But aren't they all big decisions?

I’ve talked to a few people lately about my decision to eventually get off all Western medication and entirely herbal/REAL nourishments (supplements seems like a weird word) and have been faced with a huge dichotomy. At first it was only acceptance, “Good for you!”, etc, or even interest in my plans and specific herbs (which was super sweet of them J) The next few people wanted to make sure I was planning on seeing a real healer and not “some quack”. Most true fakes will tout a single fruit/herb as a panacea, or are otherwise snake-oilsman creepy, so they’re easy to pick out. On the other hand, most of these optimistic people don’t really understand the nature of rheumatoid arthritis, “a chronic, debilitating auto-immune disease” (In a weird form of coping, I have memorized the wiki article, the hell?) I mean, I’ve lived with it since I was 13 or 14, almost a third of my life, and up until a year ago didn’t realize I was that different from my peers (thanks dorm living!) But I mean, chronic, ie lifelong, ie you will never escape. And it’s the first freaking descriptor in the article. I know if my doctor knew about this plan and I was three years younger, he might get my parents to physically force medication on to me, as to live with RA without medication is a practically a death sentence. Being alive and disabled is supposedly better than being able bodied and dead, but is it really? Questions like that are too big for my headache squeezed brain right now.

Anyway, the other camp: You know you can’t measure those, right? And that they’re really strong? I mean, you can’t regulate them. And then I meet their faces calmly and they shut up, quietly labeling me as crazy hippie girl who thinks she can organically outsmart The Man. If there is one way to bypass the man is will be with a woman. And really, what is growing out of god’s green ground is more dangerous than what’s in that bottle? It’s alive, at least, it has intention and energy and hope. How often to people OD with suicidal intent on “herbal supplements”? And yes, too much of anything is out of balance and can harm you—we don’t eat oleander, I’m not choking down an entire plant. That is what teaspoons are for, and decoctions and tinctures and teas. The idea of I don’t trust my body enough to know when to stop, I don’t know myself well enough to measure how much to eat, this disconnection is what fuels consumerism and an outsourced society: “we pay people to love us, we pay people to heal us.. .we even pay people to bury us.” All you need and all you need to know is within you. I feel sad for people who need a magazine to tell them when to eat (you could argue that Ayurvedics etc do the same thing, though most alt. traditions allow for uniqueness and self-determination, where food-fads and eating publications do not).

I trust myself to, when I try to mushrooms, to try them a little at a time—no matter what anyone tells me, experience or no. I know myself well enough, through different lenses as well as my own, to know when something will not be healing or healthy or nourishing—I’ll know how much catclaw to try, I’ll know when my bodymind no longer needs these (un?)natural blessings of modern medicine. I know enough to choose medicines of joy rather than those ofprocedure, medicine of instinct and earth over medicine of classist schools and racist policies. And yes, I acknowledge that sometimes the needed, fated, natural blessings are Western Mecine. But my eyes are open and I’ve got the woods are clearing out the toxins in my viens, fields soaking up all the sadness in my lungs.

I sat back in a massage chair the other day—it was so soft my body automatically relaxed, and I thought, how long has it been since I didn’t have to force myself to let go? The first time I was so small I don’t even remember, and it hurt—everything too bright and harsh, everyone trying to hurt me. The last time I got my heart broken, broke as my grandmother’s roping saddle, and how long much longer can the heart, the self, survive without that? I’m sorry, but I can’t—stoicism is not something we have to undertake. Sipping lavender tea, a sedative, but the best kind—someone’s arms around, that soft scent holding you while you sleep. Really, truly, bones-relaxed sleep. If it’s out there, that whole healing, I won’t just stand back and watch it pass by. It's my/our duty to pursue the highest ideals we can