(Re)making health culture

I’ve been inspired by Resmaa Menakem years ago (with his call to action for white people to make their own culture) and recently Stephen Jenkinson to remember that WE ARE THE ONES WHO MAKE CULTURE! So my actions this fall, writing and otherwise, are under this intention to transform lamentation about “the culture” into occurrences of culture!

One place I really feel the impoverished nature of our culture, by which I mean western, modern culture, I mean USA culture, I mean diet culture and how we in these concentric circles relate to our bodies and our food and how we sustain our physical lives. Another circle within this culture that produces a lot of unwellness is the silicon valley trying to take oneself out of the circle of life by trying not to die culture. The list is long. Perhaps if you’re here you are familiar with these lamentations.

One way into this recently was a realization about how hilarious and absurd it is for a human to be resentful about going to the grocery store. Sometimes in my life that human has been me. And I was driving to the store recently and I remembered that I would feel that way sometimes and suddenly I could see how astray from Life Itself that delusion is. I’m not suggesting we should pretend to not be resentful when we are. I’m not suggesting anyone shouldn’t be tired or overwhelmed when they are.

But truly — a human gets to go to a building and receive plants and animals and fungi for the sustenance of their own life in exchange for money, and bring it back to their home and cook it and eat it and feed others with it. The list of miracles occurring, the multi-species list of generosities congealing for that to happen is way too long to ever name, and if it’s not for me — for you — who else is it for? What is going right in a situation where this occurs is so much larger than what is going wrong, if we’re going to use dualistic thinking, for the purposes of awakening ourselves to this miracle, which is the point of what I am writing right now.

I remembered this miracle and I want to remind you!

I’ve also (for so long, through receiving the wisdom of Virgie Tovar as a major instigator of this investigation for me) been thinking about what can break the spell of diet culture (which is almost completely overlapping with trying-not-to-die-culture), how impoverished it really is.

How conceptual and therefore removed from Life (also joy) our approach to our bodies is! I realized that we do this thing to our bodies — objectify them — the exact same way we do this to other animals and plants in how we think and talk about them. A chicken — the astounding life force of a creature that becomes the paltry, utterly unsexy: “protein.” Or the gorgeous sophisticated motion of the hands that knead the bread in prayer and alchemy with yeast that becomes “carbs.” My children remind me of this, because they ask (and it’s wild, but I swear I did not initiate this) to say a prayer for the chicken when we cook it. This is their natural response to learning that the meat is a chicken, and it died so that we could be sustained by its body. This feels like a major missed opportunity to connect to life (and death) itself, when we reduce the abundance of what we are receiving when we call it “protein.” or even further removed: “a protein.”

We do this with our own movements too, counting steps, trying to “get steps in.” We have taken the necessity for steps out of our days through all sorts of technologies and now we need to put them back in. But we do this conceptual thing that is very far from direct perception and decide how many steps we need in a day based on someone’s context-less advice telling us how many we need.

Please understand that I know and love very many step-counting humans and have been inspired by their stories of their counting of their steps! My goal here is not to get anyone to stop counting their steps. Or even stop saying the word protein hahahahaha.

I’m on a lifelong journey to practice and to ask: what and how might I transform this culture in myself / for myself / and with and for others. Because it feels empty to me, it doesn’t feel alive. When I’m counting my foods in numbers or my steps the same way, I’m missing the MIRACLE of stepping on this earth, while inside the conglomerate of sensations called a human body. I’m also missing the MIRACLE of intimacy with other species I get to be made alive by through them becoming my food.

So my offering here is not about stopping any of these behaviors or even ways of thinking, because that is not an ambitious enough goal for me. I want to get as far upstream of all of these actions as I can; I just don’t think it matters that much if we are doing these objectifying things AND, we will keep doing them!

What I can find for myself upstream is noticing the wincing when I look in the mirror, freezing my body into a noun and deciding it doesn’t look as it should. Noticing that and saying thank you to life for the opportunity to look in the mirror and feel that pain of a learned judgment. The gift of getting to count steps and or judge oneself for not getting enough protein that day.

What I am getting at can be summarized by a lot of Andrea Gibson’s work, and especially the moments in Come See Me in The Good Light (the documentary about them and Megan Falley going through Andrea’s cancer together). Megan Falley asks Andrea Gibson if it is hard for them to not have hair from chemo because they have been a hair icon. And Andrea Gibson says they’re so grateful to have a body, they don’t care what it looks like. Megan Falley talks about how she’s writing a memoir about body image / acceptance, and how it recedes in this experience with Andrea. Number one I want to read that memoir, and number two how beautiful to hear that it receded in proximity to death.

I don’t think the response to this essential perspective they have should be self-flagellation for our vanity! Or even trying to make it go away. My invitation to myself and you is to just a willingness to feel the sacredness of having this body, getting to be a person on earth. And there are sooooo many times in my life where I have had no access to this knowing. That it feels like absolute shit.

My invitation is to seek the remembering that it’s sacred to be here, even while hating or objectifying our bodies. Even when objectifying chicken as our path to better “health.”

And, secondarily, what behaviors might cascade from humans with deep cognition of the sacredness of their experience in a body?!

I’ve been asking myself what is “health” to me, because wellness culture is not health to me, most of it feels like a profoundly lost plot. Right now for me, health is contacting my own and others’ aliveness. Saturating in that, not missing it. Finding that aliveness in places where it feels furthest away. Even in moments in the mirror where I deaden my own body by saying to myself it’s not right in some way.

Do you want to do that with me? Can we do it together and remake our culture right here right now?

Either way I love you and thank you for existing!

Sarah