The Magical Elixir Running Through Our Veins

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an experience that left me face down in the dirt on my evening walk after donating blood. Three blackouts, a grapefruit-sized bruise, two chipped teeth, and a trip to the emergency room later, I walked away calling it a “divine download” and choosing to believe the universe had enhanced my superpowers.

I stand by that.

But something about the experience kept pulling at me long after the bruises faded. I have so many rich and wonderful adventures that I rarely have time to dwell in the past. This one, though, wouldn’t let me go.

It started with a simple thought. We can remove a significant portion of our own vital fluid… and our body simply makes more. Just like that. Our blood cells rejuvenate, we begin fresh, a kind of detox and cleanse, while simultaneously perhaps saving another person’s life. What a staggeringly miraculous process.

And yet I treated it as casually as a haircut or trimming my toenails. Donated my blood, checked the box, and went about my business as if nothing sacred had just occurred. Ignored the instructions. Skipped the rest. Laced up my boots and walked straight into the woods because that’s what I do every single day, and apparently even surrendering a portion of my life force wasn’t enough to interrupt the routine.

That pattern revealed something I needed to see. My addiction to my routine, which thankfully is no longer toxic substances, but a daily walk in the woods, can still override my common sense. The walk that day, and every day, felt nonnegotiable. Even when my body was quietly asking me to stop.

And if I’m being honest, what disturbed me most was not the falling. It was the lack of thought before it. That has been my fiery Sagittarius way for as long as I have existed… jumping into the abyss, whether it’s spontaneously booking a plane ticket to some faraway land on a whim or following the roll of rune stones wherever they lead. I would have told you it rarely gets me in trouble. But the lessons I learned that day, and the repercussions that followed, prepared me once again to expect the unexpected. And to honor what I’d been taking for granted.

Our blood.

This mysterious, miraculous elixir that has historically represented a woman’s sacred cycle with the Earth. The blood that is given during birth. The same blood that, when we lose too much, ends our very life.

There is a beautiful tradition around the thirteen moons of a woman’s cycle and the harmony we experience when we choose to live within those natural rhythms instead of the ones modern society has constructed for us. We resist these rhythms. We ignore them. We talk over them with our loud, overstimulated, painfully disconnected lives that have somehow become the new normal. And those of us who try to find our way back to these inherent, natural, seemingly mysterious ways of living in harmony with the Earth? We become the freaks and the witches.

I’ll take it.

I do my very best to keep one foot in the enchanted forest and one foot out here in what is cosmically, paradoxically called “civilization.” Or even better… the “real world.” But living this way is not always easy, and I am not always graceful about it.

While modern humans, at least in America, are surrounded by cushy comfort zones and ultimate convenience, the simple old ways of chopping wood and carrying water can feel like work. I have caught myself calling my own lifestyle “a lot of hard work” more times than I care to admit. But when I slow down and actually feel what I’m doing… shoveling snow, splitting wood, walking the mountain… the labor becomes meaningful. The labor is no longer laborious. The work is rhythmic and, barring the inability to describe it fully in words, it just feels like life.

This natural, rhythmic life pumps this precious blood through my body, oxygenating every muscle I’m using. My body is a whole universe unto itself. And when I feel the alignment between my inner rhythm and the rhythm of the world around me, any outer disharmony quietly falls away.

That’s what the dirt taught me. Not just to slow down or to follow explicit instructions after a blood draw. But to stop taking for granted the sacred, miraculous process that keeps me alive and vibrant every single day.

So, thank you, precious blood that flows through my veins. I shall honor you and never again take you for granted. I am grateful for every sacred drop.

And the next time the blood drive rolls through town? I’ll be the one bringing cornbread. God-forsaken, gluten-free cornbread. Which, as my neighbors can attest, is its own form of sacrifice.

xoxCollin