Medicine
What's yours?
Mini vanilla marshmallows are medicine.
The dog’s ears are medicine.
Morning runs down the winding dirt belly of Falls Ravine, under cathedral light and soaring oaks, are medicine.
Trying new things is medicine.
Picking lemon balm leaves one by one, noticing their prickly texture, their smell, their hearty green, thanking them, is medicine.
Bike rides are medicine.
Not falling into the same old habit, and recognizing this with a flash of awe like that of a baby standing on her own for the first time, is medicine.
Eating something and really tasting it is medicine.
Taking the higher road is medicine.
Friends are medicine.
Deliberation – slicing the vegetables and arranging them on the cutting board, remembering to salt the beans and put in a few cloves of garlic, pulling the weeds and smoothing the soil – is medicine.
Letting a child learn to peel beets by covering the kitchen and herself top to bottom in alarming shades of red is medicine.
Going to bed really early is medicine.
Drawing something is medicine.
Imagining fanciful possibilities, ideally during a walk, is medicine.
A random kind remark from a passing stranger – ideally complimenting your super-nerdy electric blue compression running socks – is medicine.
Making tea for someone is medicine.
Saying you know what, sure, is medicine.
Paying attention to something you’ve done on autopilot for years – running up a hill, making a coffee – as if you are a complete beginner is medicine.
Recognizing you’ve grown out of something, and accepting that, is medicine.
Poetry is medicine.
Humility is medicine.
Laughing at things you took so seriously is medicine.
Taking risks is medicine.
Searching for osage orange balls to throw down hills is medicine.
Ritual – a pumpkin on the porch, a birthday cake, a teeny tiny altar with an old photo and a postcard – is medicine.
Medicine for narrowness, medicine for the numb, medicine for the scared, medicine for mistaking ourselves for machines, medicine for the I-don’t-know, medicine for the is-it-enough, medicine for the what-next and what-about-this and worry, medicine for waking up a little more, for noticing finches on the faded sunflowers and robins gulping down dogwood berries, for noticing fall, the fading, the becoming, the fiery sky before you make dinner and fold the socks.
Recommendations:
My friend Heather wrote this beautiful piece for Time which you should all go read right now. (And if you haven’t read her book, Raising a Rare Girl, do so immediately!) Very cool Tiny Desk Concert recommended by my musician little bro. I am recommending an app, I’m sorry, but it’s a cool app that will help you identify osage orange trees and spiders and weird flowers and pretty much anything else in your yard/nature, and then you can drop things like “That’s a grape leffolder moth!” into the conversation and sound (my definition of) cool.
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