June 16, 2006
Meet Robert Menzies,TAB
Robert Menzies is an ethnobotanist. His specialty is psychopharmodynamics.
Iif you needed confirmation that he has a sense of humor look no farther than the fact that he has chosen to live in Weed, California. Yes, there really is a town named Weed. It sits at the base of Mount Shasta looking up at the mountain's snow covered top to the east -- wi th its occassional lenticular cloud looking like a jauntily place tam cap.
Robert's passion for native plants led to the creation of Menzie's Natives Nursery and thus my sidetrip to ask his expert help on growing California's native lilies. He is a fount of knowledge about more than flora. He has recently been reflecting on what it means to be a TAB (temporarily able bodied.)
When we spoke he had just returned from a month in China. There, along the border with Tibet, he was able to leave his cane and walk unaided. Working with traditional Chinese medical practitioners he was able to return once more to the ranks of the temporarily able bodied. His previous experience of several months in a wheelchair is going to change the layout of his nursery -- and further inform the work he does with California's state parks.
There is never a time when the pain, stigma, and discouragement of disability is something I wish for someone else. However, meeting someone like like Robert who has lived his disability well and distilled wisdom from it reminds me again why I find hope in disability.
Some people's lives prove what Susan Wendell wrote in The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability:
Not only do physically disabled people have experiences which are not available to the able-bodied, they are in a better position to transcend cultural mythologies about the body, because they cannot do things the able-bodied feel they must do in order to be happy, 'normal,' and sane....If disabled people were truly heard, an explosion of knowledge of the human body and psyche would take place.
Thank you, Robert for joining in the dialogue and adding to that knowledge for us all.
Posted by rollingrains at June 16, 2006 06:52 AM