lessons from a bedtime banter.
I was laying in the dark next to my smallest child. This nightly ritual, where he nods off to sleep with my body close, is usually a sweet blessing. This night, it was taking awhile, with lots of flopping around and trying to engage me for a chat. Suddenly, he cried out in pain.
“Mama mama, my heel is bleeding!” A sure decoy, I was not taking the bait. I responded curtly with “I don’t feel anything wet”, then back to feigning sleep. 2 breaths later, “I have a blister! It hurts so bad…I need a Band-Aid!”
“But there’s no blood?”
He recalculates. “No, no, I…scratched myself. But it really hurts. I need you to fix it.”
This child has certain privileges with an herbalist as a mom, always at the ready with the helpful plants to soothe and heal. Essentially, he knows how to get me interested. After much persisting about his pain I let my curiosity peak, turned on the headlamp, and took a look. The tiniest scratch was indeed present on his heel, so small that I could barely see it. I turned off the light and flopped back down as he huffed and puffed and then announced into the dark with gusto:
“Mama, you are not taking care of me!”
This statement snapped me to attention, but I kept an even tone and whispered, “That’s because you are a wise body that knows how to take care of yourself.” He finally warbled off to sleep, and I was left in the thick of this question:
Who’s job is it to take care of whom, and to what degree?
Upon waking, no mention of the little in-firmed heal. It was only when he was pulling his socks on that I remembered to ask him how it was feeling.
“Oh that, it’s healed. My body did it all by itself.” And then, after a thoughtful pause, “Isn’t that amazing?”
This is a message we rarely hear, and for good reason: our culture relies on our desire to consume in order to be healthy, happy, and safe. To embody the perspective that we already have everything we need is incredibly threatening to capitalism’s inner workings. Instead we are taught, right down the subconscious level, that we can’t possibly heal without all the external things constantly being waved in our faces.
Take a band-aid for example: made out of plastic (hello big oil), usually dyed with synthetic chemicals and made sticky with who knows what, always wrapped in yet more plastic to make it ‘safe’. Usually, the biggest service band-aids provide is a sense of care offered from another person, a symbol of their love. Do we know we can heal without one? If we are old enough, yes, but at that point the commodity might be deeply entangled with receiving another’s love. This is a light example, but it’s easy to go down the rabbit hole of seeing how consumerism is a parasite on our need for connection and safety. Where else could our sense of connection and safety come from?
We are living through a time where we center fragility and forget what it’s like to be relaxed and confident that our bodies can hold us. For too long, we’ve been spoon fed the narrative that we need someone else to fix us, and in doing so have relinquished our most precious power: our own health. I’m not inviting shame in acknowledging this, or guilt, or even blame on the system that feeds us. All that is a part of the same feedback loop.
Sometimes I like to imagine what I would do if I didn’t have all the things marketed to be well: no pills, no supplements, no band-aids, no masks, no grocery store paying people to shop for me, no herbs even - just to try on a different perspective. What I can feel in this game is the subtle shift of my spine, just slightly, the invigoration of my blood, the balanced tone of my viscera. I think of this as my wei qi, my protective qi, waking up…that stance that we take when we are ready, yet relaxed, for anything. This stance is so important to know, for each of us to sense, because it is how we practice strength - like the long red oaks that seem to reach taller in the face of the coming storm.
I often wonder where we would be (physically as well as mentally) if this was an Rx we centered and practiced, an internal precaution deemed as important as all the external ones.
At the root, our bodies are beautiful expressions of the earth, perfectly reflected in the larger body of the planet. I don’t think we have any idea how intricate, complex, and utterly brilliant this travelling ball of blue-green life truly is. If we did, we’d trust it, and trust ourselves too.