Isaiah 21:3 Meaning Therefore My Thighs Are Filled with Anguish

Dukkhā vedanā: Painful feeling Painful feeling is one of three flavors any moment can carry. Word of a far city's ruin arrives and lands in the thighs and the gut before a single thought about it has formed. Feeling of this kind has taken the room already, the way a fever is in the body long before anyone gives it a name, and no amount of reasoning about Babylon loosens the grip on the hips.

Jāti: Birth Birth stands first whenever suffering gets spelled out. Reaching for a woman in labor to describe the anguish pins it to that opening item: coming into being hurts, and the man carrying the message is doubled over as though something were being pushed out through him. Whatever is arriving here, a vision, a war, the end of an age, comes the way any child comes, through a body that has to open.

Salla: The dart The dart is the image for one pain becoming two. Pains seize the body, and then dismay settles on top of the seizing, a second shaft driven into the same wound. The first arrives with the news and cannot be refused; the second is the recoil, the thrashing against what has already happened, and of the two only the second answers to us.

Moha: Bewilderment Bewilderment is the mind gone dark. A watchman is posted to see and to listen, and both offices fail him at once: eyes open on the wall, ears open to the road, and nothing gets through. Shock does this the way smoke fills a room, faculties still working while whatever stands in front goes unregistered. The blindness is in the looking, not in the light.

Saṃvega: The shock that moves you Saṃvega is the jolt that turns a person toward practice. Word that the feast will not outlast the night leaves the body trembling, and trembling can go one of two ways: down onto the floor, or up onto the feet. Dread of this sort has read the situation correctly, since the city that looked permanent is finished by morning, and a fact like that is worth being moved by rather than only floored by.