I Turned My Foot into a Rabbit and A Spell to Become Real

I’ve had this ache in the arch of my left foot for months. When I wake in the morning, I can barely put my whole weight on it. I hop down the stairs to let Ellie out to pee, gripping the railing like it might keep me from hurtling into oblivion.

Then the pain eases. It never quite threatens to take me down. It disappears when I sit. It's only a whisper when I run. But every day it seems just a little louder, as though it's politely reminding me that if I don't pay attention now, eventually it may collect interest in the form of a heel, an ankle, or an entire leg.

For reasons I can't fully explain, I've been disinclined to investigate this pain by traditional Western pathways. Rather than visit a podiatrist, I've given my foot Reiki. Rather than asking a physical therapist what exercises might help, I visited a reflexologist and let her squeeze what felt like equal parts lactic acid and self-loathing out of my sole. Rather than take an Advil, I tried turning my foot into a rabbit.

This last approach may sound a little out there, but in my defense, it had been remarkably successful when I was wrestling with post-coital urinary discomfort. My friend Colleen Norris recommends approaching physical symptoms with curiosity rather than interrogation. Close your eyes. Focus on the sensation. Let it reveal itself as an animal. The last time I did this, I met an absolute asshole of a snake wrapped around my urethra. This time, my aching foot became a floppy-eared white rabbit.

I looked at the rabbit and waited for it to reveal its secrets to me. Surely it had something profound to share. Instead, it just sat there, nose twitching. I knelt beside it, and it looked back at me with dark eyes and a soft pink nose. Cute enough, I invited it into my lap. It hopped up without hesitation. I held it there, petting its soft white fur, thinking both how weird I was to be holding an imaginary foot rabbit and how hopeful I was that said rabbit might reveal the hidden mysteries of my musculoskeletal system.

I've had stranger Tuesdays.

As I stroked its soft fur, my mind wandered to all the other rabbits that have quietly followed me through my life. First came Heather Bunny. My pet rabbit lived with us for ten years when I was growing up. She was a pretty little girl, mostly white with black spots running down her back and eyes rimmed with what everyone agreed looked remarkably like mascara. Occasionally we'd let her loose in the basement where she'd launch herself into joyful bunny hops before returning to the cage that smelled of urine. My mother faithfully cared for her, but Heather Bunny spent most of her days alone in that cage. I grieved how small her world had been.

Then I was taken to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and the white rabbit whom Alice follows into a whole new way of existing just because she was curious enough to pay attention. The rabbit’s refrain, “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late for a very important date,” rattled around in my brain as I considered the absurdity that a rabbit could have anything important to be late for ...and also with the unsettling feeling that I, too, am late for something, though I'm not entirely sure what.

And then, unexpectedly, my mind wandered back to my college honors thesis. I wrote about children's literature as a low-stakes way of teaching children the dominant values of a culture. I looked at stories that quietly trained young readers to accept particular ideas about obedience, heroism, gender, power, and love. One of the books I analyzed was an alphabet primer from 1902 called Babes of Empire, which cheerfully informed young boys that England ought to lead the world because, naturally, everyone else would benefit.  I also wrote about The Velveteen Rabbit. Back then, I found it deeply moving. The rabbit is loved by the boy to the point that his fur wears away, his seams loosen, his whiskers fall out, and then one day the Nursery Fairy determines that he has been loved so thoroughly that he has earned his wish of becoming real to everyone, not just to the boy. When I was twenty-two, I thought this tale about transcendent love was beautiful. Now…I'm less convinced. I'm not sure I support an image of love where becoming real requires this kind of annihilation.

No wonder my foot hurt.

Now listen, I am still a pharmacist. There are entirely reasonable explanations for this pain. Perhaps it's because an ill-advised gel pedicure caused both of my big toenails to fall off, changing the way I run. Perhaps it's because I'm thirty-seven and occasionally behave as though hydration and stretching are merely suggestions. Perhaps my mother is right and one leg is slightly longer than the other, in which case this entire spiritual rabbit expedition could have been replaced by a shoe insert and a cortisone shot.

I concede these are all possibilities. But I also wonder whether this foot has spent years carrying me down a path that asks an awful lot. A path that has stripped away careers, identities, certainty, relationships, and stories about who I thought I was. A path that keeps asking me to become more myself, though at times it has felt like all my fur being rubbed off and my stuffing squeezed out.

Perhaps that's why the rabbit appeared. Rabbits don't force; they invite. Heather Bunny invited me to notice confinement. Alice's rabbit invited me to follow curiosity. The Velveteen Rabbit invited me to question what it actually means to become real. And this little foot rabbit...so far, it has simply invited me to hold it.

The path of the holistic healer—the path of the witch—isn't really about rejecting medicine. It's about leaving room for more than one story to be true at once. Sometimes the answer is biomechanics. Sometimes it's grief. Sometimes the body and the soul appear to be in cahoots.

Maybe this pain will disappear after a diligent stretching routine. Maybe it'll resolve with ibuprofen and better hydration. Maybe it'll fade when I stop trying so hard to earn my own existence.

I honestly don't know. All I know is that my foot still hurts. And for now, I’m going to keep holding the rabbit.

Download the Spell PDF to add to your grimoire here