Jaime Mathis and The Words

I taught my body to digest meat in my 20's. It turns out that if you aren't fed animal proteins in meat as a kid, your body doesn't produce certain enzymes for doing the job. Meaning, the second I tried a hamburger, my intestines went into emergency evacuation mode and my "adventure" turned gnarly, pronto.   I took this as a personal failing due to my religiously motivated upbringing as a vegetarian. Seventh-day Adventism had screwed me out of the enjoyment of travel through cuisine and I was upset. And motivated. Bone broths and digestive enzyme supplements took over my home after college. I was willing to do whatever it took to reboot my poor, ethically vegetarianized guts. Slowly, my body began to accept meats without violent retaliation. And then I started practicing yoga daily. In and of itself, this would have only supported my meat-quest, but like the questioner I am, I started delving into the philosophy behind the physical movement. For eating me...

The monkey mind is chattering tonite. It's topic of choice, all the paths I could have taken, the people that were close and now flicker in the distance of time and memory. Sometimes, when this mental noise gets stirred, I try to believe I can drown in nostalgia, in the memory of shadows streaking lines across skin that we swore we'd never forget. I try to anchor myself in years and dates, reaching for the weight I imagined existing in 37 years. Truth? I feel more weightless now than I ever did at 21. Somehow the pinpoints of meaning, coming of age, legal drinking, college graduation, marriage, children, a first novel, became grains of sand in an endless glass. What is a life? The machine is whirring, processing, running amok. Beneath all the leapings I witness the spin. Have to smile. Remember how long it felt like the bottom of the well. Until the day when I punched through the concrete of thoughts, fickle feelings, and experienced the bottomless depths of my own damn sou...