matrescence: emotional, mental, and spiritual wellbeing
I wrote the essay A little extra something when I lived in Bullaburra, in the Blue Mountains. My children were very young. It took me a good six months and I thought about it day and night. In every spare moment, when my children were asleep or in someone else’s care, I sat in my cramped study overlooking the wild green Bullaburra gully with its raucous flocks of sulphur-crested cockatoos, dreaming and writing, writing and dreaming, urgently. ...Then when I finished it in August 1994, I didn’t publish it. I had no idea who might be interested. I’ll never forget that Maureen Minchin kindly read every word and phoned me to say she really liked it. After we hung up, I shouted out with happiness into the bright gully air. This is an extract.
The roots of flesh and tides of soul entwine in the land between lands
The human body is like a magnificent eucalyptus which accommodates seasons of flood, bushfire, and drought.
Until death we are animated not only by cycles of growth and decrease, but by a dynamic correction in defiance of the destructive powers which can act randomly upon or from within all biological systems.
This majestic defiance is the healing impulse, that dance of the interconnected regenerative powers of bone marrow, hormones, and the immune and neurologic processes of a human being. Shrouded in these physiological systems is a mystical land between lands, a verdant matrix of psyche and body, a mangrove where the roots of flesh and tides of soul entwine, dark and wet and gravid. This is the germinative human core, a fragment of universal womb buried in body with immense potential for renewal.
This is where our complex and malleable genetic template is subjected to the infinitely varied forces of environment, psyche, hormones, enzymes, so that genetic expression can only sometimes be predicted. This is where the cancer, the gastric ulcer, the schizophrenia, the diabetes, the depression – the many manifestations of wounded or disrupted body and mind – are rooted.
Pychic and organic injury are opposing lips of the same laceration. They share roots in this land between lands. This is a tidal land, home of the gods, a shadowy swamp where fate and flesh collide.
In my work as a doctor I have tracked the psyche across the terrain of body, tracked the body across the wind-swept wilderness of soul. I have watched for the contour of culture, the way great political and social movements, terrible and systemic cruelties and injustices and power structures and our profoundly disrupted relationship with this small blue planet shape our inner landscapes.
Each of our cells is bathed in the hormones and immune factors and neuronal endings of psyche and family and society, every emotion is a bodily event. Psyche is a mysteriously beautiful blossom on the branch of body: soul too draws up the sap of the earth. Illness is born out of contexts as impenetrable, knotted, complicated, multi-layered as the growth rings of the ancient Huon pines in wild takayna forests.
We can only stand with reverence before the mystery of illness and offer up our love.
