Restoring Goodness

Steve Merli is a healer. I first got to know Steve during an expedition of the Landmark Trees Project. I was with him, Richard Carstensen, John Caouette, and Sam Skaggs on Sam's former boat, the Arcturus.  We were coming back from Upper Hoonah Sound, where we had cataloged one of the last major swaths of large Sitka Spruce forests on the Tongass. Steve watched me as we rounded the southern shores of Admiralty Island and asked me, "Marc, do you get headaches? Do you have one right now?"

I did have a headache, so bad I thought I was going to start crying. And I had been having headaches almost daily since adolescence. As I told Steve about my headaches and the TMJ that caused them, he nodded.  He told me that he had found that people like me that clenched their jaw were storing a lot of energy there for a reason. There was something that needed to be said to ourselves or others that we were holding in. He did bodywork at the time and said he could work on me. But I would need to be in a safe space, because once he started working on me, stuff would start coming out. And I would need to be prepared to deal with it.

I filed that information away and soon forgot about it. Months later, I was totally fed up with grinding my teeth and night and waking up every day with an eye-watering headache. I thought I would try acupuncture. I went to see Suzy Cohen who she deftly needled my jaw and head. I had never had acupuncture but I was intrigued by its potential to relieve my pain. Sure enough, I felt relief afterwards from my tension. But I was also flooded by the blackest of griefs. I would go back to my home (which was coincidentally Sam's sailboat, the Arcturus) and weep. Jessica, who I was then dating, had no idea of what to do with this. And I didn't either. It just came and came and was so raw and elemental I couldn't even name it.

Months later I remembered the conversation with Steve and decided to go see him. He worked on me, giving me massage and working on some of the points in my head and jaw.  And he would let me express my emotions.  I would be there on the table, moaning and weeping, and feeling a bit strange about the whole thing. But in time, the headaches lessened and the emotional ballast gradually fell away.  I still get headaches once in a while, during times of acute stress.  And I wear a  mouthguard at night to stop me from grinding my teeth to dust. But I feel like my body has said what it needed to say and there is much less tension in my jaw.

Recently Steve told me he left doing bodywork and now works with trauma victims. I was intrigued. Steve was such a good masseuse. I knew he must be onto something good if he left his old work for something else. He told me he'd been working with something called Somatic Experience (c). I started to think maybe he could help me again. I ran into him at Costco one day and started telling me about my experience on the Juneau Icefield. He said he'd like to read my story. I sent him my blog. After reading it, he called me and said he thought he might be able to help me.

Steve Merli, in his studio on Seward St.

I've now seen Steve three times. I'm not exactly sure what happens when I see him, but I know it is powerful. I feel like I am coming into myself gradually each time we meet. We've talked a lot about the theory behind his work.  And every session, he lays hands on me, and he helps my body deal with the traumatic response that it is still holding withing itself.

It's only recently occurred to me that I've had several instances of trauma recently, many of which I've written about in this blog. The accident on the icefield, the injury to my shoulder, and my recent surgery are all traumatic experiences. My body did what it was supposed to do in those situations, and triggered my traumatic response.  Now I need to let my body know that it is okay now, and that everything is all right.

Steve loaned me the book of his teacher, Peter Levine, titled "In an Unspoken Voice: 
How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness." I've only just started reading it. But I am fascinated by Levine's theories of how the body naturally responds to trauma and how we can work with our bodies to restore a normal state, or goodness.

Steve has explained to me that it shouldn't be called PTSD, because it's not a disorder.  What happens to us in trauma is natural.  We just need to understand how to unwind the state our body goes into during trauma to unlock the pain and suffering that has been labeled a "disorder" by our medical community.  

Steve has told me it's our brain stem that takes over during traumatic experiences. Our reptilian brain, the stem is responsible for regulating our metabolism, breathing, and kicks in when our lives are threatened. When we go completely out of our comfort zone, like I did on the icefield, our natural response is to freeze, which is exactly what happened to me. It's a good response in a potentially fatal situation, and often works to save our life. But then, if we don't let our body release, it still thinks that it is in danger, and holds this state of freeze for potentially a long, long time.

So I've been working with Steve on talking with my brain stem. He's helping me learn to get back into my body, to connect to my body's relationship with physical objects. He's helping me practice being alert and relaxed at the same time, something that is challenging for me. My body's proclivity is to fall asleep when I'm relaxed. But a few times, working with Steve, I've come into this clarity of experience, where my mind and body feel together in an alert yet restful space.

The human body is an amazing animal. I feel mine changing through this work with Steve. I feel more grounded. more in touch with myself than I've felt in a long time. And just knowing that what happened to me on the icefield was a natural response has been greatly empowering. I had always wondered why my mind and body slowed down so much during the rescue. Understanding that by brain stem did what it was wired to do has brought me comfort.

I'm looking forward to working more with Steve after he gets back from sailing from Hawaii.  I do feel the goodness being restored.  And for that I give thanks.  Thank you, Steve.

The Sherbet Business

On Monday, June 3, I started a business.  A sherbet business.  Rhubarb sherbet, to be precise.

Sherbet brings back childhood memories of innocent summer ramblings, chasing after the ice cream truck, enjoying the surprise of creamy cold goodness emanating from the top of a push-up. For many, rhubarb has similar nostalgic qualities, associated with summer and strawberries and pie.

chopped rhubarb stalks in a pot

Personally, growing up in the South, I have no old ties to Rheum rhubarbarum, though I have enjoyed its puckering pleasure ever since moving to the North. My first house on 12th Street had a rhubarb plant  and every Spring a little old lady would come by to harvest its stalks. She said it was a particularly sweet variety of rhubarb and she'd been picking this plant for years. Honestly I didn't do much with the plant myself, not knowing much about it's qualities.

Gradually, I started experimenting with rhubarb in pies and jams, and grew to love its vibrant color, its surprising tartness, and its gelatinous mouthfeel. When we moved to Portland for six months, I missed the plant and surprised myself by buying it in the farmers market. No self-respecting northern gardener would ever buy rhubarb.   But my rental home didn't have a plant (though it did have several rosemary bushes!) so I was forced to buy rhubarb to celebrate the arrival of Spring.

I met someone yesterday from Iran who told me rhubarb was a required food to include in their New Years celebrations, which happen on the Spring Equinox.  Rhubarb stalks don't emerge in Juneau until May so she had to order some last year through the mail.

A quick visit to wikipedia reveals rhubarb's interesting history. It has been grown in China for thousands of years and came to Europe along the Silk Road. In Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo's report of his trip to Timur in Samarkand in the early 1400's, he wrote "the best of all merchandise coming to Samarkand was from China, especially silks, satins, musk, rubies, diamonds, pearls, and rhubarb..."(Wood, The Silk Road: two thousand years in the heart of Asia, 2002).

For hundreds of years, the plant has grown wild along the banks of the Volga River.  Its name comes from the Ancient Greek rha and barbarum (McGee, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, 2004). The word rha refers both to the plant and the river, who the Scythians called Rha.  Rhubarb has been used medicinally by the Chinese for thousands of years. Rhubarb contains anthaquinones, such as emodin and rhein, which have cathartic and laxative properties (http://pharmaxchange.info/press/2012/12/pharmacognosy-of-rhubarb/).

For all of its delights, people in Juneau generally have more rhubarb than they know what to do with. The traditional strawberry rhubarb pie is more work than most people are interested in.  But several years ago, I began experimenting with a fruit sherbet recipe from Cooks Illustrated.  I adapted a recipe and came up with an extraordinary product, rhubarb sherbet.  When Juneau started a "Farmers Market" a few years ago, I thought it would be a fun project to sell sherbet cones with my daughter Celia.  We sold raspberry, blueberry, and rhubarb sherbet sporadically over two summers.  I expected the raspberry to be the big hit.  But I sold out of rhubarb every time.

ingredients: rhubarb, cream, sugar
(water & salt not pictured)

Customers have reported the sherbet is "exquisite,""bloody good," and "divine." I think it highlights the essence of rhubarb, in a refreshing and creamy experience. Last year, I toyed with the idea of opening a food truck to sell rhubarb sherbet to tourists.  Once I had been discovered, I imagined tourists (especially northern ones) coming by in droves to purchase something uniquely Juneau - where else can you buy rhubarb sherbet?  But I saw my summer vacation days evaporating before my eyes and felt that was a dream better left in my mind's eye.

rhubarb sherbet in the ice cream maker insert

Then this year, I heard our local arts council was starting a Food Truck Fridays.  They decided to move a weekly summer concert series to our arts center and have food trucks out front.  I thought this could be my chance to feed my food truck desires but keep them manageable.  It could also be a fun experience for my kids to learn about customer service and on-the-job addition and subtraction.  I talked to someone else about partnering in the operation, but that seemed too complicated for the task at hand, so I decided to go it alone.  So last Monday, I went to the State of Alaska and got a business license for a sole proprietorship, the Casey-Shattuck Sherbet Company.

my first attempt at a logo

My neighborhood is officially called the Casey-Shattuck Addition.  Because many of my neighbors are allowing me to harvest their excess rhubarb, and my neighborhood church is letting me use its DEC-approved kitchen, I thought the name fit my enterprise well. Much of the land of my neighborhood was owned by William Casey, who operated a small dairy farm here around the turn of the century.  Henry Shattuck was an insurance broker and real estate developer.  Together, they developed the Case-Shattuck subdivision, the first addition to the original Juneau Townsite (http://www.juneau.org/history/ casey.php).

Friday, June 7 was my sales debut.  I had made about four gallons of sherbet and sold it in cups and cones.  There was a man waiting for me at 4 pm, though my booth wasn't open until 4:30.  He bought six cups.   From there, it was non-stop sherbet selling, and I sold out by 6 pm!

Joe, my first customer

I'm making more next week and starting to tinker with rhubarb sorbet and rhubarb fruit leather.  We'll see where this food truck adventure leads!