The lumen of the gut

I’ve been thinking about the term lumen of the gut, which I like a lot.  “Lumen”, as you can probably see even if you don’t know any Latin, means “light”.  At the Easter Vigil (the long traditional service in the Catholic end of the church that sees in Easter Day), they hold the Pascal Candle, lit from the Easter Fire, high into the air, singing three times “Lumen Christi!” (“the light of Christ”) and three times the congregation sings in response “Deo gratias!” (“Thanks be to God”).  So lumen=light.

The lumen of the gut is the space that goes right through the middle of you – mouth to anus, alimentary canal – up to you to decide which end you think is the light at the end of the tunnel!

The gut is a magical and essential part of you.  It has its own intelligence, and if you get what’s in your gut right, then pretty much all the rest of you will likely be right as well.  No promises, but a healthy gut augurs well.

What interest me is this word “lumen” here.  Light.  Lightness..

While I am having my Gerson coffee, which involves lying down resting for about 15 mins doing nothing in particular just waiting for it to be later than it is, I while away the time praying for concerns at the forefront of my mind.  At the present time I make sure to include two people especially – one who is testing her vocation to monastic life, and one who is struggling to care for a seriously sick husband, two ancient dogs and two fostered adults with disabilities. 

Today, while praying for the second of those two people, trying to think of something different to say to God from what I said yesterday, I found myself asking Him, “Father, may this day hold in it laughter for her.  Today, may she find things to laugh at.  May she not be able to help laughing.  May . . . no, that will do.  If she can only be laughing, the rest will fall into place.”

And I realised that is true of me too.  Whatever befalls, if I can find something funny about it, I can get through.   Laughter.  I need to lighten up.  Lighten up.  Light.  Lightness.  Travelling light.  Living lightly - simplicity.  Sitting light to things.  Lumen.  The lumen of the gut.  Gut wisdom and intelligence.  Belly laughter.   Somewhere in this lot lies the secret of health.   And I have heard of people diagnosed with serious illness who cured themselves just through watching funny films.  They laughed their way back to health.

For a while when we lived in Aylesbury I had high on the kitchen wall on a demi-lune shelf I managed to fix up, in a shining moment of capability, a large wooden angel watching over our culinary efforts, that I dubbed The Lumen of the Gut.   And what keeps our alimentary canal healthy, besides garlic and Gerson coffee, is laughter.  And simplicity heightens the likelihood of laughter, because complications weigh you down.

Gerson

Startled by the unexpectedly holistic simplicity into which the Gerson way has catapulted me.  Socialising, eating out, snacks and treats – forget them. Tea-pots/cups/plates: no longer necessary.  Packaged and processed foods, bottled water and other drinks: things of the past.  Suddenly I don’t really need anything.  Left alone with a bunch of carrots and potatoes, a heap of apples and oranges, and a heck of a lot of salad.  Needful implements: 1 juicer, 1 water distiller, 1 juice glass, 1 bowl, 1 spoon, 1 fork, 1 small casserole, 1 saucepan.  I never realized so much of my life and thought revolved around food.

I didn’t associate Gerson with possessions; but it has, at a stroke, made a whole raft of paraphernalia into mere impedimenta.

Clearing, clearing, clearing; thoughts, feelings, necessities. 

Because of the insistence on organic fruit and vegetables – and organic oats – there are fair-trading and ethical and environmental implications, too.  The most straightforward way for me is to order a delivery from Abel & Cole, who source ethically from (mostly) local farms with minimal and (mostly) re-usable packaging. So, not even grocery shopping to do.

One choice – Gerson – has, at a stroke, integrated and aligned a plethora of options and decisions, like the ripples from a pebble dropped into a pool, going all the way out to the edge and back again.

I’m disconcerted by the mental quiet too; the interior evenness and stability effected by vegetables, after a lifetime of the spikes and chaos engendered by sugar.  All hushed.

Other things that once amused/entertained me have also lost their savour.  There was a time (a while ago, admittedly) when I enjoyed women’s magazines; and also clothes shopping.  Now I love the clothes I always wear – same old same old, t-shirts and fleeces, long full skirts, boots, sandals or plimsolls.  Women’s magazines with their preoccupations – food, sex, fashion, image, disease and angst – bore me.

I don’t want to go anywhere, read anything, make anything.

It is as though the whole world has gone quiet.  Silence.  Thoughts.  Fire.  Wind.  Rain.  Stillness.  Vegetables.  Juice.   Light.   Clouds. 

Odd.   A sense of detachment and almost indifferent calm.    And at night, the most vivid and powerful dreams.

Rain and thinking and unexpectedness and changes

Sitting by the fire thinking, this rainy day.

The storms have been relentless, and the expected snows of winter turned out to be rain, because the temperatures never fell.  Snow is inconvenient surely, but it slows down the soaking of the water into the land; this ceaseless rain has brought so much damage and misery – here in Hastings, there have been falling chunks of cliff and cracking crumbling houses, down in the West Country the damage has been devastating, and everywhere rivers are overflowing, flooding homes.

We live on top of a hill flanked with trees, and even here the garden is one big mud puddle.  

After yesterday’s storms (my beautiful mama phoned and cancelled my visit to her, alarmed by the wild weather) the trains have been cancelled for today.  “February Fill-dyke” – I’ll say!  Wet, wet, wet!

Plunged into the world of juicing fruit and vegetable and distilling water, not to mention Gerson upside-down coffee (!) to get my health back on track (with brilliant results so far), and surrounded by mud, I have hardly even been in Komorebi these last ten days, and I’m worried about mildew in the mould-prone things – fabric, books etc.  If I were to actually live in a tiny house, the consistent heating and airing would keep everything dry and toasty, but being there only part of the time is different.

I’m glad to feel so much better than I have for a long, long time, and grateful to have found a properly workable regime that builds a firm health foundation, but I feel a bit bewildered – that I only just started something and suddenly everything changed.  A bit upsetting.  I thought my days and mind were to be occupied with off-grid tiny-house-ness, instead of which I’ve been mastering the routines and machinery of Gerson health principles.

I have found one or two profound changes in how my body works, with all the de-toxing.

One that I find hard to put into words.  I only noticed it when Hebe played a wonderful song today and I felt like dancing.  I always used to love dancing – it was a joy to me; but gradually over the last few years I couldn’t dance anymore; like my body just didn’t want to dance, couldn’t dance.   But today, unexpectedly, the music danced in me, in my body, again.  I remember one time a nutritionist saying to me about de-toxing the liver, that some people’s livers are just held together by accumulated grot, and they can be a bit fragile after de-toxing, because the liver gets a bit flimsy – needs milk thistle to re-build it.  What it felt like, today, was that the cells of all my tissues had been insulated in grot, and now they are getting cleansed out, they are clear enough for the music to get in and dance in them again.  As though my cells could hear again.  That may sound dodgy, but it’s what it felt like.

The other change is that since forever I have relied on the glorious combo of tea, sugar, white flour and fat to make me stronger than I really am, leaned on its energy spikes to help me do everything that needed doing.

With all that sluiced thoroughly out of my system, my energy is zingy and bright, but also somewhat fine – not heavy duty.  I can’t keep slogging on with things like I used to.  The other day I tackled the typing up of the church council minutes – it takes ages – and by the time I’d done I was so tired I just crawled into bed.  And, I find where I was travelling further and further into a withdrawal from everyone, just basically wanting to be left alone, I’m feeling a need to be near the people I love – just in their aura, in their company.  Where we each had our own living pod in this household, I’ve crept back into the Badger’s pod, his high-in-the-clouds garret, to be near him – even when he isn’t there.  

I spent ages wondering whether to post all this.  Somehow this blog, which always had my thoughts but judiciously filtered, seems to have strayed into very private territory.

This is an odd journey.

It seems, Komorebi is going to be a praying, peace-soaking, talking, chilling, healing space more than a leave-everything-behind living space.   It lives up to its name.  Each time I have been there in these soggy days, I have marveled at the light-through-trees dappling the wooden walls, the sense of lightness and calm, its quietness and serenity.  It is full of presence, ready for what is emerging.  Its joy transfixes me whenever I stand inside.

As always – in this situation, in life generally, in everything – I think the secret is in owning less.  The less one owns, the more one slips easily between one context and another, like a cat found curled up now on this sofa, now on that chair.   The less one owns, the more realities emerge.  It’s as though possessions peg a person down into definitions and attachments, adhering personas to the living soul.

That’s enough thinking for one day.

And you?  What do you think?

A sort of plan.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately.  Heheh – possibly nothing new.

I read this article by John Michael Greer, basically about life as we know it dying.   As always, I watch the criminalization of ordinary people trying to protect by protest the Earth, home of all of us, against the aggressive aggrandizement of big business and the unscrupulous self-interest of what Edward Snowdon calls “the political class”.  And I watch the present government in the UK turn its back on people who struggle with poverty and disability, and on the heritage of the English countryside that is essential for wellbeing – the trees that protect against drought, flood and wind; the wilderness that cleans the air.

I have participated in little public protest throughout my life – some against fox-hunting, against animal testing and against the promotion of formula milk in poor parts of the world by Nestlé, but not much.  The paths I have chosen have been, in a quiet way, alternative – seeking (on and off) the homegrown, the organic, the vegan, the free and the wild.  I raised my children to think where the things they bought and the food they ate came from – who made it, who suffered for it, who benefited from the purchase.   I’ve tried to support small family businesses and keep my footprint on Earth small.   And in my writing I’ve tried to do the verbal equivalent of serving up good food on the plates of my family: I’ve offered the fare of goodness, the fruit of the Spirit, for the ingestion of my readers imaginations and the nourishment of their souls.  But I have to admit, I’ve done little that makes any difference.

Towards the second half of last year, I began to feel a new season in my soul.  My inclination for the quiet, the peaceful and the beautiful – the wild, the gentle, the kind, the happy and the left-to-be – developed into a raging hunger.    Last year, as in so many years, I took on more work than I felt comfortable with to earn money that went out as fast as it came in, and summer days by the sea, beautiful winter sunsets, came and went unheeded while I sat holed up with a computer.

Desperate for the company of trees and birds and wood smoke and quietness, I made a horrible hole in our finances to instigate Komorebi.

At the same time I began to feel really sick and tired of religion.  The company of Jesus is my mainstay, and the Spirit of God is my life and breath – but the rules and exclusions, the dogmas and doctrines, the organisations, institutions, tribalism and antagonism just don’t do it for me anymore.  At all.   

Then as this year began, came something new.   I have a mole on my lower leg which could potentially be a melanoma, that I decided I must have removed – I’ve an appointment for this for a few days time.   That’s generally straightforward, but as I’ve worked in a hospice and gotten old enough to have a number of acquaintances die by now, I’m well aware that melanoma can be something of a runaway horse.  It just depends.   And that concentrates the mind.   It makes me ask myself, what if this takes off and I end up dead in six months?  It makes me ask myself, at fifty-six, with my future (like everyone’s) uncertain – what do I want?  Not to get or to have, but what do I want to be and to do?

I realized that straight away I need to sort my health out: stop living in denial with all the destructive self-indulgences that perpetuate my agonizing acid reflux, fibromyalgia, depression, tiredness, stiffness, insomnia and obesity, and will one day end in vascular disease, diabetes and cancer.   So I blew the dust off Charlotte Gerson’s book and made a start, and I feel unrecognizably better.  I’ve lost more than a stone, I sleep well and all the comprehensive pain has melted away.  Next I made that appointment to get this mole sorted out.

Yesterday, sitting in church, listening to the beautiful music, looking up at the incense smoke rising up through the sunbeams against pale stone, what I wanted arose into clarity in the same way as the smoke rising into the light.

For now (and maybe there is only ever now), I want to be happy.  I don’t want to run anything, organize anything or argue about anything.  I don’t want to be on any committees or administer anything.  I just want to be happy.  For the rest of my life.  I want to take each day quietly and peacefully – loving, helping, chatting, eating, sweeping, walking, washing, cooking, being.  There’s nowhere I want to go, nothing I want to accomplish.  There’s another book I may write some day, but that will hatch in time.

I have no desire to die and no desire to live either.  I would be happy to die in six days or six weeks or six months or six years or thirty years.  Whatever.  That’s fine and I feel comfortable with any option.  What is important to me is to live a beautiful life.   

My Badger is a remarkable man.  When we came out of church I said to him, is it okay if I just do that?  Just pootle along earning what I need to get by, and other than that do, basically nothing; just be, just be happy?  And he said yes, that’s entirely fine with him.

So that’s my plan.   As of yesterday, I resigned from trying and struggling and took up my new occupation of just living.   I think I was always too small and too insignificant to change the world, but I’m hoping that my happiness will add to the sum of its future wellbeing.  

Today I read this quote from Roger Ebert:

“Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs. No need to spell them out. I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

That sort of thing.