Making Peace with Nature

Glass feet climb up a murky colored staircase. It’s called “making peace with nature.” About a year ago I asked the land for wisdom on a vision quest. I was meditating with this amulet my aunt had given me that says “peace with nature on it”. It looks like some kind of woodstock token. My aunt happens to have the same unresolved hand issues as me, she was actually my age when she had to give up her practice of art. I was meditating, laying down with the land, becoming the land, and I saw my nerves through my glass hands and feet. As the roots broke down and became smaller, the plant system as a whole got sicker. I saw lapses of my planty fibers lifespan through the end. They were roots, same as the plants cushioning my fleshy vessel. I was beginning to understand that I was a part of the land. And energy has to run its course of growth and death to produce more growth and more death to keep the ecosystem flowing. I made peace with my body, and accepted that it was and would anyway eventually break down to pass on energy. To let go and stop fighting my body was the beginning of learning how to listen to and work with the body I have in this present life. It’s a feeling of calm after the storm.

Not only do the water poppies mimic small nerve fiber density, each foot a vessel to hold gradually more death failing to regenerate. Because the thing about neuromuscular disorders caused by autoimmune diseases is that it doesn’t just affect the nervous system, the joints and musculoskeletal system are often affected too. Final stages of some untreated autoimmune diseases result in deformity and paralysis. Interestingly on the flip side, side effects of immunosuppressive steroids such as prednisone, cause thinning of bones and thinning of skin (that holds all your blood and squishy stuff together) to begin with among other things. For this reason people can only take this treatment for very limited intervals. My first doctor to prescribe it actually advised me to stop using stairs completely when he prescribed it, to decrease my risk of falling and seriously injuring my now slightly more fragile vessel.

Another conversation I address is medical technological advancement in treating neuromuscular disorders over the last one hundred years, or lack thereof. The splint is prescribed as both the first line of defense in anything simple like carpal tunnel and as also a last resort like in muscular deformity. Whenever a doctor doesn’t know what’s wrong or how to fix what’s wrong, their answer is always the splint. Some will even tell you they don’t know if it does anything. But some think…maybe it will? In comparing a splint from about 100 years ago, and the modern splint I made from a couple of my old warped splints; I hope to draw parallels in design. The fix hasn’t changed much, it's still bent steel and some straps. The splint is very reminiscent of advancement in western neuromuscular medicine.