I guess I forget when you get too yang- you get more yang. We had just lost our home, our new house was infested with 12 colonies of carpenter ants and the car’s engine had blown up. What next? Eventually, you come to believe a perpetual dark cloud hovers overhead!

  It was late on a Sunday night when I heard a great commotion upstairs and screaming. I had been busy working on the first floor of our house, while my husband and daughter were upstairs in the kitchen. I ran up the steps. What  I saw baffled me, steam was rising up from the dining room carpet trailing off from a large pot laying askew on the floor. Nearby, Mark crouched on the floor screaming, holding his foot up in the air in great agitation.

  It took some time before I could get a coherent explanation of events from my nine-year-old daughter. Dad had carried a huge pot of near boiling fresh ginger water to give himself a compress and had tripped on the rug. The pot had flown up in the air and the piping hot ginger water had landed right on Mark’s left foot and had drenched his heavy sock. In the shock of the moment, Mark had ripped his sock off along with a good portion of the skin of his upper top foot and toes. I ordered Chandelle to try to salvage the oriental rug while I attended to Mark.

  It was one of those moments when a hundred images rush before your mind within a matter of seconds. Outside raged one of the worst ice storms in years. The nearest hospital was 45 minutes away, down winding mountain roads. We had just moved from Vermont to the Packinghouse in Pennsylvania, where we didn’t know anyone. There was no one else around,  I thought, “dear Orders of the Universe help me!” Mark’s foot looked like a raw piece of meat, cooked rare. It made me nauseous.

  At the time of the accident, I had been Macrobiotic for ten years and Mark was going on 20 years. During some of my Macrobiotic life we had shared a house with his sister, Diane, and her children. Diane has always been an expert in first aid situations. None of us had ever sought medical attention but there were a couple of times where we had come very close. We had experienced serious illnesses, accidents with run away lawn tractors, blindness . . .  but have always managed to remain self sufficiently.

  While I eat and live Macrobiotically, unfortunately, I have never lived in a macrobiotic community. But Mark and Diane had lived in the early Macrobiotic Philadelphia Study Houses in the late 1970  and 1980's. The experiences and knowledge they gained there helped us pull us through the worst situations, always with a greater gratitude for life.

  Mark was in terrible pain. After settling Mark’s foot into a cool water foot bath, I called Diane. We discussed treatment, as usual, Diane was cool and collected. Her clear conviction and years of experience assured me of what I had to do. Fortunately, I had tofu in the house. I mashed cold tofu and gathered up rolls of sterile gauze and towels. After four hours, I finally convinced Mark to take his foot out of the cool water. I commenced with the tofu plaster. Later when I ran out of tofu, I made the plaster out of dried soybeans, fresh greens and goldenseal powder. I religiously applied the compress’ six to eight times a day. Mark stayed put on the couch for two weeks straight. He ate a good standard Macrobiotic diet with plenty of fresh, boiled greens.

  Together we discussed why we attracted such a severe accident to ourselves. We analyzed our 9 Star Ki positions, year, and the direction we had moved in. We reflected and realized that our frenzied activity level after a very difficult move and taking on a major renovation with no break was to blame. We were responsible. We modified our diet appropriately and were careful to avoid fruit and oil to speed his recovery.

  After the first week, I called a chiropractor to examine Mark’s foot. His wife gave us the name of a good Naturopathic M.D. When I took Mark for the appointment, the doctor said Mark had a third degree burn. He was amazed and kept asking what treatment we had used. Four weeks later, we paid a visit to the chiropractor. His wife could not believe that the area of Mark’s foot that had been so terribly burnt was actually growing back tiny hairs.

  During the long convalescence, Mark continually asked me if his foot was healing. Although I couldn’t really see from all the tofu and herbs, I knew it was. Thanks to the power of nature and the good practice of Macrobiotics his foot is perfectly healed. In an upcoming article, we will relate how Mark played Gumby and lives to this day after falling from a two-story roof.