photo credit: http://wallup.net/magic-gandalf-the-lord-of-the-rings-wizard-painting/
It is hard to tell my whole life story before steemit... The Last Sage has been on a tremendous amount of journeys in his short existence on this planet.
I began life in the Midwest of the United States of America. I was raised on a small diversified farm literally in the middle of nowhere. And believe it or not I have made my way back to nowhere again. It is strange how life usually leads us in full circles. I believe this supports my equilibrium theory that all things must balance in life.
Growing up on a farm has its perks. A person develops skills that are becoming less and less common in the modern age. I am a shade tree mechanic, I am a pseudo veterinarian, I am a plumber, carpenter, electrician and the list continues. You may ask how a person can be all these things and more? Well that is simple; you become skilled in all things that are required. In the farm communities I was raised in, very few people ever hired anything done outside of the family. So before ever leaving home I had a vast amount of knowledge and skill that so few people ever find a need to develop.
It is strange when I look back at this way of life. I see it as so normal and yet most people can not fathom having to learn all of these different things. I am constantly learning and constantly telling stories. By telling stories I learn as well. The day I quit learning will be the day these eyes no longer open.
After I graduated from High School I took a full time position in a rapidly growing hog confinement operation. For anyone who is unfamiliar with how the hog industry works, I invite you to read my post: @thelastsage/living-with-the-consequences-of-western-diets
After several years of hell on earth, I finally had an eye opening experience that would change the very foundations of who I am today. I was born again... not in the Christ like sense but in a literal sense. I died in a horrific car accident and yet here I sit today writing this post. I died again about a month later... at this point I was really getting tired of this dying shit. On top of the dying thing there was this other little problem of wondering what I was going to do with myself if I could never walk again. Well don't you all worry about The Last Sage, not doing what I am told has always been something I was good at.
I suppose I really have to talk about this "little" accident just a bit more before I go on. I was ejected from a vehicle which rolled over on my pelvis region and then spit me out in a ditch. When I first came to it was a blur... I tried to yell but there was nothing but blood. My legs didn't work and I had a few bones poking out. It was all I could do just to get my left arm under my forehead to hold my face off the ground. I knew I was going to die in that ditch... I watched my trusty Timex Ironman watch tick second by second. I could not breath. One lung was collapsed and the other was failing. I had 10 broken ribs and shattered sternum. Tick, tick, tick, blood started coming out of my tear ducts... tick, tick, tick. I laid there in so much pain and fear. I was in the middle of nowhere on Dec 31st at 6:28 a.m. face down in a ditch dying and no one was coming along to help me. As I lay there staring at that watch, time seemed to slow and blur. Just as I had totally surrendered and excepted that it was over I heard a vehicle approaching. The driver rushed to me and covered me in clothes and blankets. I was bleeding to death, freezing to death and I could not breath. By the time the ambulance arrived it was just shy of 8 a.m. As they started strapping me to a backboard the pain increased 100 full. My sister and mother were there to witness what happened next as I do not recall. Apparently when they turned me over I let out a gurgled muddled scream that my sister still claims is one of the most horrid sounds she ever heard. So as you can imagine I was in pretty bad shape.
So the next 2 years of my life were full of all kinds of bad times. To be honest with you I really feel like my road of recovery will be better told in its own story line. I will summarize and say that I did a lot of impossible things in that time and what I will continue with was something impossible as well... yet somehow I did manage all of this.
So after this drastic life changing event, I decided that manual labor was not really in my future. It was time to see what the world of higher education was all about. I enrolled in a nursing program so that I might be able to give back to the world that had given so much to me (never become a nurse if you are looking to avoid physical labor). I became a Registered Nurse and decided to specialize in mental health nursing. There are so many different places in the nursing field to specialize. I decided to try to understand who I was and that of course led me into psychology. What a wonderful and interesting field of science.
So what does a person do with all of this education. Well you do what everyone else does. You go to work and try to pay off the student loans you have accrued. This unfortunately did not work out so well for me. After all of the things I had been through in life, I got hit with another real knee slapper; cancer. I despise even having to use that word.
Cancer is one of those diseases that changes your view of reality. Most people go threw life aware that someday they are going to kick the bucket but the thought is never really on their mind until later in life or something like this happens. I took the news kind of hard. At the time of my diagnoses I had been trying to wean myself off of the massive amount of opioids I had been so thoroughly addicted to for 10 years. Really bad timing.
So what do you do when your in this situation? I don't know about the rest of you but I had a fucking mental breakdown. I became so furious at everything and yet I had no physical presence left in this world. My body was weak, my mind was weak. I laid around for about 30 days living with seizures and a mental health problem that I was not properly addressing. Hell I didn't want to be alive, let alone try to think about all the shit going on. You will have to pardon my language there. I sometimes use vulgar words to express my emotion at the situation.
Luckily for me I have a very supportive wife and family. With some love and help I found my way out of my trough of self wallowing pity and realized I was still just having first world problems. I was not happy about it but at the same time, I couldn't do much to change it... or so I thought.
This is the point when I started to look at my health and lifestyle. I did what I always do with something new. I dove in head first and began to study. In today's world of modern technologies, we are not limited to listening to one or two doctors. We are not limited to accepting the norm. I was told that I would need to see an Oncologist and begin chemo and radiation treatments. I responded accordingly with a big old no thank you! The doctor responded with a normal western medical threat... "If you don't start treatments you can not expect to live any longer than 3-5 years".
Well let me tell you a little bit about what I learned along the way. First, my dietary intake was complete shit. Now I didn't purposely try to eat bad foods, it just turns out that what I liked to eat was terrible for me. I am from the Midwest where meat and potatoes rule the dinner plate. And if there is no potatoes, it don't matter as long as you have meat! Well it turns out that my lifestyle was directly correlated to my poor health. I began reading and watching a variety of doctors who did most of their research in plant based whole food lifestyles. I read a book called "The China Study". I watched "Forks over knives" and a plethora of others. All these had one thing in common. They spoke of how the western diet had become responsible for almost every ailment that we experience... including cancer.
I had a really hard time accepting the fact that meat and cheese could be part of my downfall. I had a mass of friends who were vegan and many of them seemed to be in poor health, so I thought "what the hell is the answer?". Well to be honest, I still don't know what the answer is. What I can tell you is that I have been eating a plant based whole food diet and using some alternative treatments, and I am healthier now than I have been in 13 years. Yes you read that correctly; "I am healthier now than when I was diagnosed with cancer and yet I have never received western medical treatment". Keep in mind, I hold degrees in western medicine but I give very little support for it.
So how did I end up on steemit? Well I actually don't have anyone in particular to thank. I started looking into crypto mining and that is what ultimately led me to steemit. I had seen that name a few times on YouTube posts and I had even read some articles on steemit in regards to mining. I guess what really brought me to steemit was VIVA. I had seen the little VIVA video on someones reddit and wanted to know more. The rest is history.
Mostly I have came to steemit with an open mind and the willingness to learn. In a short amount of time steemit has become almost an obsession for me, which is quite unusual. I usually find that I lose interest in things fairly quickly but I have found steemit different. Most of the topics I have focused on are in health, life and cryptocurrency. I also will post on just about anything I find merit in, so be forewarned.
I have very few hobbies in life but the ones I have work well for me. I am a cultivator and connoisseur of cannabis. This is a time consuming hobby but a very rewarding one. I use cannabis as a medicine and it has been one of the things I give credit in helping reduce the tumors growing in my body. As you can imagine this has made me a very strong proponent for cannabis as a medicine. This works well with my only other real hobby which is writing. As it turns out, now that I have found steemit, it would seem the two of them are coming together quite well.
I would have to say that this has been the best experience about steemit! Steemit has offered me a true outlet for my life. I am a jack of all trades and always looking to learn; I really could not have asked for a better place to stumble across. On top of that, steemit offers such a unique opportunity with their payment system. This is really just the icing on the cake!
After all that I have been through in my little journey on this grand scheme of life, I have only really discerned a few things...
"You must give in order to receive and to receive you must be willing to accept."
"Each day I open my eyes and know that I have accomplished all that it is to be human."
"Each night I close my eyes and relish in all that was presented to me while being human."
"There is only one thing of true value in life and that is Time."
Peace,
The Last Sage