medicine stories
a container, a practice, a conversation
Hello dear ones who find yourselves here (and how grateful I am for that),
I am starting a newsletter, an idea that has spent many, many moons gathering force in order to be birthed in this way. As I write this I am in a period of transition and upheaval, uncertain where and how I will make my home in the coming months, a reality that has so often been the norm for me over the past few years for reasons I’m sure I’ll share in time. Another move, a breaking of ties and a shifting of responsibilities and I find myself here, in the chasm of the in-between, equal parts daunting and pregnant with potential.
In the oscillations of change, in which we are asked to constantly redefine ourselves in relation to our environment, so much is dredged up from the depths of our innermost waters to be witnessed and named. We are asked to meet whatever vulnerable core remains when outward defining forces in our lives are stripped away: jobs, relationships, homes.
As a sensitive being with a mind and nervous system prone to fear, I have always found transitions to be overwhelming, clinging desperately to external stability and familiarity for a sense of safety wherever possible. But I am an apprentice to the mysteries of this life that continuously remind me that, despite my best efforts, I never really have control. So, I am learning to surrender. I am giving myself over to the tides of the expansive in-between, seeing what might surface. In this flow, linear time is suspended and prescriptive narratives suddenly ruptured, giving way to a tangle of new growth. I exist in a kind of dreamtime, called upon to wield the force of my imagination to bridge old and new worlds, to push me across the threshold into complete realignment, and I can only trust what will follow.
If I feel in a regulated state, I tend to experience an unparalleled surge of creative energy during these times, finding its course along various channels; and so, it feels right to open up this space and share this newsletter now, situated as I am in the precarious and uncomfortable seat of unknowing, not quite rooted or tied to much concretely, but watching and wondering with curiosity as best I can. Staying open, as best I can.
Writing in the midst of this, with the autonomy of not having an established practice of sharing work publicly, I feel I must release the rugged impulse to control and tame and know, to overanalyse and intellectualise what dances on the edge of my awareness. I must release my sense of urgency, too, trusting that guiding insights in shaping my work will take root, brood, unfold across their own timelines. I am trying to temper my overactive and interrogative mind, and realise what it means to write from the heart and from the body, the whole being, from the land and more-than-human kin, from that which is just becoming and not yet fully formed. Join me in this process of unlearning and learning, with words a vessel for holding to the light the vastness of this experience (a small fragment of it at least).
That’s just what writing has been for me these past turbulent years: a way of making sense of my (and our) experience so as to belong to it, to inhabit it, without the violence of being swallowed whole. It has been a home to return to with weary, dirt-bitten soles and tired eyes, riddled with despair or joy alike. It has been the container of my tending inside which the unconscious becomes conscious, the inward turns itself, often reluctantly, outward, and the formless finds form. Right in the heat of the struggle of this excavation, what will emerge that must be seen in order to transmute? To be held or lovingly released?
So, let me commit to being here in ongoing practice, even when it feels hard to be witnessed in vulnerability, in the messy and contradictory and sometimes very ugly reality of humanness. This practice is one of showing up and giving voice to what moves me, honouring where I have been and where I am standing and where I might go, and what calls me, ultimately, to this great dance.
There is medicine in this practice, of the life-giving sort.
When I decided to name this newsletter medicine stories, it was not in reference to the institution, the body of knowledge and associated practice, that you might call modern biomedicine, but the resounding remembrance rooted deeply in the word’s etymology of the broader concept of healing. Healing, Gabor Maté describes, as denoting a “natural movement toward wholeness” in its etymological origins, “a direction, not a destination”. Healing: the word that has become bound up sickeningly with commodification and extraction under modern capitalism, with ideology and dogma and falsities. Let me hold it loosely and meet it with a discerning gaze. We could not live in a more fragmented time and we desperately need stories that help guide us back toward wholeness. To work on us, drawing out our common tongue so that we might learn how to be with each other, how to honour our binding contract with the earth, and how to shapeshift in the myriad ways that this moment is asking of us, for all of us.
It is not that we need grand stories or heroic feats (History’s great men doing great things; the mythic heroes journeys). What I know to be true, having lived alongside invisible chronic illness for most of my adult life, is that healing is not synonymous with fixing//curing; healing happens where life happens, in the interstitial spaces, the murky in-betweens, the pause between movements, along the invisible threads that bind us to others in our need. It is a far more elusive, deeper-reaching and spiralling process, an age-old tale of being with rather than one of overcoming.
We need stories with a willingness to dig deep and relate more broadly, rather than a linear narrative focus on progressing forward forward forward toward a victorious end. We need people, in beautiful fragility, to speak their messy and complex truths of how it all feels in the murky in-betweens. Can we hold it all somehow, even if we don’t have the language to hold it all? Can we stay awhile anyway, hoping to let nuance and meaning reveal itself? Can we stay even in the height of discomfort? Can we stay because there is no destination other than the life happening here in this very moment?
What I also know to be true from my experience with chronic illness, as writer Sophie Strand explores in her work, is that stories (who we are, what it means, what’s possible) become confining if they remain too rigid in their form. So, medicine stories might be an invitation to explore what this move toward wholeness could look like in our relationships with ourselves, each other and the living world to which we belong, if we seek to question and rework the dominant narratives that keep us stuck. Let them be unearthed and composted, returning to the soil, feeding the soil, so that new life may emerge.
The individual psyche’s process of unearthing and re-earthing mirrors the collective, where cultural iterations of meaning dissolve and reassemble fluidly. We are creatures of stories after all, held by narrative arcs far beyond comprehension that stretch back through time and yet simultaneously birthing new worlds into being with every utterance, every small and seemingly mundane gesture outward. Isn’t that the magic of creative expression in a time of such crisis and heartbreaking atrocities? The horizon-expanding dreamwork that challenges the bounds of what is deemed to be possible; the world-making shakily assembled by our hands, wrought from our minds and hearts, with a devotion alchemised by rage and grief.
In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown writes that her default state is one of wonder. In a world so fraught with human-induced suffering, can I stay connected to the part of myself that knows, on a cellular level, what a profound miracle it is to be alive and in this body and in this moment and in this place?
There have been whole years where this felt like an impossible task. When you’re someone who feels so much and all the time, eventually your body moves into shutdown: dissociate and detach to survive, no matter the grace of the bluebells emerging from the hedgerows in spring, or the return of the symphony of birdsong to greet you every morning, or the blessed warm sun on soft skin like a balm. Never mind the smiles of strangers or outstretched hands of loved ones.
To be able to return back to a baseline of safety in the body is a big privilege, and it is only from that resting place that I was able to re-attune to the default state of wonder that feels most true in how I orientate myself in the world. Thank God I can feel beauty enter me again, I think, and rearrange me. Thank God I am learning how to notice, and how to be quiet enough to notice, and how to stay open enough to feel even when it hurts unbearably. Thank you thank you thank you.
This is the exact place, the tender pinprick to the heart that reminds me that I’m moving towards life rather than away from it with each breath, that I hope to write from. My ever-growing interest in the potential for healing (and its interwovenness with justice, liberation and so much more) materialised out of need above all else. There was a desperate need to understand, and have others understand, that which had wrested me from a stable reality that I once took for granted. If you’ve ever struggled with stubborn and difficult to treat pain or illness or trauma, mental or physical, you’ll know that our bodies speak to us in the strangest of tongues. But in beginning to listen, and to feel it all, we realise that healing is a most natural state in the grand cycle of renewal and decay. For most of us, most of the time, our bodies want to heal. Earth wants us to heal. Earth needs us to heal, collectively.
I am deeply committed to the practice of learning how to be with our most tender parts and most challenging experiences, how to centre care always, how to offer attention and harvest beauty, how to welcome change where there must be change. How to be in relationship, in conversation with the diverse ecosystem that is this world, because our entire existence depends upon it. In other words — how to be human, embracing our small mark on an unthinkably vast canvas.
So, dear friends, join me on this journey that ~may~ cross the disparate but interconnected realms of ecology, health (and wellness), healing, embodiment, spiritual practice, culture, craft, landwork, art, ritual, livelihood. I’ll explore what it might mean, being the romantic that I am, to live well, moving slowly and intentionally, even (or especially) in a time of such urgency. I won’t make a promise that my words will fit neatly into any categories, but if you’re also a lover of the transgressive in-betweens (queering dichotomies of art/science, mind/body, culture/nature, matter/spirit, politics/poetics), perhaps you won’t mind so much.
There will likely be an assemblage of words, images, poems, and the foraged wisdom and heart medicine of revered writers, makers, thinkers, dreamers and artists who inspire me. There will be the perennial questions that return to me again and again like old friends (because there are many of them), asking to be breathed into a spaciousness beyond the bounds of my individual experience (what might it mean to hold the questions, together, and know that this is healing in itself?). Grounded in place, there may be plants and animals and fungi and bodies and embers and rock and mud all entangled, but also glimpses of that distant meeting point between sea and sky on the horizon. Re-enchantment, gratitude, a bow to what is ancient and timeless and held in the seeds and soil, a weaving of threads that I have long carried, and, ultimately, presence: this is my small offering.
yay! can't wait to read more <3
❤️