When you feel bad, you may experience a sense of powerlessness over your body that can leave you feeling like a shell of a person, as though your spirit has abandoned your life and refused to live in it any longer. This is the first salt in the morning and the last at night.

After you've finished raging at your shortcomings and reaching out for help, you finally stand up and decide to go on with the realization that your priorities have changed. The things you thought you could do or have in your life, things that would never change, have disappeared or presented you with a new set of challenges. Then you begin to re-question what really matters and find yourself returning to the essentials like a ballerina returning time and again to the barre.

Sometimes the best solutions are also the simplest. Writing (nourishment for the spirit) and food (nourishment for the body) have risen to the top of my short list of essentials. Things beyond the basics have fallen away or down the list. Frankly, I have begun to write again because the level of discomfort is now tolerable. And I've returned to the idea that I must write. It is not a choice! This has been a welcome change. And the SheWrites forum is helping me with it. On another level, the ghosts of regret (and ex-boyfriends) are firmly in the past. They have all gone. What is lost cannot be replaced. I am still here; the writing still in me.

Likewise, food and my relationship to it has changed. Because of my current digestive issues, I have to buy and prepare everything myself. Eating out is a rarity because I don't know what's in the food and frequently the merchant doesn't either. This creates all manner of challenges when I travel (a Christmas trip is coming) and go to work 5 days a week. (One colleague gently teases me and another goes so far as to offer me things she knows I cannot eat).

But each new thing with its scary, jagged edges can bring something good. For me, illness has helped me develop an intimacy with food and an appreciation for the subtleties of flavor. It has made me more, not less, interested in cooking. And it has made me slow down every small thing from dicing onions to brushing my teeth to stretching out on the living room floor at the end of a long day... movements slow as molasses in wintertime.

I am also completely aware of what goes into my mouth. I've expanded my food choices (due to limitations in some areas) by incorporating others, such as roasted, sweet root vegetables (parsnips, sweet potatoes and so on) and delicious, bitter greens (turnip, collard, mustard, chard), into my diet. I have dreamed of food, too--of a multi-course dinner by candlelight that ends with a large crystal bowl of vanilla ice cream smothered in raspberry puree. The server tells me it's all mine, and I eat the whole thing.

Sometimes I imagine what I'd like to eat. During cold winter months in Wisconsin, my mother prepared flavorful lentil soup with bay leaf and pork sausage and buttered toast on the side or navy bean soup with onion and ham. I will make a pot of one this weekend. On this gray day I yearn for my Grandma's best friend's apple, raisin, walnut cake, Aunt Yvonne's Scandinavian cinnamon coffee rolls and Mom's buttermilk biscuits, all of which I hope to eat again one day. But I've gotten off course here...

I suppose what I wish to say today is that despite problems, we can eliminate the non-essentials and find ways to go on with life and yearning, not because we don't want to stop, but because nothing else in the world will stop for us and no one is going to come along and rescue us. I have also learned and re-learned a valuable lesson about myself---to trust my body and to trust life. This has been the toughest part with each new thing that arises, large or small. Someone once said to me that all we need to do is let our bodies and souls heal themselves. With a little help and right focus on essentials they do heal, but as slowly as a tree grows and with a hidden wisdom that I have only begun to understand.

© 2010 Marjorie A. Robertson

All Rights Reserved