In early December of 2023, I got two pieces of news: New York State’s Arts Council was giving me a grant to write about the wilderness of Western New York, and I have a genetic heart valve defect that’s eventually going to require valve replacement surgery.
The heart thing sounds frightening, but it shouldn’t. That is not to say that heart problems aren’t dangerous, just that everyone who is lucky enough to still be alive is going to face their fair share of medical problems. I have heart issues, but it might have been a bad lung, cancer, or diabetes.
What the heart problem reminds me is that I am no longer 20 years old, which is a fact that I probably should have understood 32 years ago when I turned 21, but I’ve been living life like I was 20 this whole time. The problem with living like you are 20 (at least for me) is that you are always crashing. When I hiked, I crashed through the woods, and when I worked, I crashed through my teaching day, and when I slept, I simply crashed.
Now, my heart is telling me that it might be a good idea to amble rather than crash.
Ambling isn’t a bad idea at any stage of life. There is a certain joy to crashing, but you miss things when you do, things that you might have seen if you just ambled.
I think about those moments of exhaustion in the past when I was forced to rest, and the forest put on its slow motion show.
I think about the time I sat reading alone and a pine marten wandered into camp not seeing me because I was motionless. I had never seen one and had always wanted to, but I’d been laughing or talking or walking along the ridge of a mountain crest. All of these are wonderful experiences, but so was cocking my head and watching this nervous animal looking around to see what he could see.
I think about the magic of being outside alone in the backyard at night and seeing a satellite flying by for the first time. No one had told me that you could see satellites, so it took me a minute to realize that what I had thought was Venus was on the move, and without an idea of what it might be, I constructed the kinds of mythologies that kids do, that it was a meteor or a space alien. Finding out what it actually was made the experience no less mystical. The next thing I did was beg my parents for a subscription to Astronomy magazine.
I think about what it was to hike up to a pass in the High Sierra and sit on the crest and simply watch as hawks circled below me and little creatures went about their lives around me.
I think about what a blessing it is to have a heart defect and to listen to its message. Crashing through life can be a pleasure, but ambling can make you aware of the miracles that populate our universe.
It has moved me toward whole-food veganism too, which is something I have always wanted to do. My heart is telling me to slow down and cook and eat differently to bring down my blood pressure. I’ve been a vegan for a month now and love the experience of new foods and a different way of cooking.
So while I am thankful for the grant to write about Western New York, I am thankful too for my many weaknesses, this heart defect just being the newest that I’ve learned about. Each one asks me to see and resee the world and to understand myself and my place in it.
And it turns out that I might have already had a heart attack and not realized it, but more about that in a later post.
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