Dear friends,
I've started, and ceased starting, this email a few times over the past month. When the weather was surprising (foggy and heavy, as if the sky was falling); when it was mundane (sun and rain spliced throughout the day); when it was notable (so cold our coconut oil turned solid and never melted); and when my knee, which is injured, was at various stages of brokenness and recovery. These are, I suppose, the highlights of my life that I've felt were worth telling my friends about; worth crafting a short and pursed essay around every month or so.
Sometimes, like now, it takes me a while to settleinto writing. Do you know what I mean? I use words every day, and yet the act of distilling myself; letting my mind well into a slow drip of words that contain both who I have been and who I am in the moment, into prose, is one that requires some simmering, some sitting.
There is little I have been doing lately apart from sitting. As you might have known (from social media, typically ), I tore a meniscus about 45 days ago and had a surgery done 33 days in. That makes me 12 days post-surgery, or 12 days (+33) of sitting at home, though the past 12 have been the most delicate, and in the month before the operation I had been functioning as if my knee would heal itself in a linear fashion, or if not face a generally healthward trajectory if left to rest for long enough (spoiler: I was wrong). 12 days sounds so precise; conversationally it could be two weeks, but it is 12 days. When you're in one place, following the same routine (wake up, brush teeth and pee, meditate, leg exercises, make breakfast, eat breakfast, toilet, housekeeping, work, make lunch, eat lunch, coffee, work, leg exercises, sleep) almost to a T, precision, which the body executes, comes naturally to the mind. My dad and I have drummed up and settled into an easy rhythm since the weeks before and following my surgery. Ney has been on a 40-day temple retreat, so the two of us are getting used to each other's company and the minutiae of caring for ourselves, even as we've adopted the roles of him as parent and caretaker, and me as child and invalid.
The thing about being injured is that - it makes you (me?) very much want to be useful, in spite of the physical handicap. 'There are so many things I can still do!' I told myself as I was just getting used to the new angles my body has assumed, 90-degrees in an office chair that I've been wheeling myself around in. Indeed, that's turned out to be true, and my dad and I have become chef and sous-chef; cleaner and sous-cleaner (sous just means assistant, ok?); gardener and sous-gardener; co-ecobrickers; and caretaker and sous-caretaker (he looks out for me, and I look out for myself, in that order). The tasks are never equally distributed (because he does more), but oddly enough I've never felt more involved in our household activities than right now. If you remember my previous email, I wrote about my non-contribution to our housekeeping and chores, and how I was trying to Get My Shit Together then. Well... I think I'm getting there. Who knew it would take a torn meniscus though?
I've really enjoyed it though, this playing house. I used to mind that it was time-consuming, that these were tasks that could be put off, and put off, and put off, until their absence became noticeable. One doesn't have to have a clean floor, healthy and punctual meals, or folded clothes, but it's not really the necessity of the task that I can appreciate now. It's more like how tasks should just be done when they are presented: clothes folded once they've dried; dishes stored after the rack fills up; the contents of the fridge rearranged as they are consumed and replenished. It helps life to roll on, keeps the mind in place. And usually, just having to do them breaks up the monotony of other, more consuming activities - like work, or just scrolling on my phone for too long.
I've especially taken to cooking as of late, which doesn't appear online as often because it just feels much more everyday. My dad and I make something interesting for lunch every day, a result of trying to use the ingredients we have, especially the stuff that's going bad soon, strategically. He does a mean stir-fry, and I figured out a pumpkin and mixed vegetable curry (zucchini, broccoli, carrot, anything more solid really) that hit all the right notes, if I do say so myself. It's really a joy to tinker with food, and to decide what goes into my body. I read an excellent book recently, 'Eat to Beat Disease' by William Li, that's made me much more conscious of what I eat, and willing to take charge of it.
This is also the reason I've been trying, more seriously, to grow food. Besides the impending threat of global food shortages due to climate change, this rabbit hole of 'controlling what I eat' seems to lead, inevitably, to knowing and being close to the soil from which it emerges. But I'll come out and say it - I don't know when buying food will become prohibitively difficult or expensive, so I want to still have food around when that happens. It sounds apocalyptic, but I think it's just logistics. Sometimes I wonder why others don't come to the same conclusion when thinking about a climate-insecure future. But recently, I've also stopped wondering so much. There are too many people, and they (you?) are all too different; I've barely even figured myself out yet.
I leave you with that to end a very overdue email (heh), some food for thought - or not, depending on whether you find this worth thinking about.
All my love,
Hui Ran