Farm Life
Farm life is preeeetty fucking amazing. I have settled into it like a frigate bird to air, and I am finding myself looking forward to the stretch of 5 years never touching ground. There are aspects of it that terrify me. But they mostly revolve around image. My image of myself as irresponsible, or lonely. Others image of me as Wonder Woman, or nothing.
One of the things I love most about nature (which is a vague, giant word for a specific, giant concept) is how it makes a mockery of the self importance of image. When one is shoveling cow shit, or hiking mountains, or sitting on a rock by a remote lake, there's no one there to define yourself by. There's hardly even you, when you're working hard enough. The soothing lullaby of labor combined with the raucous, gentle disregard of the biosphere pulls you away from yourself into a space where you exist next to any other number of creatures and moments that could be you but aren't. It's hard to explain, the dichotomous nature of what work in nature does to me. Distancing yet incredibly intimate. I love it. Also, I hate it. I hate hard work. Stupid hard work.
I twisted my ankle yesterday afternoon, getting back into the car in our upper driveway after picking up the mail. There was a tiny ledge in the gravel, and the edge of my foot found it while the rest of my foot did not. It crackled as it went completely sideways, in the most unnatural way. I caught myself before I did anything more than take a dignified knee, but OH, did it hurt. Last night, it hadn't swollen yet, but it hurt like a motherfucker. Like a train coming endlessly through a tunnel, like a toothache, but not like child birth. I got into the hot tub and let it sit there with a strong jet pummeling it. That did not work, so I got out gingerly, got dressed, and went moaning and groaning into the living room where my brother was hanging out waiting for his wife to finish putting the baby to bed. I sat down on the couch, elevated my ankle, and proceeded to be a big baby about it. Which got me exactly what I wanted, of course, since my brother came over to take a look at it, then grabbed his tuning forks and made a fuss over my leg. He's a trained massage therapist now, who also trained in Acutonics, which is basically acupuncture with sound. It actually works really well for me. One might go so far as to say it resonates with me... if one were a dork.
So, I lay back and let him run a tuning fork set to a specific frequency around my ankle, and let it do its thing. It burnt at first. If you've ever had acupuncture, you'll know the kind of burning I mean. It's like a precisely directed wave of almost too hot water running along a channel in your body, and when you're doing it around an injury, the water rushes over it. And hurts like the dickens. But also washes the old pain away, so there's nothing left but the burning, which feels healing and reassuring, like cinnamon on your tongue. What was left behind after was a throbbing ankle that felt like it would get better soon.
I surprised myself with my intense reaction to getting even slightly injured. I was terrified, in a completely unreasonable way, of becoming immobile. I saw my father, in my mind, and I instantly became him. I, apparently, have some left over issues surrounding my dads severe rheumatoid arthritis and how it affected him in my youth. I'm paranoid about becoming weak, becoming broken. There's enough about me that's broken already, I feel like I can't afford to add to it.
One of the things I love most about nature (which is a vague, giant word for a specific, giant concept) is how it makes a mockery of the self importance of image. When one is shoveling cow shit, or hiking mountains, or sitting on a rock by a remote lake, there's no one there to define yourself by. There's hardly even you, when you're working hard enough. The soothing lullaby of labor combined with the raucous, gentle disregard of the biosphere pulls you away from yourself into a space where you exist next to any other number of creatures and moments that could be you but aren't. It's hard to explain, the dichotomous nature of what work in nature does to me. Distancing yet incredibly intimate. I love it. Also, I hate it. I hate hard work. Stupid hard work.
I twisted my ankle yesterday afternoon, getting back into the car in our upper driveway after picking up the mail. There was a tiny ledge in the gravel, and the edge of my foot found it while the rest of my foot did not. It crackled as it went completely sideways, in the most unnatural way. I caught myself before I did anything more than take a dignified knee, but OH, did it hurt. Last night, it hadn't swollen yet, but it hurt like a motherfucker. Like a train coming endlessly through a tunnel, like a toothache, but not like child birth. I got into the hot tub and let it sit there with a strong jet pummeling it. That did not work, so I got out gingerly, got dressed, and went moaning and groaning into the living room where my brother was hanging out waiting for his wife to finish putting the baby to bed. I sat down on the couch, elevated my ankle, and proceeded to be a big baby about it. Which got me exactly what I wanted, of course, since my brother came over to take a look at it, then grabbed his tuning forks and made a fuss over my leg. He's a trained massage therapist now, who also trained in Acutonics, which is basically acupuncture with sound. It actually works really well for me. One might go so far as to say it resonates with me... if one were a dork.
So, I lay back and let him run a tuning fork set to a specific frequency around my ankle, and let it do its thing. It burnt at first. If you've ever had acupuncture, you'll know the kind of burning I mean. It's like a precisely directed wave of almost too hot water running along a channel in your body, and when you're doing it around an injury, the water rushes over it. And hurts like the dickens. But also washes the old pain away, so there's nothing left but the burning, which feels healing and reassuring, like cinnamon on your tongue. What was left behind after was a throbbing ankle that felt like it would get better soon.
I surprised myself with my intense reaction to getting even slightly injured. I was terrified, in a completely unreasonable way, of becoming immobile. I saw my father, in my mind, and I instantly became him. I, apparently, have some left over issues surrounding my dads severe rheumatoid arthritis and how it affected him in my youth. I'm paranoid about becoming weak, becoming broken. There's enough about me that's broken already, I feel like I can't afford to add to it.
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