in praise of illness.
Last week, after an overly full day of activity, I woke to find my smallest child sick. This one, who is bright and fast and sometimes so loud I need headphones, was suddenly a limp little flower.
The compass that locks into place around illness is clear and immediate for me: slow down, attune to the physical, tend to what’s vital. Bring out the jar of steam herbs to invigorate the shared air. Go out to the tree with turkey tails for broth, to the thyme patch for tea. Let the day be foot baths, warm foods, gua sha, long stories. This is not because I’m afraid of illness, but rather a communicative body deserves a response. I’m not out to change or ‘fix’, just respond to what is being expressed, and model attunement for these young ones. We are more body than anything else, and ignoring what it’s saying seems just plain bizarre, if not dangerous.
To reorganize around someone’s body, not their ambitions (or my own) is quite a shift from the bizarre normalcy of our culture. Normal these days tends to be organizing around the pings and dings of devices and tightly planned, imposed schedules. In contrast, we humans once organized around the curve of the moon, the generous language of songbirds, and our bodies.
. . .
When someone in my family gets sick, I’m secretly almost joyous. Even during a pandemic. Even though I’m not immune to the ‘fear of covid’ either. The real medicine here is the actual illness, not all the herbs and foods and care I respond with. There is a reorienting to the physical that feels so profound - so human – I am instantly connected to all that is current and happening in real time. Here, I’m allowed to linger in the present and let simplicity be medicinal. The medicine is dancing between surrender and response – action and non-action. Being sick is a healthy response to imbalance, and I’d rather look at imbalance straight in the face than carry on for the sake of normalcy.
I think I do that most everywhere in my life – it’s why I heaved myself across the country from my deep home and community: to respond to what’s being communicated from the Earth’s broad body. We are like a billion little worlds orbiting inside the curve of this green blue planet, and the way we each inhabit ourselves really is reflected in how Earth manages our presence. It makes perfect sense that the imbalance we are calling ‘climate crisis’ or ‘bad weather’ is a healthy response to that deep dysymmetry. The earth is as overmedicated as we are.
. . .
Lots of folks these days are writing about how personal choices around ecology don’t matter much in the face of big policy changes that are needed in government after government across the continents. To be honest, I don’t have any big hope in government. I do wonder what would happen if we changed the story from the bottom up – re-spun the tiniest to the biggest tales about how we should live, what we need to do so, and why there’s really no way to exist without exploitation/destruction/control. Just like there’s ‘no way’ to for medicine to exist without harm (the Hippocratic oath is so “out” in allopathic medicine these days).
How about this: we are all keepers of bits of starlight that needs the most profound care and tenderness to survive past our bodies so there’s light for the younger humans we love to see by. And, we are all – even the assholes among us – worthy and deserving of a self-love akin to a mother’s un-afflicted love. We were all once delicate new bodies, adored and cherished by someone. What if we still are – and acted like it? What if the medicine to the biggest imbalances is the same as it is for the smallest ones?
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My little one eventually gets better, and seems older. To physically struggle, especially when we’re little, feels like a ripening, a filling out into our next selves…a shedding of a skin. I tell my child that being sick isn’t something to fear, it’s something to welcome. Then I bring tea, and we count golden leaves as they fly - no longer a part of the trees, belonging now to the breeze and soon, to the soil. I spin some story about the wild journey the leaf takes to become part of the water, the gold in chipmunk’s fir, his own laughter. It’s a long, complex story, but very believable.
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