Читать книгу Time is Cows: Timeless Wisdom of the Maasai - Tanya Pergola Ph.D. - Страница 4

I was born in Connecticut, not far from New York City. My father’s family had emigrated from Sicily in the 1920s. My mother was born in what is now Azerbaijan and was raised in northern Italy. So, I was born a global girl, and my bloodlines and the cultural influences inside my childhood home were deliciously mixed, often making for excellent culinary experiences—from the homemade ravioli we would have on special Sundays to the exotic piroschki I would take in my lunchbox to school.

Yet when it came to gaining clarity about some of life’s biggest questions—Who am I? What do I want?—I was often met with a flood of perplexing answers. The prevailing belief in Fairfield County, Connecticut in the 1980s was that, in order to be successful, a young woman should go to university, do well, and continue paving the way for other women that first was cleared by the women’s movement of the 1960s. Having been born with a pioneering spirit, this plan seemed reasonable.

But my father, who as a good Sicilian had originally hoped I would be born a boy, spoke to me as if I were his son, and he plainly enjoyed criticizing the feminists he knew and, by extension therefore, me. Deep down, however, I knew that by biological and sociological default I was necessarily a “feminist,” and the cultural buffet of sometimes conflicting ideas from my earliest days certainly did provide many interesting meals on my life’s plate.

A born peacemaker, when disparate ideas come my way I instinctively start building bridges. On a practical level, I think nothing of serving Italian wine with a Russian meal; and on more spiritual and philosophical levels, I have often found myself seeking the common ground between my Muslim, Christian, and Jewish friends. A born optimist, I try to seek out the good in everyone and everything, and create combinations of the best of two or more worlds.

Perhaps inevitably, at university I abandoned the majors my father had chosen for me—marketing and advertising—for anthropology and sociology. In those departments I truly fell in love with reading and learning for the very first time in my life. As I read about the bushmen of the Kalahari, I delighted to imagine what it would be like to live life in a manner so different from my own. In my social psychology classes I freed my mind to explore the vast realms in which society and culture co-create self and identity. I discovered that we are who we are because of our relationships with those around us. And as each of us acts and reacts to the world we encounter, we make changes—individually and collectively.

I was hooked, and I dove in deeply enough that I eventually earned a Ph.D. in sociology at one of the most exciting places I could have been at the time, the University of Washington in Seattle. 1990s Seattle was the talk of the nation, if not the world. With its contribution to music—the grunge rock of Nirvana and other great bands—the technology revolution spurred by local behemoth Microsoft and dozens of lesser companies that spun in its orbit, and the coffee craze that was initiated by a hometown roasting company called Starbucks, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest were ground zero for an emerging new world. The city of Seattle launched one of the first extensive recycling programs in the country; Bastyr, one of the first natural medicine universities was located in Puget Sound, and the region was a national leader in “new age” religion. My friends and I liked to think of ourselves as “post-modern” folks, living with our fingers on the pulse of, well, we weren’t entirely sure, but we knew at the very least that people around the world were awfully interested in what we were saying and doing.

But with this onslaught of creativity came traffic jams and a quickening of the pace of life that felt a little unnatural. It sometimes felt like my fellow urbanites and I were skating on ice not yet hard enough to support us. I remember one evening in 1998 talking with a university colleague about the very risky decisions of several friends we shared to max out multiple credit cards with no real plan to pay them off, as well as buying houses they clearly could not afford.

The two of us came to the conclusion that the American economy was a kind of “vapor,” capable of being clearly seen for what it is from a bit of distance, but which disappears when you’re inside of it. We guessed the economy would roll along recklessly for about ten more years, and then it would encounter some monumental challenges. And with all the extraordinary advances in technology, financial growth, and health care, were we not forgetting some basic, even elemental aspects of our humanity? So many people appeared to be running around like headless chickens, and people’s physical and mental health seemed to be getting collectively worse rather than better.

Trained as a pharmacist in the 1950s, my father loved trying to help family and friends get well and stay well, and I remember many conversations with him about which medicines really could cure pain and suffering. He told me that he and his classmates at the University of Connecticut had been required to study botany, but that later botany had been dropped from the curriculum, and how delighted he was to learn that botany was being taught again to pharmacy students. Plants, he was certain, held many benefits for human health.

There was a small closet in my childhood home that held dozens of samples of pills and potions my father obtained at pharmaceutical conferences and the trade events he attended—although that closet was seldom opened. My sister and I rarely got sick, neither did my parents, and I now understand that a primary reason for our collective good health was my mother’s insistence on serving fresh, homemade Italian meals. She was raised with the belief that “food is medicine,” and that if you ate well, other treatments were rarely needed. Inspired by my now-deceased father, who understood the efficacious qualities of plants, and by my mother’s dedication to creating delicious and healthy food, I realize today that I was nurtured by them and was perfectly poised for the leap into the waters of nature healing that, unbeknownst to me, I was about to undertake.