…Return to the earth, before you are placed there regardless of your best efforts to prevent it! Anyone’s plague susceptibility (anyone in western society, at least) is in large part due to our general distance from the earth and all the balancing properties intrinsic to it. I mean this a lot more literally than you might thus far think:
For a long time I’ve held and—when feeling jolly and okay with taking on the role of a friendly goof—spoken that if one is ever very sick, especially with a high fever and an unknown diagnosis/prognosis, the best remedy is to bury oneself naked, standing/leaning most of the way under the soil with just your head exposed. There is something very intuitive to this idea that I could never dismiss as being absurd, and also it is the most holistic thing I think you can do for yourself, even perhaps before you are deathly ill. We all ultimately are made of the earth, no? Why not reduce our surface exposure when we are most vulnerable, and let the mother protect us? It’s compelling to think of being surrounded by a cooling soil when you are highly fevered; or having this firm, reassuring hug when you have the chills; or allowing a solid substance to absorb and dissipate your waves of nausea.
Of course this is not something that I would personally brave to do if I were seasonally sick or unwell, being so stupidly invested in polite society and trying to appear as normal as possible… but if I woke up with a Lou Gehrig feeling of a countdown to my death, I would get my ass into a muddy hole very quickly.
I think this notion might have stemmed out of noticing how much better I feel lying on the floor than up on a bed while enduring a stomach virus, and there daydreaming of being outside and feeling even better (of course its ironic that when people are very ill they are kept inside, even when it is a beautiful day). When sick I would also do things to numb my senses by throwing a towel over my head and closing my eyes to make everything seem more distant. I have a feeling that the earth has incredible abilities to mute our minds when they are reeling in agony. Our senses which enable us to be highly mobile and defend ourselves in a faster paced above ground scenario, will be rightfully allowed to put their guards down, and we can allow ourselves to become tree-ish and effectively weather the onslaught.
So what of the seasonally frozen tundra that so much of western society has stubbornly deployed itself upon? I think the ground being frozen is a big message to all of us that we aren’t supposed to be living here, or that we need to hibernate.
Subverses 