Right after Labor Day I took a hard crash on my knee while riding my mountain bike on a trail near Kennicott. I was returning from a glorious day out on the glacier with my friend Denise and her dog Azul. The next day I couldn’t bend my leg at all and I spent the 7 hour drive back towards Anchorage with an ice pack on my knee. My first thought when I lost mobility in my knee was ‘Oh no, I’m starting a serving job in a week!’, where I knew I would constantly be on my feet. So far I have been fine working, but still unable to fully bend my knee almost 2 months later. Of course I don’t have insurance and am currently playing that game, in the event that I may need surgery. At this point I have accepted that I may not do any snowboarding at all this winter. Between this and Gerrit’s scary interlude with staph, I have been putting a lot of energy into healing and ways of staying healthy without relying too much on doctors and hospitals (though they certainly have their place). More than anything, my loss of mobility has made me appreciate so much more all the activities I can do with my body when it is working well. For Gerrit’s infection, I started reading a lot about herbal remedies, and found one of my new favorite books, Prescription for Herbal Healing, by Phyllis A. Balch. Her wealth of knowledge led me into thinking a lot more about food, and how much what we eat can affect all systems in our bodies. Hence The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and The World, comes into play. This book was written by John Robbins, the son of Robbins from Baskin and Robbins, who has seen many members of his family suffer from heart disease. While I was certainly skeptical of buying regular meat at the grocery store before finding this book, now I question whether it is wise to eat meat at all. Today I started reading a book by Gretel Erlich, one of my new favorite authors. A Match to the Heart is about her experience of being struck by lightning out on her Wyoming ranch. One reason I enjoy her writing so much is because she is intimately in tune with nature and the role it plays in the interior lives of humans, and how she applies her Buddhist practice to her experiences. She writes, shortly after being hospitalized for the long term and examining her wounded body,
“How could I have been so uncurious? If I held a match to my heart, would I be able to see its workings, would I know my body the way I know a city, with its internal civilization of chemical messengers, electrical storms, cellular cities in which past, present, and future are contained, would I walk the thousand miles of arterial roadways, branching paths of communication, and coiled tubing for waste and nutrients, would I know where the passion to live and love comes from? It is no wonder we neglect the natural world outside ourselves when we do not have the interest to know the one within.”
I have found that being injured has proposed a rich opportunity not to take health for granted, and to maintain an attitude that promotes health. Sometimes I find that this is an all encompassing challenge, especially when I turn my computer on everyday to CommonDreams.org, and am overwhelmed by the tragedy of the human condition in so many places on the planet. Some days it affects me more than others, and again and again I return to the fact that my own wellness can only make a positive contribution to the state of the world.
That is a beautiful quote.
I’ve been in a similar place lately, because I’m finding that pregnancy also changes one’s attitude toward the body, because suddenly everything my body does matters, whether it’s wildly fascinating or vaguely distressing (mostly, it’s wildly fascinating, and every small change demands my awed attention).
This shift in perspective makes me appreciate how little I regard my body under normal circumstances, and how easy it is to take for granted the astonishing complex system that keeps me alive.
Hello dear Sarah.
Developing an active relationship with the remarkable world of mushrooms can contribute to continuing health. As an introduction I suggest reading Mycelium Running, by Paul Stamets. He describes the place of fungi in the web of life and how we may use their powers to heal ourselves and the planet. There is a chapter which describes species of mushrooms and their medicinal effects. After cancer treatment, I decided to grow and gather medicinal mushrooms again and so took another seminar from Paul Stamets. I had taken two of them about 15 years ago. It is amazing what has been learned and developed since then. Oyster mushrooms will eat the oil and pcbs out of contaminated soil. Chemicals from turkey tail mushrooms are used as a registered anti-cancer drug in Japan. Cordyceps can be used to eliminate termite infestation and increase the vigor of blood flow in the human body…..
I like to gather medicinal mushrooms as well as grow them. It has a spiritual benefit.
If you send me your address, I’ll send you apples.
Love,
Lance
And have you read Michael Pollans’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma?” That fascinating book certainly focussed my attitudes about food and health.
It’s good for me to be reminded about how important it is to take care of our bodies… I go through big time phases with this one. It’s interesting that you are questioning meat-eating while I, being in South America, have actually started eating meat sometimes after 10 years of vegetarianism! I don’t know if it’s such a good idea… but it’s much more difficult to be vegetarian here than at home. I hope your knee heals well on its own, and thanks for the beautiful reminder about how crucial the health of our bodies is to keep up a full and happy life.