ABSTRACT
A few years ago, I emerged from routine abdominal surgery with a mysterious neck injury, and when traditional medical approaches failed to heal it, I set out to explore alternative options, soon finding myself confronting jarring questions about the integrity of my body. Simultaneously, my growing interest in food, agriculture and environmental activism had led me to join an all-women design team working to create Bela Farm, a centre for land-based art, scholarship, activism and spiritual practice in southern Ontario. As part of that project, I spent many months studying the history, language and process of permaculture.1 The confluence of these two experiences served as the impetus for my current work-in-progress, a set of narrative non-fiction essays entitled A Pain in the Neck, which is about what happens to life-writing when individual human bodies – shaped by a long-standing cultural mythology that separates mind, body and earth – are suddenly reconnected to the body of the world.
