present moment preamble
The snowless, cold, gray thick of March1 is always rough for me — generally speaking, a muddy without sparkle, naked and cold. The presence of the weekly container of forest circles this past February and March really helped me find regular access to magic amidst this time. The difference between a casual jaunt in the woods and a slow, contemplative, animist walk is too vast to name. During the walk, I rest heavily on trees, listening and asking and thanking. I stop for as long as I can bear to watch a stream of sunlight hit a patch of moss. Every time I take conscious moments to walk slowly and quietly in the woods, I re-find a part of myself and of truth that is too hidden to access otherwise.
I invite you into the slow and firm embrace of spring animist forest circles as the end of the sign up period nears. We still have two more spots open! This consistent ritual has kept me connected to magic and aliveness and community during a time that otherwise may have been categorized by challenge, deprivation, and healing.
Let’s get to the story.
a hero’s journey, if you will
Feel free to let rip the eye-roll that has been resting in your body since elementary, middle, and high school English class used Campbell’s model as a crutch upon which to create months of curriculum. Eye-roll aside, the model offers some meat from time to time.
This story of my body is a hero’s journey story of healing, as all healing stories really are. We bumble along, experiencing humdrum, unremarkable health-lives, until the call for a quest -- a powerful, uncomfortable, inciting health incident -- comes to our door, presents a conundrum, and pulls us out into the unknown, often unwilling and scared. Through battles, dragons, and floating eyes of evil, we tear our way through the spiny thicket to try to reach the sleeping princess and kiss her non-consensually on the lips.
In this story of my body and my quest for intestinal equanimity, I hope to tell a story that can resonate with many types of quests. The call to battle dragons does not only come from calls to revitalize our health, but also from just about everything else. We receive calls to quest for love, to end wars in our homes, to raise children as free, to soothe wounds from our past. I hope to tell a story that speaks to the demons, dragons, and floating eyes of Sauron that speckle our quests for wholeness. I hope to speak more broadly to the nature of struggle, courage, and choice.
the backstory
I have suffered from a ruminating gut since adolescence. The swelling, stagnation, and fiery contractions that come with inflammation have all been a regular, thumping rhythm of my earthly relationship with this body. As faithfully as my heart beats, my gut has rumbled and cried out, asking for a change that I could not interpret.
As an adolescent, I experienced intestinal fire -- extreme pain induced by stress and other factors. Then, for about ten years, I lived inside a window of teetering [American] ‘normalcy.’ I ate all the foods everyone else ate, drank beer, ordered whatever I pleased at restaurants, and didn’t think about combinations, or source, or timing. I generally tried to eat organic foods, I generally mostly ate vegetables, but also there were many, many, many exceptions as well as foods that came in a box. I experienced discomfort, bloating, and other mild symptoms regularly, but didn’t heed these whispers as a call to quest. I craved pleasure, ease, and company; I did not want to experiment with deprivation, discipline, and isolation.
Thus, I drank beer and ate cakes and went to restaurants as I pleased. I ate Thai takeout and quesadillas with salsa. I had bloating and gas and discomfort. But I was [American] ‘free.’
the call
Two years ago, in February 2022, I experienced a cataclysmic shift in my awareness of my gut. I went from my ten year stint of so-called (razor’s edge) ‘normalcy’ to a body who could not digest the simplest of foods. I slept for 16 hours a day, took small, exhausting walks around the block, and sipped broth while wincing in pain. I had been harvested by giardia (an intestinal parasite found in water), followed by a round of antibiotics that decimated whatever meager microbiome garden I had previously subsistence farmed.
In a short span of time, I transformed from a youthful adventurer who traveled the world, tasted all the food, and sunk into meal-sharing as distinct inlets of pleasure and connection, to a chronically fatigued, aging soldier at the helm of discipline and deprivation. I cut some things out, and then more out, and then, finally, found a rhythm of existence in a place where the list of what I could eat was much, much, shorter than the list of what I could not. I had to say goodbye to many foods that I loved deeply, not knowing if I would ever get to experience them again.
At the same time, my relationship to spirit was changing, fast.
The relationship I once had to plant medicine dramatically shifted, seemingly overnight, from one of wisdom, clarity, bliss, and love, to pain, confusion, and disconnection. My window opened wide and clear into the deep, deep wells of suffering available to these bodies, this planet, and this existence. Someone, without consulting me, had cleaned the fog from the glass and invited me to gaze out directly into the eye of suffering that simmered hot coals, red and pulsing, on the other side.
As someone with my widest net in the realm of mental intellect, I naturally fell upon the urge to create intellectual sense. I attempted sense-making like a baker determinedly preparing dough before sunrise. I wanted it to all make sense in my mind. I wanted, I want, I am wanting.
And while the urge to create intellectual sense has manifested into something intelligible enough to write this article, I very much heard the call to situate experience above sense-making. The embodied, sense-rooted lessons I am learning are first and foremost to be felt. Then, when the time is right, to be scooped into the bassinet of sense.
the lessons from messengers along the way
Archetypally, my body has been the messenger, the foe, the teacher, and the prophet. Her lessons dive into the realm of pain, illusion, delusion, and the jagged. And this time, I have come to view this realm less as a category of obstacles on the way to a destination, but instead as windows to a dimension that is always present.
My understanding comes through imagery, and it looks kind of like this:
We have special human-grade body-portals to the full spectrum of light and dark, suffering and connection, pain and bliss. (In this article, connection stands for all the things that come with the experience of cosmic connection: peace, serenity, love, joy, bliss, purpose, etc.) We can both peer into and feel into the spectrum of experience that exists in this reality, whether or not we have directly felt something based on a singular experience during our interactions with the material world. Because consciousness is collective and because our individuation is an illusion, we have access to the full spectrum at any given time. The spectrum is always existing, always there. Our interaction with the spectrum is the variable.
In this diagram, you can see that the path of exploring suffering more deeply can lead to wider, deeper, and more expansive understandings of suffering. It does not end, but instead, culminates in a portal to unknown dimensions of suffering. This, at least to me, can be terrifying. Similarly, the path of connection leads to ever expanding, widening, and deepening existence. It does not end, but culminates in a portal to unknown dimensions of connection. For me, this can be the one of the most exhilarating aspects of life. The bliss, belonging, joy, and serenity we can feel is unbounded.
Ultimately, the whole spectrum is available to us at all times, existing outside of time and space. They are frequencies of existence that we tap into as we stumble about - or train ourselves - on this very special and terrifying lil earth-school.
it’s a big shift
Previously, I had subconsciously registered suffering as challenging bumps on the road to connection.
Bam: here is the hurdle of suffering you must jump over, or the lake of sludge you must swim through, in order to get to the inevitable other side: connection, joy, love.
Bam: here is the cycle of gray winter gloom to get to colorful, chirping spring.
Bam: here is the cycle of conflict hurdles to get to deep love.
And so on.
As I’ve been bestowed the (unasked for) ability to peer deeper into the realm of suffering, I am beginning to see it differently. I am learning to see the suffering side of the spectrum as an integral part of the experience, with its own meaning and purpose -- not just bumps in the road, but roads in themselves. However, I am also seeing that, in the end, the road of suffering has a circuitous goal, which is to teach me how to find the strength to choose connection.
When I say suffering is its own path, I do not mean that the suffering itself is why we are here. Suffering is its own path because it, itself, teaches us how to identify connection.
It also teaches us how to choose connection.
And how to fight for connection.
This may sound obvious, and that could be an indicator that it’s true. However, the obviousness obscures the complexity. In this re-braiding of my perspective, I am beginning to see the complexity of what it takes to choose connection.
the battle against Sauron, spiny thickets, dragons
The struggle to choose connection is more than a movement of desire. It is more than longing, even though longing is part of what it takes, and part of the experience of connection itself.
Every dip into the infinite, inky well of darkness, I am given an opportunity to attempt to use that time as a (harrowing) exploration of what it takes for me to re-find my way to connection, aliveness, and goodness. It reminds me of what Steven Jenkison said on the Sounds of Sand episode, “Wisdom in Death and Dying”: every death before our own teaches us how to die. Each death is an experiential morsel of cumulative training on how to dance with the unknown. Similarly, it may be that every dip into the inky well of darkness offers a piece of cumulative training on how to swim to the surface, as well as to explore what all is above the surface, anyway.
When I say it takes more than a desire to choose connection, or goodness, I have trouble putting words to what it does take.
It takes something like profound, resounding inner strength. It takes courage. It’s not pretty. It takes a similar flavor of resilience and persistence that I can liken to pushing through the final 500 feet of a steep climb up a 14-thousand-foot-tall mountain, or to waking up at 6am for high school after a full week of classes, sports, and homework. It feels similar to the kind of strength it takes to pray through a sweltering sweat lodge, or come through a harrowing medicine experience, or to fast through a vision quest.
This quality we have, to persist and push through hardship -- it can be used unwisely, to grind us to dust in systems of exploitation. It is also the very same quality, I suspect, that can guide us towards the realm of connection, or, in other words, the realm of infinite good.
From my experience, this process can be terrifying, even if it is the ultimate kind of empowering.
the portal of my body pain into the unknown & towards the ever-unfolding resolution
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