Round and Rugged

Sophia Green
AP Lit
transcendentalist essay

Round and Rugged

It started with female problems.

Or well, that’s what I told my 8th grade gym teacher because he was a he and if you started to say the word “cramps” he would cringe and give you whatever you wanted. The truth was I just forgot my gym clothes.

Walt Whitman once wrote, “Tenderly will I use you curling grass”. I’m not sure if my use of the great, often overlooked stretches of green where what the poet intended, that phrase is the essence of what I learned that day.

We were supposed to be playing golf. All twenty students in my class lined on the far field of the middle school, growing hands clumsy around golf clubs. The metal handles caught hard streaks of yellow light in the sun. For weeks I’d been tired, sleep hitching in the back of my thoughts and in the near constant headaches. The brightness wasn't helping. So I went off to the side behind the putters and laid down in the grass.

Any positive adjective you could skim from the top of your mind would do to describe what came next.

I could feel the sun soak into the thin skin of my eyelids. I could see the it turn my vision red with purple blobs of shifting clouds. The grass was cool and coarse under my arms, the chatter and wind swung me into the point between sleep and wakefulness.

Soon enough the bell rang and I blinked back to reality. The funny thing about laying in the sun is that when you open your eyes everything is black and white for a little while, like you just came back from some far, far away place.

To my amazement, my headache was gone.

  This was the beginning of a long line of memories that led me to conclude that for all the stacks of pills and complicated orders of chemicals in modern medicine the best cure is often found in nature.

  When I first discovered the seemly magical properties of lying in the grass I had a whole slew of undiagnosed health problems. Iron deficiency, lyme disease, Hypothyroid. The list was long enough that I had started poking jokes that I may be secretly inbred.

Sure, I popped enough advil in those years to most likely cause premature liver deterioration, but what really helped me was being outside. Whether it was a stomach ache or a throbbing behind my left eye, I’d come home from school, take off my shoes and flop on the ground until I felt better.

  There was this giant old willow on the edge of my neighbor's property. I use to burrow into the moss that patched around it roots and just rest, watching the occasional ant skitter over a fallen leaf. I’d procrastinate my return to society for good chunks of time, so much so that my mom came looking for me on more than one occasion.

It always helped. I tried doxycycline, an army of different supplements, thyroid hormones and adderall. But nothing made me feel better than the trees and the grass and the ocean and the rain. “Simplify, simplify, simplify,” indeed.

  I wasn't the only one. I currently have a dog named Skyler, whom I frequently make squeaky noises at and profess my love to. I treated his predecessor Rufus the much in the same way. We got Rufus when I was two so I really don’t remember my life before him. When my beloved fluffball (one of his many nicknames, albeit not my most original) was eight we discovered he had nose cancer.

  The animal hospital suggested radiation therapy, a treatment which would have exuberant fees, require the dog to be sedated and quarantined for days, and may not even work. It was less than appealing to say the least. However, for a number of years we had been going to a holistic (all natural) veterinarian. When Rufus went in for a checkup, the doctor gave him one of his “magic potions” as we called them. It came in a little black bottle and was made of unpronounceable herbs. It had to be mixed in water and squirted up poor Rufy’s nose. This entirely unpleasant experience that mostly fell to my Mom.

Rufus lived for another two years because of that magic potion.

I have a friend who’s a yoga master. Her name is Sasha, she’s in her mid thirties and she once  met a guy in the woods whom she dated for three years. That’s all the relevant background information, other than that she’s one of the few people the word “spunky” can be applied to in all seriousness.

Once upon a time in a land of hemp mats and bare-feet, Sasha got sick. It was just a virus, but one she couldn't seem to kick. Antibiotics left her feeling drained and shaking, the more pills she took the worse she seemed to get. So she visited, of all people, an amazonian healer.

  She described him as a large man with dark skin and a white beard that crinkled over his tribal patterned tattoos when he smiled. He’d pried open a brightly color frog’s mouth and used a needle to suck away some of it’s venom. In short, he injected Sasha with the venom in six round circles on her calf. Supposedly it was very painful.

But it worked. Sasha said she’d never felt better in her life. After three treatments, she was back to her usual and very bouncy self.

The examples of nature exceeding the capabilities of modern medicine pile up into a mound roughly the size of Santa Claus following Christmas eve. This may not have been what Emerson, or Thoreau, or Walt were thinking of when they gushed about Mother Nature’s various perfections. But it certainly applies, and I’d like to think that those days I nearly fall asleep in the sun, the transcendentalists would be proud of me.

  Maybe they’re even in the grass beneath me stitching the scattered thing in my bones back together.