My Meandering Path to Acupuncture
I wouldn’t be practicing acupuncture today if it weren’t for the workers and communities in the coalfields of Southern Appalachia organizing against mountaintop removal -and- the Black women organizing their Memphis neighborhoods against environmental racism and injustice.
Like many white acupuncturists in the United States, I didn’t grow up knowing acupuncture existed or that it was something I could do when I grew up.
In my early twenties, as I was trying to answer the (rather unfortunate) question of “what I wanted to do with my life,” the only thing that moved me was being involved in activism and organizing work.
After I finished college with a hodgepodge degree, I was invited to work for a nonprofit to continue organizing college students across the South in the climate justice movement. I cut my teeth as an organizer in the climate justice, mountain justice, and environmental justice movements. While I’d soon learn the compromises and pitfalls of the nonprofit industrial complex, I am so grateful I had this experience. Getting to collaborate with folks regionally, nationally, and sometimes internationally, I learned that our movements are much bigger than we often know.
I got to visit and live in the coalfields of Southern West Virginia where I saw the consequences of mountaintop removal first hand. With my own eyes, and through the relationships I made, I could more deeply understand the economic and environmental consequences of capitalism. Simultaneously in my hometown of Memphis, I learned the history and reality of environmental racism in the Black, poor, and working class neighborhoods. Neighborhood activists showed me the consequences of toxic air, water, and soil in their communities due to the intentional choices of chemical companies, oil refineries, coal plants, and military bases.
And I also saw the power and brilliance of the organizers who were fighting these injustices in their communities. I supported and participated in the protests at city hall, the door to door organizing of their neighbors, the direct actions, and the walks from WV to DC.
I also learned how communities were doing their own research and testing of toxins, how communities in Memphis were caring for each other as they were sick and their healthcare systems failed them, and about community gardens that existed because they were necessary. I learned how communities in Appalachia had been foraging for food and medicine from the forest for generations. I met ramps and ginseng for the first time. These moments were some of my first experiences ID’ing and building relationships with plants and my first experiences with alternative medicine and community care.
I am forever grateful to these organizers (Larry Gibson. Ed Wiley. Doris Bradshaw. Mary Norman. Rita Harris.) for their major role in my early political development. And I’m also grateful for the big turn in the road they created on my meandering path towards medicine and acupuncture that will be forever rooted in transformative organizing and healing justice.
Artwork: Organize! By Josh MacPhee of Just Seeds