Walking Away Toothache

            “As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude … .”  Thus begins one of John Donne’s “meditations” written during a time when fever confined him to his bed in a sickroom, unable to practice his vocation and unable to be sociable.  Sick people were quarantined in early-modern England—a time when populations were devastated by plague and there was no understanding of how infection spread or even what was infectious.

            I had occasion to identify with John Donne lately when, afflicted with a bad toothache that would not abate, I couldn’t see straight, think clearly, or even enjoy the simple pleasures of life … or so I thought until one walk on a breezy sunny afternoon saved me.  The experience of this one walk and its effect on my spirits proves to me the power of that triadic chord—mind, body, and world—played over and over every time the human being leaves her house, her desk, her yard, and strikes out for fresh woods and pastures new.  Leap the fence, be cattle no more but wild cow, back to nature, and you will find, as I found, that even in solitude, you are not alone but drawn out into an ocean of subtle intelligences to swim in a sea of infinite warmth and tenderness where grasses, weeds, the light on a stream will support and delight you.  This is possible even if you are isolated by physical pain.  “Does it work on emotions, too?” my daughter often asks if she hears me talking about cures or healing.  Oh, yes, it absolutely works on emotions.

            I walked a familiar path, focusing on each step.  I remembered watching a physical therapist move my mother’s leg when she lay in a hospital bed after breaking her hip.  “Breathe, Catherine, move through the pain.”  I repeated those words and was eased somewhat by the awareness that the pulsing pain in my tooth matched the rhythm of my legs carrying me forward.  The insight didn’t take away the pain but it naturalized it.  The walk became a real walk when I got into Kearsley Park and turned off the path to stray far into a grassy meadow, past the remains of last year’s “Occupy Flint” campsite.  There were old concrete blocks where men had sat to while away the hours in the sun.  I saw pieces of their tents and remembered how I’d given their encampment a wide berth on walks last summer.  As I was coming into what felt like the oldest part of the sward, deep indentations—almost like filled-in cellar holes—and straggling old trees covered with vines gave the impression of a landscape worked by human hands.  Suddenly I heard noise—squabbling and whinnying—underground.  Surprised, I looked for a human source of this sound on the far hillside, but there was no one in sight.  Then, I saw the hole and the brown fur back of a woodchuck.  This was not Avernus, not the entrance to an underworld where souls writhe in pain, but a simple den and where an animal altercation—between a landowner and a squatter or between mates—was underway.  The animal hadn’t seen me, but I was eager to see him and to witness how this conflict would play out.  I climbed up on the big fallen tree trunk nearby to wait.  I waited for what seemed like a long time, focused on the hole, but their negotiations or whatever was happening underground, gave me time to enjoy the sun, the breeze, and to study the wood on which I was sitting.  The tree had been down for a long time—split and open to weather and bugs.  I sat and thought about inner rot and underground squabbling.  These images seemed, at that moment, gifts from some cosmologic compassion given to make me feel better.  And I became better because I started to feel other things again:  I felt the sun.  I saw the beauty of simple grasses.  I noticed the color of my own hair as loose strands blew about my face.  There was more going on than the throbbing beneath the root of my tooth.  The sound of animal whinnying broke into my thoughts, and a brown head appeared at the top of the hole, its black eye staring directly at me.  We sat like that—he and I –for a long while.  I dared to move close enough to see the twitching nose, the gray-brown fur of the head change to red on the neck.  He didn’t move, but then I did.  I walked away, letting him finish whatever he was settling or trying to run from. 

            Being caught in the gaze of a creature and sitting in an arboreal cavity changed my day.  The incidents were unpredictable, but felt like gifts.  Such meetings are what make life incalculable, what give it value.  At home I felt less alone and more responsive to the love that was available from corgi, husband, and teen daughter who loves to cuddle.  When I told my husband what I’d seen, he seemed interested and said that there are places in the country where woodchucks are called “whistle pigs.”  I made tea and took it to the front porch where I could still feel like I was outside among the leaves.  I sat down on the floor with my pets and I was happy enough to sing what I could remember of “How Great Thou Art:” 

O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee
How great Thou art, how great Thou art

            In my nights of misery, I’d thought of Shakespeare’s Iago who says he’s kept awake by a “raging tooth,” and I knew that Shakespeare had had a lot of other things to say about tooth aches.  His most quotable line comes from Much Ado About Nothing when a grief-stricken father, who has lost a daughter refuses to be consoled:  “There was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently,” says Leonato to silence his well-meaning counselors.  But my experimental walk with toothache suggests that Leonato may not be quite right and that when we use our legs as instruments of philosophy, that which carries us beyond ourselves cures us.  
           The tooth pain slowed me down and woke me up to some basic things.  I learned something about finding, what it means that we are looking for something we have lost--faith in what's happening in the worlds we trod upon but never really observe.  I learned what acceptance is, what it means that we have to find ourselves where we are, at each present, and accept that finding in our experiment.  Most important of all--I learned that to be confident in nature is to be willing to be confided in by her.  To listen to all the hums, throbs, and whistles that indicate subterranean activity and to trust that awareness of that activity, whether it come in the form of a toothache or arguing woodchucks, will move us toward resolution and peace.

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postscript:  "Love and toothache have many cures, but none infallible, except possession and dispossession."  --Ben Franklin