by BK Loren
It happens to me also with land (my body is mostly earth). Though my childhood and the ground I walked then seem so vivid—the detailed scents of summer, the way birds flew up in bunches and turned all at once, like a living cloud exhilarated by sky—I can’t recall, in detail, the hills I walked a year ago, the same hills that now lie beneath the new shopping mall. Though I spent the past five spring seasons watching a pair of mated bald eagles fledge their young in a tree that stood where the food court is now, I can remember it only vaguely. The place seems as if it has always been as it is now: food court for eagle, and my mother’s body seems always to have been crooked.
It is this gap between ideal nostalgia and the present time that makes loss palatable. I struggle to suture the gap and restore what I know to be true.
I struggle to close the distance, sometimes, even in myself. Throughout my early adolescence, when I was studying martial arts, I learned that any truly traditional wushu requires a practitioner to imitate the movements of wild animals. Partially through that study, I came to feel myself as inextricable from the natural world. I recall my first teacher’s voice repeating to me a phrase that, these days, has become a cliché: “become the animal,” and now, “become the tennis ball,” “become the guitar”—become that which you seek to master. These days, people say it mockingly. But the superficiality of pop culture doesn’t change what has been true of Chinese wushu for centuries: There’s no way to master a form unless you become not only the animal, but the earth beneath the animal’s feet, the elements within which the animal lives—water, metal, air, fire, earth—the seasons, the sounds, the emotions, the parts of your own body related (in Chinese medicine and martial arts) to the essence of that animal. Unless your body becomes inextricable from the earth and all that surrounds it, you can’t truly succeed in wushu. You may be a good fighter, or you may move beautifully. But if you practice wushu fully, it creates a weave between you and the natural world that, unlike Penelope’s cloth, cannot be done during the day and undone during the night. Though I no longer practice martial arts regularly, wushu was the background of my life from such an early age that it’s almost impossible for me to separate myself from the land that surrounds me.
My ability to spar or to do any of the more external aspects of wushu was challenged, however, when I was in my early thirties. In the span of a few years, my body (the same one I believed would live forever) went haywire. My endocrine system, which doctors defined as “the time clock of the body,” turned on and off on whim. My adrenal glands worked overtime just to keep me awake, and a cup of coffee caused me to drop into a deep sleep. Language abandoned me intermittently, leaving me for weeks on end struggling even to speak. Though I was only thirty-two, I became postmenopausal within a few months, but at the same time, my body was acting as if it were carrying a child. I was lactating. Doctors were befuddled. The menopause was irreversible, they said. They told me my heart was at risk. They told me my muscle tone would decrease. They warned me of fatigue, loss of memory, and premature osteoporosis. They projected the likelihood of early aging.
In addition to seeking the help of Western, allopathic doctors, I had regular treatments from a doctor of Chinese medicine in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The Chinese doctor charged me ten dollars per session, and each session varied from fifteen minutes to over an hour. He held my wrist in his hand, taking the pulses of my qi meridians, then he scrawled some Chinese words on a pad while his wife hand-chopped herbs, weighed them on an ancient scale (the kind of scale used as an emblem of justice), packaged them in large bundles, and handed them to me. They cost me three bucks. When I asked the Chinese doctor what the diagnosis was, he shrugged as if I’d never understand.
But I persisted. “I know a little bit about Chinese medicine,” I said. “Can you tell me the Chinese diagnosis?”
As he was taking notes, he said, “The wind enjoys your body.” That was it, my diagnosis. The wind enjoys my body.
This was similar to something I had heard before, from my first teacher, too. He’d been raised in China in the forties, and according to him, it was taboo to practice any internal martial art (nei gong) in bad weather. It was important to always practice in a warm, well-ventilated place, free of wind, drafts, and extreme dampness. For a man who appeared so tough and demanding of himself and others, this seemed contradictory to me. Like any teenager, I abhorred hypocrisy. I ignored his bullshit warnings. I practiced nei gong outside in the pouring rain, “toughening” myself up. If I was teaching a martial arts class and I had to go from the kwoon (Chinese martial arts studio) to my car, I didn’t wear shoes, even if four feet of snow covered the ground. I liked to face this kind of easy adversity. My teacher’s tender-footed approach to weather puzzled me; maybe it even pissed me off a little. He bundled up unnecessarily to protect himself from any kind of weather. His weakness made me cringe.
Although the language barrier between the Chinese doctor and me was even greater than the one I had with my Chinese teacher (the doctor spoke Cantonese, and I had only learned a bit of Mandarin), I struggled through. “I don’t understand why I’m having all these problems,” I told him. “I’ve practiced nei gong for decades. I’ve done all kinds of things to keep myself healthy.”
The doctor looked at me like I was an idiot. It was clear my question had pissed him off. “You think you practice nei gong it make you superman?” he said. “The nature world outside is bigger than you are. Out of balance out there, out of balance in here.” He tapped my wrist.
He helped me understand what I thought I already knew: Internal martial arts and acupuncture are designed to balance and heal the body. In doing so, they also recognize a give-and-take between the human body and the natural world. Unlike Western approaches, they are not really designed to conquer the ailments of the body so much as to return the body to a more “natural” state, whatever that state may be. (Sickness and dying are both natural at some point.)
In my case, allopathic doctors were surprised to the point of fearing a lawsuit (something that never crossed my mind) when after a few months of acupuncture they tested me and declared that my “irreversible menopause” had reversed. This diagnosis came from the result of their own lab tests. My FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) level went from 100 to 18, the reverse direction FSH levels are supposed to travel during menopause. The reversal was temporary. It lasted only about a year. But that year allowed me the time I needed to accept the huge changes that had previously shocked my body into complete menopause in only a few months.
By this time in my life, I had begun to realize how impossible it was for anyone to “master” traditional Asian martial arts. They are embedded in a culture, and once removed from that culture, they become something altogether different. Like the relationship between the human body and the environment, the products of a culture are intrinsically part of that unique world. Remove them, and you dissect them into unhealthy parts. The American teenager in me wanted to push myself to every physical and mental limit I could imagine. It’s a great American fantasy. We see the natural world (and the human body, which is part of the natural world) as something to be conquered. We see a mountain, we want to climb it—or level it, or build houses on it. We, as Americans, believe we can master our physical environment. By combining the rigors of martial arts with the attitudes of my own culture, I had turned my relationship with my body into an SUV commercial. I was splashing through rivers, braving the wind and rain, thumbing my nose at the snow. If my body was in pain, I ignored it; if it was sick, I worked through it; if it was tired, I had a cup of coffee or three.
The particular combination of my own personality traits and the traits of the culture within which I was raised had created a time bomb in my body. But when my endocrine system went haywire, I was forced to accept a balance I thought I’d embraced all along.
The human body is inextricable from its surroundings, and there’s far more to the story of one’s health than lifestyle and genetics. It’s a trick that
’s been played on us throughout the past few decades. As scientists have found that more and more terminal illnesses and neurological disorders spring from environmental toxins, we have, as individuals, been sold the idea that if we get ill “it is a gift” and we need to learn to interpret how we have “invited” this illness into our lives. Clear up the emotion, eat the right foods, and (we are led to believe) we just might live forever.
There’s an arrogance to this “spiritual” approach to illness that seems to escape many people. We—our bodies—are an integral part of a system that is being destroyed from the outside in by the same forces that have sold us the idea that our illnesses are “our gifts.” If we can be convinced of that, we will spend our time and money analyzing every minuscule aspect of our diet and lifestyle, which leaves very little time to look at the problem as a whole: the environment is being devastated and we (our bodies) are the environment.
I am haunted by the fact that the original name for pesticides was “endocrine interrupters,” and that we only began using them after WWII because they were left over from the biological weapons we had invented and used on our enemies. I am pissed off by the fact that popular literature on cancer tends to overlook the World Health Organization’s report that states very clearly, “At least 80 percent of all cancer is attributable to environmental influences.”2 In this study, the word environmental refers to “everything we interact with or consume that is not freely chosen.” It is placed in contrast to lifestyle, which refers to “that which we choose to consume: breathing air as opposed to eating dessert, drinking water as opposed to dipping snuff.” The martial artist in me wants to be able to fight when I read that “cancer rates continue to rise sharply and a flood of synthetic, hormone-mimicking chemicals continues to exert wide ranging effects on people and wildlife,” but I’m uncertain where and who my opponent is.3
It no longer surprises me that the girl who was my best friend when I was a child developed, in her early thirties, some of the same “idiopathic,” multifaceted symptoms I developed: premature ovarian failure, substantial adrenaline loss, a breakdown of the immune system. We were, by then, living worlds apart from one another, connected only by memories we held dear, and those memories held zero awareness of any subtle, environmental violence combing our bodies.
I worry that when health ailments befall us, we often believe they are either “our fault” or “our fate.” But this is part of the imbalance. It is what allows us to push the limits of the land (our bodies) and to overshoot our natural resources (our bodies).
Out of balance out there. Out of balance in here.
It is empowering to believe we can stay in good health by making the right choices in lifestyle. It is equally empowering, however, to realize that these choices also extend to the natural world, the environment. Paying attention to lifestyle and genetics means little unless we also find the strength to fight against the degradation of the environment, to be aware of the imbalances forced upon it, to be sensitive to the balance we are affecting with every choice we make.
FIGHTING INNOCENCE
Three months after I was born, a massive fire struck the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility. Firefighters made many attempts to extinguish the blaze with carbon dioxide. The attempts failed. The fire burned through the night. Bits of plutonium, a pyrophoric substance, danced above the mountain horizon like giant sparklers rising through columns of black smoke. Toward the early morning hours, firefighters gave in to an action they had tried to avoid, and some thirteen hours after the fire began, the facility and several hundreds of acres of earth were saturated in water used as a last resort to douse the blaze. Although officials assured the public that any escape of the highly carcinogenic plutonium into the atmosphere was negligible, “there was no reliable equipment operable at the time to monitor the amount of radiation that actually went out the stacks. Not until a week after the fire were working gauges installed. Then, in a single day, emissions registered sixteen thousand times the permissible level—a full fifty years’ worth of the allowable quota.”4 No one addressed the contaminated water as it began sinking into the local water table.
This was the first of several major fires at Rocky Flats.
Twenty-odd years after that first fire, I sat on the ground outside the high security fence, listening to Bonnie Raitt, Daniel Ellsberg, Dr. Helen Caldicott, Jackson Browne, and many others. They had gathered on a makeshift stage to draw attention to the plant’s dangers. Among other things, they warned that Rocky Flats was the only nuclear weapons facility that had been built in a residential area. In addition to this, records indicated that levels of airborne plutonium were higher at Rocky Flats than in any of fifty other U.S. stations. Dust samples downwind of the plant (where I had lived as a child) showed plutonium concentrations 3,390 times what might be expected from fallout.5
What the residents (my family and friends) around Rocky Flats nuclear facility knew was that the plant manufactured “triggers” for nuclear bombs; what we didn’t know was that the word trigger was a euphemism, conjuring, as it does, the simple metal piece hanging from the grip of a gun. But a nuclear trigger is the gut of a bomb, a hockey-puck-sized disk loaded with enough plutonium in and of itself to effect a blast the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Placed in today’s sophisticated weapons, this trigger would effect a blast six hundred times that magnitude. Rocky Flats, the facility in my “backyard,” as my father proudly pointed out, manufactured somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy thousand of these nuclear triggers before it closed.
Currently at Rocky Flats,6 workers are seeking a way to clean up the place and transform this tainted ground into six thousand acres of “hiking trails.” Some problems they are facing: to find a way to drain some 4,060 gallons of plutonium solutions from leaky pipes and tanks (they have been leaking into the soil for decades); to locate approximately 1,100 pounds of plutonium that remains lost in the ductwork during production (this is enough plutonium to create 150 bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki); to clean thirteen “infinity” rooms—rooms that, when tested for radiation, cause the instruments to point to “infinity” on the gauge. In the process of accomplishing all this, they must move sixteen thousand pounds of high-grade plutonium through Denver and across the country to South Carolina.7
I wonder who will hike the trails when they are completed, if the interpretive signs will tell visitors they are walking only a few feet above infinity.
FIGHTING TIME
As I have been writing this essay, the latter part of fall has been turning to winter. I sit at my desk and look up toward a window that opens to the world. There are times when the light blazes through so harshly that the letters on the screen of my computer disappear in the glare. I keep typing, and as my pupils soak to black, full of light that blinds me, I see, occasionally, the silhouettes of hundreds of Canada geese flying overhead. Their heavy, winged bodies intersect the small window in a geometry of flight that flickers like a candle, its flame nearly out, then surging, the wings of the wild birds, bending, extending. When this happens, I sometimes stop writing and go outside. There is a small parcel of land behind my home. It is not my land, but there has been little else in my life that seems more like something that cannot be taken from me. That place is like a child, I suppose. Others might look at it and believe it was a pitiful, small thing—some fifty acres of tall grass and weeds, a pond, some cattails, and the dusty lunar landscape of a prairie dog village with its mounds and craters. I stand there, and as the Canada geese cross the sky, the sun goes out for a few seconds in the same way it darkens and chills when a heavy cloud passes. The sound of the geese falls around my ears like jazz. I can hear not only their nasal honking, not only the brush of their wings through air, I can also hear the creak of their joints as their wings pump up and down. I allow myself to fall into the sheer stimulation of every one of my senses: my eyes full of flight; my nose full of damp, snow-melted grasses; the wind touching my skin like fingers; my ears selecting the s
pecifics of sound, my voice, a laughter I cannot hold back.
Recently, I have learned a developer wants to turn this land into a plot of convenience stores. Although martial arts have taught me how to walk away from a fight, they have also taught me that sometimes, you can’t walk away. For me, now is that time. It’s not that I abhor convenience. It’s that I feel slathered in it. It no longer feels like a privilege, but like a burden, like something so heavily out of balance that it has invaded me, the body I have sought to care for and whose balance I have finally learned to maintain.
One of my wushu teachers once told me that one goal of martial arts was to learn to embrace the world with all your might, but when the time comes to let it go, to let it go; however, I have never reached this ideal. It still gets under my skin, this world. I want the imperfect grace of it all to pour over me. I want to swoon when I see beauty, to cower when I feel fear, to remain strong enough to allow every emotion to weaken me. I want to wrap myself around these moments, squeeze them for their beauty, their grace, their ugliness, their sorrow.
At night, when I fall asleep, I sometimes imagine the backhoes digging into the fleshy hip of that land. They are superimposed on the image of my mother’s ravaged body, bent and torn by a disease whose cause was preventable, but not by her. Although I know the natural world may continue to renew and restore itself without my intervention, the fight I feel in my bones is not only about restoring the natural world. It is about healing myself, my loved ones. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the vastness of it all, by a momentum outside my body that seems unfathomable. Then I remember that I know what it takes to fight a good fight. It know that rage must fade away and give itself up to a steady, constant compassion, a focus not on what I choose to fight against, but what I choose to fight for, to cling to, to love. Because sparring, doing forms, meditating, they all share in common the incredible strength it takes to move from one point to the next with as much clarity, integrity, compassion, and unmitigated intention as possible. They have created, in me, the simple ability to stay the course, to know when it is necessary to fight, and when that time comes, to fight with the soft and fluid stillness of a river.