An architect-designed home is being renovated. The previous owner had lived there ever since I moved here (18 years ago) and apparently died in the last year or so.
There are several more houses on this street closer to town, one of which is a lawyer's office. And then the local Funeral Home is on the corner of State St. and this road, Dougherty.
Make My Healing a Party Everyone Is Invited To
by Sophie Strand from Make Me Good Soil sophiestrand@substack.com |
Healing is hard work. Healing takes dedication. Healing takes commitment. Doctor’s offices are private, fluorescent caves. Curtains divide the ill from each other in hospitals. Sickbeds are sterile, singular. Illness is a sign of weakness and must be hidden from sight. It must be managed and defeated. This is the myth that keeps the chronically ill and the disabled trapped within a life-sapping seriousness. If you are unwell, you shouldn’t be having fun. Fun is for healthy people. You should be working hard to get better, to improve, to fix yourself, so you can participate in the fast-paced world of progress again. Most importantly, you shouldn’t detract from our fun with your messy, complicated body. Hide it, hide your pain and struggle. It’s not invited to the party.
When I first got sick, I deferred things. “I’ll have a real birthday celebration when I’m better”. “I’ll go canoe in Canada when this is better”. “I’ll fall in love when I have a little more strength.” Those with serious illness will recognize from their own narratives the day you were hit with the nauseating realization that you won’t be getting better anytime soon. Is it after the tenth experimental drug fails? After the second birthday passes in bed? Is it when you finally receive the shut-door diagnosis? “There is no cure.” I think it happened the second year, hallucinating on steroids, shuttled back and forth to the hospital as I went in and out of life-threatening allergic reactions. The idea that healing happened behind the curtains, all the mess and anguish cloaked, and then you emerged, butterfly vibrant, even better than before, was making me sadder, sicker. What if I was never better enough to emerge? “I have to start living anyway. I have to start laughing. I have to start doing as much as possible with whatever energy, time, juiciness I have available.”
I was done approaching healing as work. It wasn’t even working. It kept me isolated from the laughter, the joy, and the nutritive relationships that I needed to give my immune system an emotional boost. Healing wasn’t going to happen in a backroom. Or even within my own atomized individuality. It needed to be woven into to Everything: to become a single thread in a dazzling tapestry of other stories. Stories of me falling in love. Stories of me hiking and travelling. Baking Bundt cakes. Hosting potluck storytelling gatherings with friends. Lying in a sheath of river water, watching clouds streak across the aquamarine sky. Leaning out of the fire tower at the top of the mountain, tasting the lemony tang of magnolia blossoms wafting up from the valley below.
My friend Mary Evelyn who also suffers from the same genetic illness as me, shared a helpful insight with me. “I’m beginning to understand that health has very little to do with the body. It has very little to do with disease. Health is the amount of joy you feel in your life.”
More and more I also think of healing as being the amount of connections you can feel in your life. The points of interface. The communal interweaving.
Healing for me isn’t a destination or a well body. It is community. Human and more than human.
Years of chronic illness have delivered me to a cautious mistrust of the clean- up approach to wellness. Minimalism reduces danger. But it also reduces pleasure and joy and mess and relationship.
My body is seasonal and relational. It changes as the plants and people and weather systems shift around and through it. Sometimes it need bitter herbs and ascetism. But often it doesn’t benefit from another elimination diet. Another ten day fast. Often is benefits from maximalism and mess. From delicious food shared with loved ones at a table set with beeswax candles and fresh roses. It needs more microbes, more dirt, more hands kneading the communal dough. It needed to touch and to be touched. To embrace. To run full speed downhill. I needed to use my body for love. For dancing. For joy. I needed to prove to my hands, my arms, my feet, my hips, my belly, my breasts, that they are here for more than just pain and for illness. They are here to experience pleasure and movement. They are here to hold babies and dogs. To hold other people’s sorrow.
Many years before Covid, I began a storytelling gathering as part of the final step in an herbal apprenticeship. We were told to make a promise to the earth to honor the gifts it had given us. I promised to create communities of people who shared herbal knowledge and nontraditional medicine that can’t be pressed static as a dried flower into a book or ordered from the pharmacist. Story medicine that needed to be passed in boats of breath overs dinner table oceans of shared offerings. These gatherings showed me that it wasn’t only physical illness that could be softened by embodied joy and community. Emotional distress was also cushioned and alchemized by communal storytelling and food-sharing. Everyone brought a bottle of wine, a passed-down family dish, a subjectivity flavored by their particular ecosystems and experiences. Topics that typically trigger shame and discomfort were allowed to mellow and move held within the ritual of food sharing and friendship. How do you talk about grief? About abortion? About rape? About terminal illness? You talk about it with flowers, with friends, with champagne, with candlelight, with fresh-baked cookies, with bawdy jokes, with grief-sweetened tears that are allowed to fall and flow into another person’s story, another person’s open hands.
I have a new prayer. I don’t want my healing be work and I don’t want it to be private. I don’t want it to benefit only me. I want it to leak. To overflow.
I want my healing to be a lemon-lit living room with the bay window open, bossanova pulsing from the record player, a new couple swaying in the corner, a pair of friends playfully debating on the dilapidated velvet loveseat. Make my healing the kitchen filled with the scent of a roasting chicken, crackle of rosemary, a child come in the backdoor with a handful of daisies, still dangling roots. Make my healing the strangers stepping outside into the orchard, constellations of fireflies fluxing in the shadows, stars stippled across the inky July sky. Let my healing be their easy intimacy, their first fumbling kiss. Make my healing the group of people seated around the fire in the backyard, trading ghost stories, secretly hoping to summon something miraculous from the gloaming. Make my healing a joy that leaks out of my life into the life of all my loved ones, my family members, my friends. Make my healing contagious and outrageous. Make my healing a party everyone is invited to.
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Thank you for such a timely piece! It hit home for this healing person. Joy here I come!
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