Pun fully intended :-)
Dearest Manzanita community,
As some of you know, I injured my ankle a few days ago, during the last mile of my backpacking trip (just slipped on some rocks and fell in a weird way with my foot underneath me as I tried to regain balance- heavy backpack and falling on rocks didn’t help)... And, it turns out it is broken (comminuted displaced fracture of distal fibula descending into ankle joint, for those of you interested) and needs surgery- oy! I've scheduled the surgery for this coming Tuesday, and I am so sorry to say that I probably won't be back in the clinic for a few weeks after that. I will miss you! I will reach out again once I have a sense of what my recovery and transitional schedule will look like, probably in a few weeks from now. In the meantime, please feel free to reach out to Amy Chang, another wonderful acupuncturist at Manzanita, who has so kindly agreed to see my patients while I'm out. Her contact info and bio can be found here. Or, for massage and other kinds of bodywork, feel free to reach out to Maya, Ana Diane, or Inez (who also have contact info on that same practitioners page).
Finally, thank you so very much for all of your support, kind blessings for healing, and so much more- it really means the world to me. I am so lucky to be surrounded by such a supportive and loving community, and so grateful for my connection with each of you!
I’ll leave you with a couple treasured quotes from Ross Gay, which are just under these photos from the otherwise lovely backpacking trip in Desolation Wilderness (with my 81 year old dad- and other wonderful family members, some of whom helped carry me for parts of that last mile!)
Sending you so much love and gratitude,
and blessings for health, healing, joy, beauty, hope, strength, and solace,
Shoshana
From Ross Gay's The Book of Delights
#24: Umbrella in a Cafe (closing paragraph):
"A guy on his way out, after buying his Americano and scooting by my big red bobbing foot, and smiling softly at me, and me at him, looked at the drizzle through the big plate-glass window, put his coffee down, opened his umbrella, put it over his head, picked up his coffee, then realized, I presume, that he was still inside this bakery. (The window was very clean.) I saw him giggle to himself, realizing, I think, what he had done… and so lowered his umbrella and walked quickly out, with a smirk that today I read as a smirk of gentleness, of self-forgiveness. Do you ever think of yourself, late to your meeting or peed your pants some or sent the private e-mail to the group or burned the soup or ordered your cortado with your fly down or snot on your face or opened your umbrella in the bakery, as the cutest little thing?"
And, from his book Inciting Joy:
"But what happens if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and pain are fundamentally tangled up with one another? Or even more to the point, what if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks? Which is to say, what if joy needs sorrow, or what Zadie Smith in her essay "Joy" calls "the intolerable" for its existence?"
We are still in the season of the Heart, the Fire Element.
If you would like to learn more, please check out the "Elements" section on my website here.