The smell is what got me.
I loved it from the start – earthy, mysterious. I waited for it when my mom reached to open the glass door. Instantly the cool air blew out when the door opened and I breathed deeply of its essence, the delicious scent quickly filing itself away inside the deepest part of my brain lodged there forever as a foundation for healthy living.
Walking through the threshold of this aromatic oasis I found myself in another land. It was a small place with only one checkout counter and an old-time register. A woman with grey hair and pointy glasses chatted kindly with the clerk as he rang up her items.
This was a place so unlike the regular grocery store we normally shopped which contained rows of boxes and cans stacked high with colorful labels, a large section filled with mounds of fruits and vegetables and several refrigerated cased filled with milk, eggs and cream. No, this tiny little store I knew was special with its fragrance of ground medicinal herbs and vitamins that tingled my nose with a therapeutic fragrance.
And even though Captain Crunch was my all time favorite cereal (that I rarely got to eat) my 7-year-old brain still went gaga with all the stuff in this store as I wandered down the small aisles of shelves that held bags of stuff like ground sunflower seeds or granola cereal labeled in plain black stencil writing and bulk bins that held ground buckwheat flour or beans of every sort.
There were rows and rows of vitamins and tinctures and strange herbal mixtures from generations of wisdom.
This was a place that held a history of healing through alternate means and it sang to me. It was trips to this family owned health food store that planted a seed inside me which has been growing ever since. It was in this store that I gained a focus, a perspective that set me on the right track and kept me forever in the awareness of good health. Any decision that involved my body was made in the name of health.
Why do I bring this up? Because health seems to elude many people, and though I don’t hold the full answers to restoring health, I do know the underlying intent for health that was built in me from the very start has kept me in health.
Yes, I’ve wavered off the path now and then, sometimes from blissful ignorance and other times due to blatant carelessness but never to a point where I completely forged a new way of living outside of health. Living in health is as automatic to me as breathing because I’ve nurtured a focus from a long way back.
Ask yourself, where is your focus?
I was jarred a few weeks back when in a meeting I lamented the fact I would love to visit Spain and Portugal and all the places they were talking about. The woman traveler turned and simply said, “You make it happen.”
She’s right.
Though I wished to travel, I hadn’t even remotely been putting my focus on it, gathering information, breathing everything in about Spain. Because if I did drink in everything related to my dream, it would set me on a pathway that would lead to Spain because I would have put myself into a new frame of mind.
And so it is with health. Start down the pathway where health germinates. I’m not talking obsessive-compulsive behavior that is fueled by an underlying fear or discomfort that brings a frantic need for grabbing onto any thing labeled “healthy.” It is a deep-rooted action stemming from a decision infused with change and desire in the name of health.
Dive into the world of health. And I don’t mean saying you eat healthy as you munch on your favorite bag of specially baked organic potato chips (no such thing as a healthy packaged chip, I don’t care how they fry or bake it) or do yoga three times a week then have a mojito or two or three at your weekly local hot spot. Or using chemicals in the yard because the lawn has to be that perfect green or spraying chemicals because pulling weeds is hard work (it is, I agree). That’s not focusing on health.
Be brave. Shift your world a little and think health. Attend one of the many local and usually free seminars available at wellness and fitness centers.
And even though the little local health store has sadly morphed into the ever new and improved health food/grocery store, the focus on health is still abundant and can help anyone with the need and desire for a better understanding in health. Though the lovely apothecary smell and quaintness is no longer present in these megalithic stores, I still love to slowly work my way down the aisles marveling as I did as a kid everything related to health.
My focus as always firmly planted happily in the realm of healthy living
