Remembering Wonder

Dear Reader,

Once on a long, rainy car ride north, my then tiny son and I listened to a podcast and learned about Suzanne Simard’s ground breaking research on the “wood wide web”. For the rest of his early childhood my son’s memory of it impacted his ideas about the forest he was so lucky to grow up with in northern Ontario. “They are talking, Mama.” 

Trees, as it turns out, have an intelligent underground network of fungal threads connecting their roots allowing them to communicate, share nutrients, and warn each other of danger. A cooperative world beneath our feet where forests act as a single, intelligent superorganism rather than just individual trees competing for survival. This should really give you pause.

We live on a planet where whales sing songs that travel for miles underwater and lightning can turn sand into glass for a brief moment before disappearing entirely. Where stars we see may not even exist anymore and where grief changes the nervous system and love changes it back. 

And yet.

Most of us spend our days staring at calendars, answering emails, rushing between obligations, and trying to outrun the quiet feeling that life is becoming increasingly mechanical. (Is this life now?) 

I worry sometimes that one of the great costs of adulthood is how profoundly it narrows our attention. Not because we stop caring about wonder, but because survival becomes so damn loud. We are consumed by schedules, productivity, caretaking, logistics, and the constant low (or high) grade pressure of trying to hold it all together. Our nervous system adapts accordingly. It learns to scan for problems instead of noticing magic.

We must resist.

I have been both lucky and created a life where I have spent a lot of time living and working deep in nature, in places where when the wind changes and the smell in the air shifts, your body registers the signal before your brain does. I have always felt the most fully myself in nature, the ultimate grounding force. It helps me to remember because like everyone else, I get consumed by the needs of the day and press on.

But what of the women I orbit around, helping them regain health, joy, a sense of self? Most are functioning at an absolutely extraordinary level while feeling some level of disconnection from themselves. They are managing households, careers, aging parents, children, relationships, changing hormones, the endless invisible labor, and bodies that no longer tolerate chronic depletion the way they once did. By the time you finally pause long enough to ask yourself how you actually feel, the answer is often: a kind of tiredness for which there really are no words. 

I know what you mean, even without the words.

As you reach forward in your journey looking for better health, remember that medicine comes in many, many forms dear Reader. 

Be the person who notices light moving across the floor, the tiniest frog, the smell of the pine needles baked by the sun, and the quiet moment when your body exhales.

We are still very much a part of a living world that operates with astonishing intelligence and beauty so staggering it deserves deep reverence. 

My son said in passing the other day as the air suddenly became metallic, “Smells like lightning”.

Remember.

Dr Kirsten