Hi Friend,

"Diseases are often places where origin stories arise - and are contested and reformed," I told my current Origin Stories cohort recently. I realized as I said it not just that it was true, but that it was a wide area that I know a fair amount about, but almost never talk about. It feels pertinent to share this theme of health and illness and origin stories and narratives of dis-ease with you.

Health ‘anomalies’ or disruptions in what a culture thinks of as a 'normal' life journey frequently evoke origin stories - and those origin stories are places of frequent contestation, disagreement, learning journeys, agony, and, sometimes, great healing and peace. They are places where identities get re-formed, families can be re-shaped, and, sometimes, whole cultures are reconfigured.

Over time and across cultures, different physical and mental dynamics (queerness, neurological diversities, depression, anxiety, anorexia, mysticism, overeating, tumors, twins, left-handedness, smallpox, epilepsy) are associated with originating from the gods, from evil spirits, possibly a result of curses, a simple matter of fate/biology/human diversity, a result of environmental harms or nutritional deficiencies, a result of trauma, or seen as gifts to be treasured by the community.

People with such differences have been, in different cultures and times, lifted up as extra-ordinary, saints, or become cast aside and dis-membered from their family/community… and everything in between.

Humans need to make meaning and to create patterns; cultures are ways that we create patterns. That includes the pattern of what is considered to be 'healthy' or 'diseased'. Diseases/abnormalities in the pattern need explanations. Those explanations sometimes push up against the edges of whatever the dominant cosmovision is.

Is queerness just a matter of genetics? Are we just part of the diversity of sexual expression and life? It seems so. Is it also a way of being and seeing the world? Perhaps.

Is a disease to be blamed at the door of the person and their poor self-control (the individualized medical approach); at some kind of intergenerational trauma; or at a societal problem that has become manifest in a particular individual (a common sociological approach)? Is the solution to be found at the end of a vaccine needle, through changing societal structures, or by performing an ancient ritual and/or plant medicine?

And then of course there is the larger question around dis-ease and illness: what is health in a culture that has dynamics within it that are fundamentally diseased? At what point is an epidemic of, say, loneliness, just part of a society? If enough people can't afford their own home and have no guaranteed access to stable housing, what possibilities of social belonging are probable? If the only way we can have enough food to feed our growing population is by destroying our soils and our air, how do we ever feel ok about our place in our ecosystems? Much less become healthy?

Who would be well in a world set up like this?

I've known/experienced/lived out and sometimes even studied these dynamics most of my life, and not from choice. I was born into a family with a long lineage of a combination of sickness, mental illness, neurological divergences, mysticism, and brilliance. There's also been health, but somehow people always talk more about the suffering.... and the brilliance. And the miracles. I come from a very long line of miraculous health stories, many of which include hands-on healing, prayer, stubborn women caring feeding healthy food to their husbands/sons/brothers, and finding 'new' (old?) ways of treating everything from partial blindness to heart disease in ways that were outside of 'medical advise' of the day.

And my grandmother watched two of her four children die before she did: I never felt that life "should" entail children dying after parents. Of course, that happens, and it's generally preferred. But it isn’t promised.

Ain't no guarantee 'round here.

Did growing up around all sorts of differently-shaped people - around a father who was in and out of a wheelchair for most of the time I was in highschool, whose feet became very mishapen even as my body was changing from child to adulthood; of aunts who were in and out of mental health institutions; of an uncle whose body was hunched and limped in odd ways due to regular car accidents, of my own learning disability - make me especially grateful or appreciative of life? Maybe, but that's not what I'm conscious of.

I am aware, instead, at this current vantage point, that this set of experiences led me to be skeptical of narratives and assumptions about continuity as normalcy. That a life should and would look a certain way. I don't assume that to be the case.

It helped me know - not just believe - that diagnoses are not the end of the story. Some things can be healed from. Some are not. Other things are not only 'one' thing - my learning disability/neurological divergence is both one of my greatest gifts and a continual, everyday challenge, impacting all areas of my life. The way my brain works is not a problem. And I know that I often have to create systems, structures, and ways of engaging with others to help other people help me. It's not going to happen on its own.

And it taught me to work with what is, not with some expectation of what should be. I don’t hold chaos and order as strict opposition. I don’t hold productivity and achievement as the pinnacle of human worthiness.

And that continuity is not inevitable.

I've recently re-picked up a book I devoured in college, when I took a medical anthropology class (I was an Anthropology major), called Disrupted Lives. One of many super interesting anthropological books that didn't really make it out of academic circles, it looks at how individual American lives were disrupted by illness, death, infertility, etc. (Another favorite of mine was, Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, about a Hmong family navigating a child's epilepsy. The family's culture held a set of vastly different origin stories and social-place-making for illness than did the Western medical system. That book was very successful outside of academic circles.)

One of the observations that the author of Disrupted Lives makes is that Americans' deep cultural stories of continuity and linearity no longer incorporate the dance with death (and other random forms of disruption); consequently, Americans are surprised or shocked when faced with disruption. Which is a bit ironic given how much change the us brings upon itself and others, all the time.

As if disruption is somehow not going to happen. "Success" (a successful recovery from an illness) is thus "life continuing as it did before."

Which is not always remotely possible. More often, life changes.

It might get better or worse - but mostly, it's different. The person who could always say yes to everyone contracts a serious chronic illness and suddenly can't say yes to anyone. It turns out they were overextending themselves to begin with. They might not have known it. Now what will they do? Continue to play the martyr? Or find a different way of relating?

What's the deeper dynamic at play... and what's the deeper pattern that can be addressed? Not to enable continuation per se. But to enable this next chapter, this next moment, to be met with greater peace.

If you work enough with disruptions, you know that they can and do happen, and you stop being so surprised by them, and that puts you in a much better position to navigate life.

For those of us seeking to be aligned with Earth, we need to understand and engage with sickness and other forms of disruption.

We are indeed starting our next origin stories cohort in a few weeks- there’s been just enough interest. Info webinar coming up soon, so do join us! I didn’t think this thread would show up in our course, and it’s been super generative! Who knows what will emerge in the May/June cohort!

Blessings in all aspects of our collective health and illness, the many spaces in between...