If you're not familiar with the radical explosion of so-called flavored mint plants, you might actually think that “chocolate peppermint” refers to a tea that has chocolate and peppermint in it. The reality is, instead, that people have been doing a ton of breeding on mint and have come up with varieties that have slightly different degrees of flavor. They then dub these varieties some kind of mint--chocolate mint, pineapple mint, etc.

 

Most of these smell extremely similar except for a few minor differences. Anyway, this tea is made with dried leaves of the mint variety that has been dubbed “chocolate mint.” Is it chocolatey?

 

I mean, maybe? There's kind of an overtone that is slightly reminiscent of chocolate to it. But it's mostly just mint. Don't get me wrong; I love mint tea, and this one is a good mint--the back of the package states that the mint is processed within an hour of harvesting, and I definitely think this is a well above average mint tea. But I'm not so sure that “chocolate” is a signifier that works in any sense except that it's maybe more chocolatey than regular peppermint, which is not chocolatey at all.

 

That naming quibble aside, it's a great tea for relaxation and sipping in a cup at the end of a day.

You can get chocolate peppermint from Sacred Blossom Farms here.

I spent the last weekend with two of my siblings. This started in 2015, I think, with just me and my younger brother, but now it encompasses somewhere between 2-4 of us and our various partners. It is our now-traditional meet-up for some kind of a running race where we hang out, make meals, and watch some not-me members of the family go on some kind of a mountain trail race that varies between 6 to 28 miles.

 

On the way back, my husband and I went the long way round and spent a night at Great Sand Dunes National Park. It rained heavily for the first part of the night; for some reason, when the rain stopped, the quiet woke me up. I had a hard time sleeping, so I eventually got out of the tent and walked around the campground, which is in a national Dark Sky area, and took pictures of the sky.

We got up in the morning and headed to the Great Sand Dunes, which are a bizarre geological feature in which these absolutely enormous (around 750 feet high!) sand dunes are in close proximity to mountains. There is some times of the year a spring that bubbles out of the ground. (It's below ground at this time of year, so we didn't see it now, though we have before) meaning that there's basically a sometime sandy beach that appears at odd times around 8,000 feet of elevation.

The sand was wet from the last night's rains. The weird thing about walking on wet sand is this: the first moment you step on the sand, it feels firm, before you break through and say, “yep, that's sand.” After a few steps, though, I started to get the hang of it: if you just used your hips to move your legs forward, and didn't push at all, you wouldn't break through the sand, and you could actually move faster and with less effort than if you tried as hard as you possibly could.

 

Step, step, careful step: we crossed the large sandy area and made it to the base of the dunes. It made the act of walking meditative.

At some point, we stopped and looked back. We could see other people's footprints, heavy and indented in the sand. Ours almost didn't exist--just the light imprint of our feet on the sand. It was so weird that I took about four steps trying to walk normally, and there it was--the deep indentations--and then I walked the new way, and once again, the indentations almost stopped.

 

It made me think. See, I learned something on this trip. The thing I learned was that I need to actually concentrate on my knee injury.

 

Which, uh, I haven't mentioned in this newsletter. So anyway, at the beginning of May (!!!???) I sat for too long (???) in the wrong position and strained my knee. I thought, initially, that it wasn't a big deal and it would heal really soon and then everything would be fine.

 

Also, to be clear, this is not a new injury. I had an old injury in 2017 when I was wearing inappropriate footwear for a snowy hike. It mostly healed? It was fine, in the sense that I got back like 98% of knee function and had like 2% of things that still bothered me but I could ignore 2%.

 

Anyway. Back to the new/possibly old knee injury. Months went on. It was not fine. It did not get better. I found out, gradually, that there were some things that made things worse (driving, for instance). I got a knee brace for driving and weirdly when I started actually taking care of myself and not constantly reaggravating the injury with things that hurt but not that much, it began to get better, finally. Rude.

 

I found out this weekend that sitting in the car for long hours on end with almost no break made it worse: a lot worse, to the point that I almost couldn't climb a single flight of stairs without pain after our seven hour drive to destination. I also found that the solution to this pain was not rest, but moving: walking two miles pretty much fixed the pain.

 

A few lightbulbs went off. It explained a lot of things about why I had found it so hard to sit and write over the last months: mostly, because I haven't been able to sit and I've been unconsciously rejecting it.

 

So anyway, here I was, slowly walking on wet sand and thinking about my knee injury and my country, and the thing I thought was this: there is a real benefit to taking the steps you can take, and never mind what normal looks like. 

 

I have been trying to fix my knee injury by ignoring it; that definitely didn't work. “It's not that painful, I'm sure it'll resolve itself” is… okay, sometimes it is in fact a solution, but it's not a solution here. I'm aware that knee injuries do not always resolve themselves at all and there is good evidence that, uh, this knee injury might be the kind that does not resolve itself, either, but there is also evidence that I might be able to minimize the impact of the injury with exercise to the point where I'm able to get back to 2% or 3%. I hope.

 

Instead, I need to take careful steps: to identify the moves that make things harder, and to try and walk steadily, even if it is slow. I am going to give healing it the old college try, and if I cannot get it to a better spot with judicious exercise, I am going to have to think about whether I need to consider surgery, because sometimes, knees just don't heal.

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