It’s been bitter cold here in Mississippi! Roads were icy and schools were closed. Many folks were burrowed inside catching up on long-avoided tasks and grateful to be blessed with warmth and security. Others, like so many around the globe, struggled to stay warm and have enough to eat.
Living Well Locally (LWL) is glad to be back after taking a break. We are ready to think and write again about place-based wellness and how personal healing can regenerate our families, homes, and communities. And, not least, how LWL can build cultures of health where those who are not now warm and secure can become so.
Although we take a special focus on our home state, we see the LWL vision as widely adaptable. Dependence on corporate goods from global markets has left us vulnerable in too many ways, especially in survival basics like food and medicine. LWL set in a bioregional context means goods and services can be sustainably shared, and augmented as needed from distant markets. This allows each community’s blend of unique resources and cultural gifts to be enhanced, more fully utilized, and marketed beyond the community.
Mississippi, however, seems a perfect place to envision a new way forward. Our home state has a great need for better health; our people are home-centered and not so far removed from a rich heritage of small farms selling locally. Not so long ago most families grew gardens and cooked real food daily, and while our homesteading grandmothers and grandfathers have largely passed on, LWL believes the roots of living close to the land and doing more for ourselves are still viable.
So the Living Well Locally vision for Mississippi starts with watering our roots. With bringing back to life the skills and jobs that reconnect us to the places where we live. And doing so by taking a special focus on personal wellness.
But the water we use to revive our roots will need to be of a special kind. It will need to incorporate the key pieces that are currently missing from our present knowledge base, most notably the regenerative methods being advanced in both medicine and agriculture. Such methods are essential for making healing and wellness successful and especially for making them place-based. A few early adopters of these methods are already present in Mississippi, but their numbers and skills will need to be amplified and made more available in rural and urban communities across the state.
Health practitioners schooled in lifestyle medicine, local farmers using regenerative practices, and committed home tenders able to apply healing protocols - these are the backbone of place-based wellness. Together they produce a synergy that can revive local economies and make it possible for communities to consider taking health as an economic strategy. We explored this synergy here, and each of the players in earlier posts (practitioners, farmers, home tenders).
As lifestyle-based medicine expands, more health practitioners will explore diet, lifestyle, and environment as both causative factors and healing tools. This very promising and wise evolution of medicine will make it possible for more of us in more places to take control of our health and to reverse chronic illness. Many pioneering patients have already taken personal healing journeys. (See earlier posts on reversing heart disease, multiple sclerosis, mental illness, and dementia.)
As time passes and place-based wellness matures, more people will be able to heal in their homes and with their neighbors. We will be treating illness and reversing chronic disease by doing more for ourselves, not by relying on distant sources. We believe the roots of self-sufficiency left by those who came before us can flourish again. We also believe its fruits will be healthy homes, families, and communities.
We believe too that those who now struggle through daily life with little security, warmth, or hope will find more possibilities in communities that are self-sustaining and healthy. The best version of wellness comes when those around us are also well.
Mississippians are an independent-thinking, functionally-minded people whose heritage says that we want to do more for ourselves. When we have a healthcare system that can tell us why we are sick, and a vision that gives us purpose and hope, wellness will spring to life. In this place so well suited to sharing and sociability, to having faith and doing for ourselves, we believe Living Well Locally has a good chance of proving itself viable.
We have high hopes that Mississippi medicine and farming will adopt regenerative methods. America and especially Mississippi are a long way from making these practices mainstream, a long way from maturing the local wellness economies that are possible. But every change starts somewhere . . . and sometimes it begins with a vision.