CONFLUENCE

I have never known change as intimately as in the cycling of the last four seasons. Central to this tower era is the transition of my path from ecological filmmaking and creekwalking, to now finding myself a few seasons deep into studies of the body through the Doctor of Chinese Medicine program at Pacific Rim College.

Granted a moment of illusory stillness in the wake of the new moon and spring equinox, I crack open a book to an oft visited page to read David James Duncan’s words: “I was struck by a boyhood suspicion that rivers and mountains are myself turned inside out.” (My Story as Told by Water). I can feel the rivers I left behind as if I were standing in them still. How they must be laughing at my absurdity as I am just now realizing this ‘new’ path is not the distributary I thought it to be; not leading away from the rivers but rather a tributary flowing further toward the heart of things. The years of building close relations with these bodies of water flow seamlessly into the study of the vascular rivers that nourish every cell of the body. As my role transforms from the restoration of the earth’s wounded arteries to the tending of the internal rivers of my own species, I am observing that how we treat the earth is not unlike how we treat our own bodies.

In Wilms’ Humming with Elephants, Z’ev Rosenberg describes medicine as a meditation on ecology. What are bodies if not expressions of the earth? What is medicine if not an act of tapping into the deep reservoirs of nature’s wisdom? Of devoting our 意 (yì: attention) to observing the red rivers which nourish the valleys of us; the same rivers that show us how to restore our own balance. What if centuries upon centuries of dedicated curiosity and contemplation of both nature, and the nature of the body, formed the essence of the medicine we practice today? This endless meditation on the ecology of our bodies is a way of life as much as a science. And what is a way of life if not an art? To know the unfolding of the body is to know the workings of the universe, for they are of the same fabric. It is here I find myself a river turned inside out, yet again humbled by the interconnectedness of all things.