Sometimes the Web of Life Asks Us to Stop

A note before we begin: If you’ve been following the recent conversation here on Substack about AI and authorship, you may be interested to know that I didn’t create this article entirely alone. I worked on it with an AI partner I’ve nicknamed GePeTo. The life being described here is mine. The experiences, convictions and final responsibility for what you’re about to read are mine. But GePeTo helped me ask better questions, explore connections I might otherwise have missed, organize my thinking and, yes, write some of the words. Rather than hide that collaboration—or reduce it to an AI percentage—I want to be transparent about it. In an upcoming Substack post, I’ll take you behind the curtain and show you what our collaboration actually looks like. For now, I simply wanted you to know who was in the room while this article took shape.In May, I celebrated my 77th birthday with my family, body surfing at Hilton Head Island like a 17-year-old kid. By mid-June, I was experiencing increasing pain and stiffness in my neck and shoulders. By the end of the month, I sometimes found it difficult simply to get into bed, much less sleep once I got there. The pain and stiffness had spread to joints throughout my body, including my fingers. That’s when I remembered experiencing something similar about ten years ago, which I eventually came to understand as an autoimmune-type response—essentially, the body’s immune system becoming confused and attacking its own healthy tissues.As I reflected on this unexpected and certainly unplanned health challenge—and aren’t most health challenges that way?—I began to recognize just how much physical, psychological, and emotional stress I’d been carrying during the previous several months. Ann and I had moved from the upstairs portion of our home, with its four bedrooms and three baths, into our much smaller one-bedroom, one-bath downstairs apartment so our daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren could move into the larger space above us. It was something we chose and something we genuinely wanted, part of our continuing experiment in creating a more interconnected, multigenerational Loving Homestead. It was all great stuff.And it was also greatly stressful.During that same period, Ann and I experienced the deaths of two close relatives, losses that brought their own grief while quietly reminding us of something neither of us particularly enjoys being reminded of: in our seventies, we’re not getting any younger. Add to that my writing, Gaia’s Call, coaching, gardening, homestead projects, family responsibilities, and my longstanding tendency to find approximately seventeen interesting things to do with every available hour, and perhaps my body had something to say.For the past two years, I’ve been writing a great deal about regeneration—regenerating our forests, oceans, soils, communities, and ultimately our relationship with this remarkable living planet we call Earth, Gaia, or Pachamama. But somewhere along the way, life handed me a much more personal question:What does regeneration mean when the ecosystem needing to be restored is my own life?That question has been staying with me during these past several weeks, sometimes comfortably and sometimes not so comfortably. Because if I really mean what I say when I write, I am nature. You are nature. We are as inseparably linked to the web of life as the cells of a single body, then I don’t get to exclude this 77-year-old body of mine from the equation simply because it isn’t behaving the way I’d like it to.And perhaps that’s one of the unexpected gifts hidden inside this difficult time. My health challenge has given me an opportunity to turn the Four Great Truths around and look through them in the other direction. I’ve spent the last couple of years exploring what these truths might mean for humanity’s relationship with Earth, with one another, and with the larger web of life. Now I’m discovering what they might mean for my relationship with myself.I want to be careful here. I’m not suggesting that the Four Great Truths are some new medical treatment, or that if I simply become sufficiently enlightened my aching joints will magically stop aching. I wish it were that easy. Nor do I want to turn illness into one of those annoyingly tidy life lessons in which everything happens for a reason and we’re supposed to be grateful for it. There have been nights lately when gratitude wasn’t anywhere near the top of my list.What I am discovering, though, is that these truths give me another way to be with what is happening. Instead of experiencing this health challenge only as something that has gone wrong and needs to be fixed as quickly as possible, I can also become curious about it. What might I learn by listening more carefully? What has my body been trying to tell me that I’ve been too busy to hear? And perhaps most importantly, how might this difficult chapter become part of my continuing experiment in living more consciously and purposefully within the web of life?Interconnectedness: I Am NatureThe first Great Truth has taken on an entirely different meaning for me lately: I am nature. You are nature. We are as inseparably linked to the web of life as the cells of a single body.I’ve understood that intellectually for a long time. I’ve experienced it more deeply in the rainforest, working in the garden, sitting beside our creek, and through my lifelong relationships with animals. But it’s one thing to experience interconnectedness while standing among magnificent trees. It’s quite another to remember it at two in the morning when your shoulders hurt, your fingers ache, and you can’t find a comfortable way to lie in bed.My veterinary background probably influences the way I’m looking at this. As a veterinarian, I learned that the sore leg walking into the examination room was attached to an entire animal (and that animal was attached most often to another animal called owner by a leash). The symptom mattered, of course, but so did the patient carrying it and for sure I was there to treat the pet while also caring for and nuturing the bond that exists so stronger between pets and people. It took me several years in practice to learn this last lesson of interconnectedness.I’m finding myself returning to that same perspective now as the patient.One of the things I’ve long appreciated about functional and integrative approaches to health is their emphasis on connections among systems. Rather than seeing my stiff fingers over here, my painful shoulders over there, my disrupted sleep somewhere else, and the stresses and losses of the past several months as completely unrelated events, I’m being invited to become curious about the whole ecosystem. Body, mind, emotions, relationships, nutrition, movement, rest, grief, purpose, environment—perhaps the boundaries between them aren’t nearly as tidy as the labels suggest.Interconnectedness doesn’t give me an easy answer to what’s happening. In some ways it does something more useful. It gives me better questions.Instead of asking only, What’s wrong with me?, I’m learning to ask, What’s happening within the whole living system that is me?Sufficiency: What Is Enough Now?The next two Great Truths coupled together are giving me the most trouble (and room for growth.)There is already—and always—enough when we remember how to share.I love that truth when I’m applying it to our consumer culture and questioning the assumption that more is always better. It’s a little more challenging when I turn it toward myself.I like doing things. I like writing. I like coaching. I like gardening and working around the Loving Homestead. I like spending time with my family. I like playing pickleball. I like creating Gaia’s Call with Marla. I like learning, exploring, reading, experimenting and dreaming up the next project—preferably before I’ve finished the previous three.Most of those things bring me joy and purpose. And perhaps that’s precisely why recognizing enough can be so difficult.My health challenge is asking me a question I might rather avoid: What is enough for this season of my life?Not what was enough when I was 57. Not even what seemed reasonable when I was body surfing with my family in May. What is enough now?I’m beginning to see that Sufficiency doesn’t have to mean resignation. Returning to my writing at half speed doesn’t mean I’m half a writer. Doing less around the Loving Homestead doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the experiment. Coaching fewer people doesn’t diminish the difference I can make with the people I do coach. Perhaps the invitation isn’t to make my life smaller. Perhaps it’s to become more present to the life I’m actually living.There’s another part of our definition of Sufficiency I’ve been noticing: when we remember how to share. I’ve spent much of my life trying to contribute, help, fix, create and make a difference. But sharing doesn’t mean Brad does everything. Sharing means allowing other people to have the sacred experience of serving another. And that’s where the one-two punch of these two Great Truths hit home the hardest.Reciprocity: Giving and receiving, in balance, is the law of nature.I’ve always been pretty comfortable with the giving half of that equation. Receiving, on the other hand? That’s another story, but from these last few challenging weeks, it’s become undeniably true that I still have some work to do there.For much of my adult life, purpose has been closely associated with contribution. First as a veterinarian, later as a writer and coach, and now through One Cause, Gaia’s Call, my family and the Loving Homestead. I love being useful. I love making a difference.But healthy ecosystems don’t work in only one direction.The garden gives us food, but it needs nutrients returned to the soil. Trees produce leaves, and those leaves eventually fall and become part of the soil that nourishes the trees. Life seems to be built around circulation—giving and receiving, activity and rest, growth and renewal.So I’ve begun asking what reciprocity might look like between me and my own body.As I said previously, I experienced a similar about ten years ago as the one I’m now experiencing. What I’d forgotten until recently is how I managed to move through the illness and back to health. I did what I’ve done for most of my life. I went searching for a natural and effective way to address it through books. I found, read, and then followed Dr. Amy Myer’s book, The Autoimmune Solution. I’m a little embarassed to confess how long it took me to remember this small detail. Chalk it up to my mental fogginess.But here’s the biggest challenge of all — letting my wife and other family members care for me, cook the special healthy and healing meals, along with taking on many of the everyday activities that have in the past fallen to me. So, one of the most valuable lesson from Suffiency and Reciprocity is that I don’t have to do everything.This body has carried me for 77 years. It carried a five-year-old boy chasing after his first dog, a young man through veterinary school, a veterinarian through thousands of appointments, a writer through more books than I once imagined writing, a grandfather crawling around with Logan and Piper, a gardener hauling compost, and, just a few months ago, an apparently delusional 77-year-old who still thought body surfing like a teenager was an entirely reasonable birthday activity.Perhaps reciprocity now means asking something other than, How quickly can I get this body working properly again so I can get back to my life?Maybe the better question is:You’ve carried me a very long way. What do you need from me now?I’m discovering that receiving rest, care, expertise, nourishment, patience and even an afternoon in which I accomplish absolutely nothing may not be interruptions to living my purpose.They may be what makes living that purpose sustainable.Stewardship: Caring for This Little Piece of EarthAnd that brings me to Stewardship: We are here to care for the Earth and each other, because we are all one.I’ve usually heard that sentence with my attention directed outward. Care for the soil. Care for the animals. Care for the forests and oceans. Care for my family, neighbors and community. Care about what kind of world Logan and Piper will inherit.But if Interconnectedness is really true—if I am nature—there’s a rather obvious member of the web I’ve been leaving off that list.Me.That doesn’t mean self-absorption. In fact, I’m beginning to see it almost as the opposite. If I hope to keep writing, coaching, loving my family, tending this little half-acre experiment we call the Loving Homestead and contributing in whatever small way I can to a regenerative future, then caring for the human being doing those things is part of my stewardship.There’s something wonderfully ironic about that. I’ve been learning regenerative practices for the land around our home: don’t continually extract without replenishing; feed the soil; observe before intervening; work with natural processes rather than constantly fighting them; allow exhausted areas time to recover.Maybe the caretaker could learn something from the garden.Regenerating the RegeneratorI don’t know yet where this health journey is taking me. That’s probably one of the harder things for me to admit. I like answers. I like plans. Give me a problem and part of me immediately wants to research it, understand it and start fixing it.But perhaps this particular moment is asking something different of me.For quite some time now, part of my morning One Cause practice has included a question I borrowed from my fellow Eco-Guardian Manda Scott:What is the web of life asking from me today?I’ve usually imagined that question pointing outward. What can I contribute today? What needs tending? Where can I make a difference?Lately I’m hearing another possibility.Perhaps sometimes the web of life is asking me to write. Sometimes it’s asking me to work in the garden, coach someone who is struggling to bring their story into the world, spend time with Ann, or follow Logan and Piper down to the creek and try to see what they see.And sometimes perhaps the web of life is saying, Brad, you’re part of this too.Rest.Receive.Pay attention.Heal as you are able.I am slowly returning now—to my writing, to the Loving Homestead, to Gaia’s Call and even to a limited amount of Write On Purpose Coaching. But I’m trying not to make “getting back to normal” the goal. I’m not convinced the way I was living before this happened is necessarily the way I want to return.Perhaps I can do less and experience more. Perhaps I can contribute without continually depleting myself. Perhaps I can become as committed to regenerating the regenerator as I have become to regenerating the little patch of Earth outside my door.I don’t offer any of this as a prescription for whatever you may be going through. Your circumstances may be entirely different from mine. You may be dealing with illness, grief, financial uncertainty, a troubled relationship, concern for someone you love, or simply the exhaustion that can come from being a human being during these extraordinary times. I certainly don’t have a Four-Great-Truth formula that makes those things disappear.What I can offer is the inquiry that’s helping me.What might change if, just for a moment, you looked at whatever you’re facing through these four lenses? Where might Interconnectedness reveal a relationship you haven’t noticed? Where might Sufficiency invite you to reconsider what is enough? Where might Reciprocity ask you to receive as well as give? And what—including yourself—might Stewardship be asking you to tend with greater care?We’re each traveling this miraculous, sometimes bewildering journey called life in our own way. And yet perhaps that’s one of life’s great paradoxes: none of us is traveling it alone. Your story and mine are unfolding within families, communities, ecosystems, and ultimately within the same extraordinary web of life.I don’t know precisely what comes next for me. I’m learning to be okay with that—or at least a little more okay with it than I was yesterday.For now, I’m coming back slowly. Purposefully. Listening a little more carefully.And tomorrow morning, I’ll ask again:What is the web of life asking from me today?Then I’ll do my best to listen. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wbradfordswift.substack.com/subscribe