Eating the Sacred: How I Came to This Work

I’ve been asked so many times how I got involved with this work that it seems fitting to tell the story yet again. This is the stuff of fairy tales — where the hero makes a bold decision, sacrificing all that’s going for him only to step into the abyss. The fate of wisdom falls upon us through strokes of passion and authenticity that, from the outside, can look like foolishness. Looking back, I don’t disagree. From the outside, we can only hope to honor the decisions of another.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a doctor. Whenever people asked, I simply thought of the uncles and relatives who were doctors and had a great standard of living, and I announced that I wanted to do what they did. Around the time of the 2008 recession, I had few employable skills, and it didn’t look like I’d go far with the work experience I had. But there was a very clear “nursing shortage” then, and I had a background in the health-professions field. So if not a doctor, maybe a nursing track would do. I got to work on the prerequisites, buckled down, and invested the next year in the pursuit.

Everything moved along fine until I stepped back from a chemistry exam gone wrong and realized that those kinds of errors might get somebody hurt if I were careless with medications, or if stress led me to record data incorrectly while charting a patient. It was then that I recalled a deeper yearning — to be something like an “Earth Nurse.” With my feverish passion for ecology and my insistence on social justice, I had long before imagined myself impacting the health of people and land, worldwide. It wasn’t just one person I wanted to help. On New Year’s Day, I stepped away from my classes and set my dreams upon the wind. My heart had spoken.

To step away from certainty and choose a new path is truly daunting — all the more so when the way forward isn’t yet clear, or even present at all. But when my heart told me this was a fear-based path, and that modern medicine was not for me, I could not look away. To live humbly for several more years, to move through humbling and challenging times — I had made a choice that guided me toward the light. It would be only one more day before I received a phone call that later led me directly to StoneBlood. The rewards were still a decade away. But I had given life to the vocation encoded in my soul, and it had finally found its path.

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