Of Crows and Cancer Prevention.

At this point in my life, I am able to do forty pushups but can barely make it through a half hour gentle yoga sequence, body trembling and crumbling while trying to hold the poses, engage the breath.

I have been conditioned into exerting force over my body, building muscle at the expense of Prana, choking breath, stagnating Chi, lacking movement, play, sensuality. This is one of the ways colonization has dug its mechanical tentacles into my body.

Its been three weeks since I have been humbled by a daily yoga and movement practice (dance, Tai Chi…) hips tight and sore, learning again to align my breath with the movements of my physical body, building strength and endurance through slowness, through alignment and grace. It is changing everything.

In the evening one night as we spoke in hushed voices amidst the candle light and the dishes of dinner, a beef heart stew with beets, sweet potato, kale, and assortment of spices, I am reminded by my partner that our body is the land. She reminds me that while we live in the city, unable to easily access acreage and the forest depths in our day to day lives, we can learn to steward our bodies, becoming land protectors of our own ecologies.

Decolonizing through descending into the messy and forgotten realms of the body.

We are here, raw and awakening.

The contents of the basket next to our front door, cold air seeping through the cracks, is as follows:

Three baby socks.

Unpaid parking ticket.

A silver key who’s home lock we know not of.

A dog food scoop.

Two thin scarves (for fashion only).

A few overdue library books.

Loose change and some small burlap satchels we use when selling herbal medicine.

Crows use over two hundred and fifty different calls to communicate to one another.

They have returned to this city, over 2,500 of them, “roosting” as ornithologists refer to this remarkable phenomenon. They mate for life, are highly omnivorous, and used to be killed in massive numbers by local municipalities using dynamite and other explosives due to the fear and superstition they arouse in us humans.

You see them now throughout this old city, perched shoulder to shoulder on the hundred and fifty year old Sycamore trees lining the old cobblestone streets now covered in asphalt, stone mansions and abandoned insane asylums who high stone walls still flank their perimeters. The crows, they fly silently it seems at this time of year, settling in quietly together as they sit high amidst these urban trees, slowly raining nutrient rich guano onto the sleek cars below.

I recently learned through the reading of the shocking, surprisingly holistic, well written and vulnerable book “Anti Cancer, A New Way of Life, by David Servan-Schreiber, M.D., P.H.D.” that the human body creates over ten thousand cancerous cells each day. The majority or all of those defective and isolated cells are detected by our immune systems’s Natural Killer Cells (NK cells) who do not require previous antibody detection to efficiently kill and recycle the nutrients of the cancer or pre-cancerous cell back into the stream of life. This process is so intimate and brilliant, happening around the clock, throughout our entire lives. Natural Killer cells however are suppressed by the presence of of prolonged states of anxiety, fear, and isolation, making this vital task less and less effective. Upon learning this, and the myriad other ways our incredibly intelligent, harmonious, and elegant immune systems are hampered severely by the presence of chronic stress, I was and am inspired to push through my own anger and fear of the current social climate and step into a deeper sense of power and openness. A letting go of my previous co-dependent people pleasing patterns is under foot, crunching as the last remaining orange and brown oak leaves fall to the sidewalks and forest floor, macerated by the boots of young school children running to catch the bus, their sacred breath forming trails of vapor in the crisp morning air.

I call myself back into an embodied way of experiencing this life.

I sing myself back out of the cold and tight trappings of the past shame filled fixations and the false future negotiations happening in my racing mind as I do the dishes.

I dance myself back onto the sexy nature of inhabiting this body.

I am allowing myself to settle in the warm and dry nest of my enoughness.

It is from this place, and this place only that my power resides, where my magnetism and authentic expression lays in wait for my beckoning and outstretched, weathered and aging hands.

I am allowed to relax and enjoy this life.

Gaia says:

“Come sweet son. I need you here with me, for we have much remembering to do”.

I am here Great Mother.

I am listening.