Discuss: The Nature of Walls

oops I forgot one of the best books.

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Here’s a little riff on MCS and the natural world I wrote a couple of years ago that was published by The Bear Deluxe: http://wildflowerstew.org/58244.html

I think Frost said it best:
“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.”

Hi April

Thanks for that.

I am not knowledgeable about poetry.
I build a lot of walls though and I think that is it.

Jon

Rebecca & Jon:
I kept watching this too, to see if someone else with mcs would pop up. It was neat to see that someone did ...

I lately watched “Rivers and Tides” for the first time, and saw the amazing wall there ... I wondered if you had seen that wall, Jon? Amazing!

Rebecca: I live in Nova Scotia, and I’m not as dependant on air conditioning here, but I do use it about one month of the year ...

-Kathi

To Rebecca,

I looked at your link.  I thought it interesting that you tied your health to the health of the planet.

After Kathi’s most recent post I did a cursory web search for MCS.  I saw that there are a family of maladies associated with it and that there is some internal discussion as to a biological or psychogenic “cause”.

I could not find estimates of the number of people affected and would love to know. It seems entirely plausible to me that the synthetic chemistry we spew into our world would negatively impact us in both biological and psychic ways.

I have noticed lately in a variety of scientific and cultural sources , including Orion, that there is a movement growing examining our lack of exposure to nature and its negative impact on our immune systems and cultural identity. I have, perhaps mistakenly, read this as a critique of our notions of cleanliness. It has spilled over into our funeral customs as well with at least one book, Grave Matters. 

These are intense taboo topics that are deeply etched into our various cultural cores.

I wonder if perhaps a common fear of death drives these cultural patterns? We are not forever young.  We each die, and we rot. Just like road kill racoons or opossums.

Advertising and cosmetic surgery promise eternal youth and several religions promise an afterlife.  We know about embalming and mummies.

But few people discuss our shared certain death outside a religious or health framework. There is a natural system that reuses each and every molecule of our being again and again and again.

From a biological perspective if we can imagine being no different than animals, the stuff that is us never goes to waste or goes away. 

It changes forms.

Maybe we are meat flowers?

We germinate, grow, flower, set seed, fade and die. Up until now we have provided for the next generation. Maybe that is our calling?

Maybe that is enough?

Jon

Jon:
According to MCS America, “The prevalence of MCS, based on sample populations, provides an estimate of 16% of the population and 33% of Gulf War Veterans who experience chemical hypersensitivity (Gibson, 2005; Meggs et al, 1996).” (The figures are slightly different in Canada, where I am ...) You can find out a lot more about MCS at the MCS America website, http://www.mcs-america.org.

-Kathi

Meat flowers? How Zen . . . however nothing eats us. We are the top of the food chain.

Sure when we die the body rots - compost - pushing up daisies. In Tibet they practice “celestial burial” - the ground being too rocky and frozen to dig a grave. They chop up the body and throw it to waiting vultures. The vultures are white. It’s quite a visual. Or there is cremation - ashes to ashes. All matter transformed one way or the other.

But we are talking about more than molecules here. The energy that animates molecules moves on. How aware is the psyche that rides that energy? Who knows?

I know that my molecules have been affected by the toxic substances my fellow human beings have put into the atmosphere. These substances did not naturally occur. They were deliberately mixed by humans with agendas other than the physical wellbeing of other humans - like to make more money for themselves. They are innately corrupt. This is a corrupt use of human energy.

Electromagnetic fields are real. Everyone is affected by cell phone towers, for example. The way that influence is manifested is individually unique. I may have migraines from it, you might not have any noticeable symptoms, one of your children might have a genetic change that would not have occurred had you not been affected. There is really no way to trace all this and really no need to. We are already equipped to know what is naturally beneficial to us and what isn’t just like a deer knows not to eat the jimson weed.

We don’t trust our instincts anymore. That may be our downfall. The building of the wall as you describe it is an elegant example of trusting your intuition. We can do that in everything. We can retrain ourselves to do it.