you?  And yet, I am not told to know you with all my heart, mind, soul and strength, no… rather I am told to love you… to love You… and what is love?  Through what portal does love enter?  What quality does love possess that can be detected and transmitted to the brain?

In my questions, in my wondering and thinking, I am cerebral… and yet, and yet… “even the very marrow of my mind sighs for you…” something in the deep sinews of my mind hungers for you… how it knew that you were to be hungered for, I know not…

© 2025 Christina Chase

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Feature Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash