Ginger Jones (@plaything______) is a poet from California.
#109: Ginger Jones
California, USA
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
Freedom.
How would you describe your current lifestyle?
Right now I’m living and working on a farm in northern New Mexico. I spend most of my days outside in the sunshine. I weed gardens, hoe fields, build structures, fix whatever is broken, care for animals, ride horses, and swim in creeks and lakes whenever I can. I like being dirty. I like making my body useful. Physical labor quiets my mind in a way nothing else can.
How do you start and end your days?
Farm life wakes me up at six. I stretch for half an hour, drink black coffee and Xiao Yao San tea for my liver, then feed the chickens, collect their eggs, water the greenhouse, check the fences, and feed the other animals and eat. Breakfast is usually three fresh eggs and half an avocado. I also take a B-complex and omega-3 supplements. Hours will go by before I speak my first words.
In the evening I water the gardens and cook dinner, usually chicken with whatever greens are growing nearby. I make a shandy with beer and lemonade and watch the sky change colors while I talk to people I love on the phone. After a while I go inside and sit on my bedroom floor and write until my eyes get heavy. I crawl into bed naked and silent with the moon watching over me. Sometimes I play music to lull myself to sleep.
Can you recall a moment when you became more aware of your health, or your relationship to it changed?
One of the hardest things I’ve had to learn is what to do with pain. A few years back, two old friends of mine died just a month apart. One overdosed on fentanyl and the other killed himself while high. I was so overcome with grief that life became almost unbearably precious to me. I now know that grief is just love with nowhere to go, so you give it new places to live. Whenever I choose beauty over bitterness, kindness over resentment, presence over fear, I am more alive and thankful to live life beautifully because I know love is infinite.
There are things you can’t see but your mind still recognizes. Sometimes what I feel is more true than what I know.
What’s your relationship to self-healing?
I’m not interested in understanding myself too much. I’ve become very protective of my own mystery. There are parts of myself I don’t want to fully understand. I think the soul deserves some privacy. I heal when I release myself from expectations of knowing. I want to be the kind of person who can humanize herself. I want room to become someone I haven’t met yet. That feels closer to healing than certainty ever has.