Morgana is a London-based writer and cook. She runs Food Relics, a multimedia project spanning language, food, and desire.
#112: Morgana Rubini
London, UK
What does health, or being healthy, mean to you?
I see myself as quite feral. I think less about being “healthy” than I do about taking care of myself. I experience a kind of mothering distance between my caring self and the self being cared for: I want to look after myself as though I am my own plant. When I cook something beautiful just for myself, I think, Look what you have done. Look how you have cared for yourself.
And I want to always be allowed to be dirty, too. I think that is important in a way, those wild parts of the self.
For me, health is less about discipline and more about kind routines. I usually know what feels good for me, but I am not always in a position to give myself those things. I feel like a Sim, with all these needs constantly rising and falling, trying to attend to each one. It can be difficult to get everything right.
At the moment, I am really thinking about health in relation to money. A lot of the things we associate with being healthy are privileges. You are not going to buy supplements when the choice is between those and a supermarket shop.
Health, to me, is also about how cared for we feel by the world, and how we care for it in return. I believe in a reciprocal relationship with the world: listening to it, noticing the seasons, and paying attention to what is growing and changing. I think that is how we find newness, without the destructive search for instant dopamine highs.
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