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Dear X

I was just thinking about our conversation and all the trouble this year I've had expressing paleo. I didn't have to convince myself to do paleo because I was sick and at a loss for what I could do to make my life less painful. Paleo freed me from the antibiotics and medicines that only partially mitigated the illnesses I suffered from. It's possible other diets would have also done the trick, but paleo had something else that appealed to me beyond salvation from illness. I didn't really ever read the actual paleo diet books, I read economic anthropology texts like Limited Wants Unlimited Means and rhapsodical works of nature praise like Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry. The idea there is a better way to live that is in line with our heritage as a species resonated with me. It's the idea that I am a human and I should live as one. I think there is immense potential for this, not as a petty diet, but as a philosophy which I have just begun to master. Yes, I have the diet down, but I have so much work to do and the world around me looks like a different and perhaps more frightening place. I more clearly see the constraints we have put upon ourselves that keep us from living as humans. Considering that, whether or not to eat specific foods seems kind of inconsequential. What I am looking to eat is the forest in my yearning rich with fallow deer, golden yellow chanterelles, grouse nestled in gorse, bright ruby red berries sparkling against a blanket of moss. To nourish my body in wind in the pines beneath the shadows of the clouds. When I met Erwan it was just after losing this world of fertile forests and old cities that I lived in for a year. I had also lost the person I had lived in that world with, as well. But in the West Virginian forest running through those thick green glades, I was reminded that it's all still there, that despite the way I live now, I can perhaps reclaim this human heart.

 

Melissa McEwen