Natural Selection

If you catch a cold these days and decide its time to medicate, be prepared to sit down in the pharmacy isle for some reading and researching. Longs even has a bench of seats available. I thought that those seats were for folks waiting for prescriptions, but now I get it. There is a double rainbow of medicine packages available with infinite combinations of symptoms listed as well as infinite combinations of results. Trying to choose something in such a milieu while in the fog of a head cold is rather difficult. I would even consider buying ahead, except that how will I know my exact symptoms?
Before the wall came down, I visited the bad side of Berlin and saw what the opposite of such abundance looks like. Hole in the wall corner groceries housed empty wooden produce bins, with a few potatoes or onions left in one bin somewhere near the counter. Luxury items such as TVs were sold in the hotel gift shops. No one locally would be buying them anyway.
Having an infinite variety of products available is delightful. Even better is having an infinite supply of money to buy them. But, barring that, I enjoy the hunt. Our thrift shops carry luxurious treasures waiting to be adopted, and shopping is a common form of entertainment.
For the most part, we do a good job of avoiding waste, especially when you consider that the greater percentage of us never have experienced scarcity. Sometimes waste happens. My French toast this morning was served with an ice cream scoop of butter. Much as I like butter, I had to waste most of that one. When we start throwing away individual packets of unused foods, then I feel my hackles rise.
We stayed in a nice place in Africa renowned for its guest buffet. Upon approaching the ample line of food tables, it became apparent that most of the flourish was potted plants, and not at all food. In fact, only the third table in the lineup held the edible items, and that included three soups. The fame of that buffet shocked me into realizing how wildly fantastic we have it in America. Back at our table, the four of us asked our waiter if we could have some bread. “Some bread?” he asked, stalling with wide frightened eyes. “Uh, sure, of course.” He was gone for a while, and came back with a bread plate with one roll on it. We thanked him profusely and cut it into four large pieces.
My parents grew up during the depression. They taught me a few things about making do, doing over, or doing without. Even though I can sometimes afford newer things, I actually like shopping second-hand. Maybe it’s the treasure hunt aspect. Definitely the uniqueness appeals. But I also had to unlearn some things. When I was cutting the elastic off of worn out underwear to save for sewing projects, it took a true friend to point out that I don’t have a sewing machine, nor any intended projects. I had to let the BVD elastic go. Out of the things I throw away reluctantly because “I could use this for something,” only one in ten do I eventually regret tossing. That’s a good enough percentage to help me let go of the stuff. I just hope that I don’t regret it when it all crashes. Even if our economy does collapse, I don’t suppose I’m going to be hunting for that elastic before it has lost its stretch. More so, I don’t want to hang on to things so much that I lose mine.
I never did find the cold medicine I was looking for, by the way. I wanted the one that had a bright bold NEW on the front with fine print underneath which reads, “makes it go away.”

Alternative Medicine

I went to a naturopath for a cough. This was a weird cough, not something I’d dealt with before, and I was ready for a weird, or less orthodox, treatment. Or so I thought. The good doctor was a gentle person, kind, and with a fantastic chair-side manner. As we talked, he determined a cluster of symptoms that pointed mostly to my diet.
My diet? I don’t diet. I believe that it’s all good, in moderation.
“It’s not all good.” he quietly asserted, amused at my simpleminded approach to life. Apparently there is a hierarchy of goodness in foods. I had forgotten that, having given up dieting for a lifetime of eating when I’m hungry and stopping when I’m full. Until I started eating for comfort and stopping when I couldn’t fit in any of my clothes. That’s about the juncture where I met this doctor, just when I was wondering what I was going to do in order to have clothes to wear.
He put me on a cleansing diet: no dairy, sweets, or alcohol while I had the cough. I was also to limit my intake of carbohydrates. That’s when I started whining, when he mentioned my precious carbs.
I whimpered for a while, “I crave them, my preciousssss.” and he looked at me like I was the golum I had become. How embarrassing! Then I decided he wasn’t going to crack. So I carried on the argument inside myself.
“Two slices of bread are less carbs than a wrap,” he was saying.
“Flatten those two slices of bread with a rolling pin and you have a wrap,” I didn’t say.
“You can use soy, almond, or oat milk.” he continued.
“Why isn’t oat milk a carb?” I didn’t ask.
I have spent the last couple of years unlearning all the shoulds and rules that I grew up with. I decided it was time to question everything and go with a fresh start. I wanted to find for myself what I found to be true. Now here was this official gent telling me some rules, specifically rules that I didn’t want to hear. I also wanted to find my direction in life from within, so hearing this very firm, albeit gentle, directing from without felt forced.
But I had this pernicious cough, and I really wanted to get rid of it. In fact, he did address the cough with some formulas to address bronchial health: liquid dirt, and pills comprised of roadside weeds from the western united states. I smiled and thanked him.
And I obeyed his directives. I took the weed pills and drank the dirt. The cough remained, and I lost an instant five pounds. I decided to give him another chance, and a week later returned to report no relief from the cough. This time, he told me to eliminate wheat from my diet. I laughed, and he didn’t. Well, laughing seemed like the thing to do when he mentioned further dieting. Hadn’t I given up everything already? But no, he wanted my firstborn son: pasta. So I headed into week two, with further eating restrictions and some new medicines formulated for sinus health: pill made of weeds from the roadsides of the eastern states along with liquid sawdust.
I experienced some early relief from the cough, and stuck with the instructions I was given into the second week.
My thinking at this point went something like, “I coulda just gone to my regular M.D. and gotten a pill to cure this thing.” But I didn’t really know that, just wished.
Then I thought, “I coulda just taken a road trip across the states and grazed roadside for what this doctor is costing me.” And I almost kicked myself for not doing that except that I lacked the one element needed for such a venture: time.
And that’s when I realized what this was all really about. I wanted a quick fix. I want a cure that goes from day one miserable to day two well. Alternative medicine is on a slightly longer time line than the mainstream. I suppose the idea is that my body might actually be able to regain balance on its own if I feed it the fuel it needs to do so.
The wait is very uncomfortable because it requires change from me, and I have to ask in that process of change, “Who is this woman I have become?” In grocery shopping for my cleansing diet, I found that entire aisles of the grocery store suddenly became not for me. The periphery of my usual marketplace held a few foods that were in line with my diet, but not many.
My next fear was that I was going to become high maintenance. A woman in a restaurant last night ordered her salad of baby greens and insisted three times that the waitress assure her that the greens were baby. That’s what I mean by high maintenance. I went to Starbucks and ordered a coffee: decaf, soy milk, sugar-free mocha without whipped cream. It would have been easier to order a cup of hot water.
“I don’t want to live like this,” part of me wails. And I wonder if it’s going to come down to a decision completely for or against this new way.
How sustainable is alternative living for me? If I have to shop for groceries that my family will eat at one store and for myself at another, that’s not very likely to happen. It’s also highly unlikely that my family will change their eating habits. If I seem resistant to change from the outside, my family is the ultimate challenge.
I’m tempted to see this as a polarized situation, either I change completely or go back to my old ways completely. Although the good doctor may not like the idea, I wonder if there isn’t a middle ground. Can I graze on weeds from the midwest roadside as well as the grains from the same region? Maybe it was right for me to see it as all good, but I just forgot to exercise moderation. What do we do when we hit a situation that seems to demand either/or and we can see both sides?

Kailani

The ocean and I first met each other in Coronado, California. It was cold there, and gave me a bit of a shock. My feet ached as I ventured further out, little by little. I didn’t often go more than waist deep, too achy from its cold presence. Much later, in Mexico, we met again on warmer terms. The water was inviting, and I learned to ride its waves with just my body. I also learned to let it support me, as I floated in a full suspension by warm salty swells. It became a lullaby to my soul to rest on ocean waters and rise and fall with each wave. Our next rendezvous was in Hawaii, where I fell in love with the ocean. I played in waves that were nearly out of my range of skill, and I often simply sat on the rocky coast and watched the water play on the lava. My sorrows and joys seemed to break along the shore, passing as quickly as each wave. I simply watched from my observer position, and allowed tears or laughter to roll by. The ocean remains indifferent. When winds are big, its waves are big. It can be calm as glass and seem as nurturing as a womb. It can also be terrifying, developing giant waves and housing creatures of monstrous proportion. Whether serving as a metaphor for emotions, the depths of our minds, or a mother, the ocean cradles my heart in a wonderfully neutral suspension of both adventure and gentleness.
I sometimes swim out from the Kailua Pier, paddling over a coral garden of wide variety. Each time I see something new. My courage has grown. After nearly half a year of sitting on rocks at spots here and there, wishing I had the courage to just swim off from a protected spot, I finally took that leap of faith. It was an empowering moment when I looked back to see that I had made it out without being dashed on the rocks. An oldtimer told me about the cove where I entered the water, the underwater landforms to be seen as I swam out (a stone arch, then a long bench of rock and coral to explore), and the direction of the prevailing current, but failed to mention one thing. I explored and played and delighted in this expanded territory until I decided I was ready to come back in. That’s when I realized that my informant had forgotten something. How was I supposed to get back out of the water onto the rocks? Because it was a glassy-water day, it was no big deal. I scoped out the easiest exit point and made note of where it was for the next time.
Adjusting to breathing under water goes against every instinct a human possesses. For that reason, snorkeling and diving may need to be learned as a process for some of us rather than an event. It is unnerving to leave your natural element entirely and to go against the ancient survival instincts of our species. Once mastered, diving of any sort results in access to a wonderland to behold.
Ocean water is a living environment. It is impossible to replicate true sea water. Sometimes when I float, I feel the air on my upturned palms and fingertips. The air feels like an elastic bubble. When the sun comes out, it feels like a hot bubble. I wonder if that’s how fish out of water feel about air. Coming up toward the air from below, waves look like a bubbly surface, billowing like clouds. I wonder if fish that swim way out to sea get freaked out by seeing nothing but open sky above the air out there. Then I get my feet back on the ground.
Flying back to the Big Island one day, our aircraft turned in just such a way that my porthole captured only land for my view. Instantly I had a sad feeling of being land-locked. I wasn’t raised near the sea, but apparently I was meant to grow there. I am at home both in and on the sea.