dental health is mental health
As the season of chaos reigns, are you taking care of you?
A Southern Tribute
There’s beauty in the traditions of the South that cannot be described but merely felt. The ways of honoring the deceased and the respect shown to the family is unparalleled elsewhere in the States. And the ways in which we share in our grief, us Southerners I mean, is comforting, caring, and uplifting in way I did not recall or notice as a child. The silver lining of funerals and the passing of our loved ones is that it brings family and friends together.
Synchronicity
What I’m alluding to, more than my trite experience, is the times in our lives we have found meaning from happenstance. The correlation feels spot on and all the feels hit just right or illuminate something previously hidden in the psyche. That time a song came on the radio that answered the question in your head. When you turned around at the right time to not be mauled. The stranger you shared a laugh with that saved your day. All of the minuscule moments that draw meaning down into the core of us. Synchronicity.
My year of healing in the tetons
According to Garth Brooks’ lyrics, “heartache is healed by the sea.” What if it’s caused by the sea though? Well, by the people of the Sea…ttle. After three harrowing post grad years spent doom scrolling, errr doom applying?, for a “career position” while my industry imploded and the world shut down, I finally achieved a dream—to live in Teton Valley, Idaho.
I rolled into Idaho December 2021 with a battered, bruised, and skeptical soul. Unsure of possessing a loving heart any longer. The night I arrived in Driggs, I hastily began unloading belongings from the back of my RAV4. Nerves are probably responsible for my sleeve catching the corner of an open box and spilling its contents. A sky-blue hand spun pottery mug shattered on the pavement. My favorite mug. A relic acquired from a local artist on Cape Cod during my performance life dancing on stages with my dance partner across the United States. Thoughts of “good luck, a mazel tov moment,” swirled through my road weary brain.
In practice over the following year, the jagged edges of those pottery pieces scattered at my feet revealed themselves back to me each day as the people of the valley generously applied a salve of love and appreciation along the rough edges of my soul. At the time, I did not foresee how the shattering of the mug moment would unfurl as an allegory, an awakening, for my year of healing in the Tetons.