“Where are those herbs I brought home from the cafe?  I’m trying to find stuff to shove up the chicken butt,” I explain to Bob as he watches me scramble about the kitchen. 

“There seems to be a lot of that going around today,” he remarks as he takes a long sip of bone broth.

I pour olive over the chicken, sprinkle some spices and salt on top, and put herbs, garlic and some limes leftover from our music night cocktails into the cavity.  Then I turn my attention to the pile of summer squash on the counter.  I shoot a glance over at at the clock on the oven.  “It’s 9am!  Bottoms up dear,” I coo to my husband.  “Enema time!”  Bob sighs and heads off to the other side of the house.  I turn my attention to chopping the squash.

Dark humor will have to get us through today, when he gets his dreaded prostate biopsy.  But as I think on that, my spirit floats up in the air and watches me move around the kitchen from a distance.  I watch myself dress the squash with herbs and olive oil so it can marinate while we’re gone.  I put the chicken in the oven and set it to turn on later in the day.  When we come home, dinner will be cooked.  It’s almost instinctive –  my motions, my calculations, the way I work backward, thinking about how tired we’ll be when we get home, when we’ll want to go to bed, when we’ll want to eat, how much unwind time we’ll need before hand, how much time it’ll take to roast the chicken, to broil the vegetables.  The way a witch might perform a spell, the way a religious leader might perform a ritual…is the way I cook dinner.

A part of me used to believe that a day like this wouldn’t come, that the nourishing food alone would protect us from the truly hard times, that the dark humor we’re relying on this morning wouldn’t be necessary.

I remember those early days of the regenerative food and farming movement — when we truly believed that the right food could heal everything.  If everything we ate was organic, grass-fed, macrobiotic…If every medicine was herbal or homeopathic, these things, like the need for a prostate biopsy, wouldn’t happen.

I remember the cruelty of the movement as well….The way our beliefs about the purity of our food and alternative medicine were so sacred, we criticized and condemned those who fell ill, pointing out how, it wasn’t fate, it wasn’t the turn of life, but a personal failure to adhere to a perfect diet and alternative medicine protocol.  When Bob developed type 1 diabetes from out of the blue, members of the movement lectured us about how he must have been drinking milk from a cow with the wrong genetics. I was admonished for allowing him to eat dried fruit.  Someone else instructed me that I should never permit a carbohydrate to cross our table.  

As a writer and speaker in the movement, it felt that we couldn’t admit publicly to a health failing without receiving an admonishment about a dietary failing.

There are definitely cases where food truly has been toxic.  The movement called attention to the poisoning by glyphosates, to the health impacts from using growth hormones in animals, to issues with antibiotic resistance. That’s a large justification for why food became a religion for me.  Eating as close to Mother Earth as possible became a way to express my reverence for her, a way to safeguard the land, and to ensure the health and safety of my family.

But it only works to a point.  In the twenty years I’ve been active in this movement, I’ve learned some deeper lessons about health and well-being.  Sometimes illness finds us because there are deeper issues within ourselves we need to resolve.  Sometimes illness is an opportunity for a growth journey.  Sometimes it’s just a natural part of the life cycle.  

But always, there remains opportunity for happiness, even when there is sadness and fear.    

And that’s where the chicken dinner comes in.  

Bob and I don’t know what today will bring.  It will be a few weeks before we find out the results.  It could be there’s no problem at all, or it’s a very manageable problem, or we’ve got a very big problem.  

But tonight when we come home, as the chicken roasts and the vegetables broil, we’ll sit out and watch the sunlight as it dances across the fields and forests.  We’ll toast the day’s end with a celebratory tipple and listen to the sapsuckers, the song sparrows, the scarlet tanager and the robins that surround the house.  Then we’ll come inside, take dinner out of the oven, and enjoy a delicious meal with our kids.  And there will be deep happiness in that.  

And in that moment, food truly will heal us. 

The Hearth of Sap Bush Hollow podcast happens with the support of my patrons on Patreon.  And this week I’d like to send a shout out to my patrons Melissa Johnson, and Meg Maurer.

Thank you, folks!  I couldn’t do it without you!  If you’d like to help support my work, you can do so for as little as $1/month by hopping over to Patreon and looking up Shannon Hayes. By the way, have you been a patron for a while?  Please be sure your credit card information is up to date on Patreon, so that your payments continue.  Thank you!