About two weeks into quarantine, my emotions start to get deeper, and I begin to eat more chocolate. I don’t feel like going to the park as much, and I start to develop a sore throat. My first thought is the take-out I got yesterday, in my state of exception. After he smoked a cigarette I saw that kid use hand sanitizer, but I didn’t see him wash his hands.
My first reaction is fear, in different places than it was before. My second reaction is deciding not to talk. I have said a lot. Time to be quiet for a while. Not just go in the house, but go inside.
Feels like I’m taking one for the team, developing our collective immunity. For some of us have to get sick, if others are to get better. We have to learn how to handle this in a reasonable way, handle the discomfort and the pressure. Keep breathing, if a bit slower. Longer. Deeper.
Without intending to my mind traverses the spectrum of “what if,” imagining what it would feel like, if I was forced to temporarily submit to this virus. Who would I call to come help me? Suddenly my friendships and relations are immediately triaged into those people I could count on to show up on my doorstep, regardless of the possibility of transmission, and those who I couldn’t. Suddenly all my desires for solitude and personal retreat in this time seem foolish.
With a slight internal smile I turn to a lone fortune cookie I acquired at the Asian grocery store when I was stocking up on dried mushrooms and spices. I open it with the vague determination to allow it to decide my future. It says I am going to live happily and in freedom for a long time.
I go to bed early wearing “garlic socks” – a previously unknown to me home remedy for colds in which you mash up garlic cloves and put them in your socks for a period of time to allow the medicinal properties of the garlic to be directly absorbed into your body through the skin. I bring a hot water bottle to bed and put it on my chest. I feel silly for going out into the cold sun with a wet head, and it seems uncanny the difference I would have felt, feeling what is most likely a simple cold, a few weeks back.
When I wake the next morning my symptoms seem minimized, but I decide to fast on bone broth nonetheless, another home remedy intended to boost the immune system. The unbelievable run of sunny days has finally been broken by clouds, and before noon it is raining on the deserted asphalt. For better or worse, the external atmosphere now feels like quarantine. I speak to a friend in Oregon, who leaves me a voice message interspersed with a few deep coughs. She and her partner began showing symptoms over a week ago, and their local doctor ordered the Covid19 test. At this point, 6 days later, they still don’t have the results, though their symptoms appear to be getting better. In an uncanny twist of everything, after a week of solid sun, then it starts snowing. The earth appears to be sweating it out, every which way she can.
…
I recently read in the paper a story about a factory worker in his mid-30s who spent six hours waiting in an emergency room to get tested for coronavirus after running a fever at work. He didn’t get a test, because they were too full. He returned the next day and stood for another full day in the pouring rain, waiting for a test, and he still didn’t get one. Perhaps he thought the third time would be the charm, because he went back again the following day and repeated the same ritual with worse symptoms, only to return home again without confirmation of his condition.
It seemed counterintuitive to me, to go stand in the pouring rain for six hours when one has a fever. At that point, what difference does it make, really, if someone tells you the name of what you have? If that particular thing that you have happens to be part of a global pandemic? In any case, in every case, the first solution is to try to heal yourself – rest, stay warm, drink copious amounts of clear liquids, attempt to lower the fever. Help your body do its job, rather than stand in the rain and exacerbate your symptoms.
Of course, not everyone trusts themselves to discern their own health. In fact, the fear pre-installed in our insurance and healthcare systems almost seem programmed to remove self-empowered decision-making regarding one’s own health. Even within the healthcare world, qualitative physicals given by doctors are more and more going the wayside of qualitative technological assessments, mostly due to an overwhelming increase in litigation that occurs when something goes wrong. At least with the results of a test on the record, one can say that they did everything possible, and they have the evidence to prove it, even if in actuality, they have no idea what’s going on.
I am 38 years old American, and for a good part of the last two decades I have been effectively without health insurance. The exception in this time was after I graduated from college in Vermont, where Bernie Sander’s now famous Medicare for All was already in place as a statewide form of affordable healthcare. At the time, as a healthy person in their early 20s who rarely if ever went to the doctor, I paid about 45$/month for my health insurance. At the time my rent was about $350. The price seemed reasonable, and I felt safe knowing that if I needed to, I could go to a doctor or the hospital. That health insurance was one of a handful of reasons I stayed in Vermont after graduating, knowing as soon as I left my Vermont residence, I would no longer have health insurance without getting a job in some part of corporate America.
Eventually I did leave, however, moved out West to Colorado, California, and eventually down to Mexico. Spent a few years working as a snowboard instructor at a mountain and sustained quite a few substantial injuries and illnesses as a result, including but not limited to a torn MCL, black eyes, an extraordinarily severe set of contusions on my hip and shoulder, and typhoid fever. Not once did I go to the emergency room. Instead I would call my father, a practicing pediatrician at a Community Health Clinic in Rhode Island, who inevitably told me the same prescription of rest, ice, and ibuprofen. As a yoga instructor I added my own set of exercises to my various rehab routines, and also started learning about plant medicines like Arnica and Echinacea, homeopathic options, and acupuncture, which would not have been covered by normal insurance anyway. I made friends with people who knew things about healing, and gradually became a healer as well.
After leaving America for Germany about ten years ago, I was required by law to get health insurance for my visa. However, the minimum form of health insurance, which was the only one that I could afford, only covered emergency situations, and otherwise one would have to pay up to a 500 euro deductible. To make a long story short, I just got used to taking care of myself.
This is why I would never stand in a line for 6 hours in the rain waiting for someone to confirm whether or not I have coronavirus. It’s not that I don’t trust the system; it’s just that I don’t think it will necessarily help, either my personal condition, or the pandemic. Moreover, when I see this history of how my own practices of self rehab with traumatic injuries and viruses compare to the rounds of opioid painkillers or antibiotics often offered by Western Medicine, I can’t say I feel I would necessarily be in better hands than my own.
I am not stubborn enough to refuse medical assistance if it became necessary, but there is a wide spectrum between home sick and going to the emergency room. It seems this pandemic has made two things starkly clear:
First, we need to learn how to take better care of ourselves. We need to learn how to cultivate and embody true health, as well as learn how to take care of ourselves if and when we get sick. Many years ago I was in Peru, and if you felt sick and asked someone what to do, almost every single person knew a handful of different plant-based remedies to try. Health and how to maintain it was very much common knowledge.
Second, Bernie has been right all along about Medicare for all – it really is the only thing that makes sense. At the moment I am quite grateful to be in the hands of the German government, rather than that of America. Once can only hope that this leads to a revolution of the entire system, and a serious re-evaluation of the concept that health care is currently a for-profit endeavor.
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Many people have chosen to use the War metaphor in regards to this virus, and though it can help to have a rallying cry, it feels like a handicapped perspective. Viruses and bacteria are also part of what builds a healthy immune system – much more so than the overuse of hand sanitizer. I realize that it is currently important to limit physical contact, and I would certainly encourage people on the front lines to wear a mask, but I find myself personally resisting it, in part because I feel that the virus is already in the global atmosphere, and rather than avoid it, we must learn how to live with it, overcome the challenges it presents, continue to calm our minds and breathe deeper, despite the pressure we might feel growing in our heart or on our chest. This is to say, not only is it already here, it is already a part of us.
As Charles Eisenstein recently pointed out in his essay, “The Coronation,” there is the “germ theory,” and the “terrain theory” – which is to say, one can try to isolate and eliminate particular threats to any given environment, or one can choose to attend to the environment as a whole, assist its own process of self-regulation, and find a new normal that embraces the current conditions. One of things that we are learning about this virus is that it doesn’t respond to force. For in reality, this is not a war, and I would venture to say that the longer we treat it like that, the longer it will go on. Rather than a war, it is the overhaul of an entire way of being. Taking the perspective of a battle implies that there are sides, and as long as we pick as side, there will be another side out there, in opposition. As long as we perceive ourselves as pristinely sterilized, every other person out there is a potential threat to our well-being.
How many times have you heard since this began that we are all in this together? How many lines of normality has this virus already destroyed? Even undocumented illegal workers are now considered essential, despite and with the fact that the virus does not consider borders to begin with. What will be the implications of this in the longterm? Will be find ourselves in a more compassionate sense of normal, where having compassion for others is normal, or will society land in the far extreme of separate nationalist totalities? One can only hope that the small print includes the legalization of all those who are essential.
For this is the danger of the mindset of separation, that we are not what is inside of us. That we are not, who or what is already here, within the borders of our body or our country or our home. That we do not have the capacity to heal ourselves, our broken spirits, our tired lungs and hearts. Fear is a powerful lobby – it can and will try to exhaust us and overcome our will to love and live. It is important to challenge the fear itself, for what it is, as well as consider some of other, less recognized, threats to our health and well-being. As many of us know, loneliness can cause depression. Subsequently, our state of mind also affects obesity, contributes to many forms of cancer and other auto-immune diseases, and also causes people to commit suicide. These ideas, put forth in Eisenstein’s Coronation, all seem to point towards a sense that as long as we make an enemy out of this disease and approach every other person (or unknown new thing) with fear, we are completely missing the point. This is not World War Three, this is a time for Active Evolution.
People have been speaking about climate change for decades, and still there are people who anthropocentrically think the earth was made for human consumption and that this whole global warming thing is a hoax meant to halt economic growth. The thing is, even if the earth WAS made for human consumption, wouldn’t it be logical to preserve it, so it could continue to preserve us? Though there are some who think that this whole coronavirus is an internal act of bioterrorism, I find that to be another incredibly anthropocentric claim over Mother Nature’s incredible capacities. She warned us, for years, and years, and years, in various ways, continually. Small acts of devastation distributed around the world, attempting to illustrate the state of imbalance that humanity continued to cultivate. But as a species, as a whole, we refused to listen, again, and again, and again. Until now, perhaps.
Are we all listening yet? Are we listening to the Earth, to each other?
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Scheiss die coronavirus!
Walking in the park the other day I heard a child of about 6 or 7 run by and shout his own personal claim to resistance. It raised a few eyebrows, including my own, hearing a child tell a virus to F*ck off.
Perhaps it is my personal act of resistance, or stupidity, but I am find myself determined to make friends with this thing. Though I don’t have any extreme symptoms, my immune system continues going up and down these last weeks, and it feels quite possible that I am the recipient of a low-grade coronavirus. Rather than go to the doctor and confirm this, I am committed to developing my immunity, making my bone broth and wearing my garlic socks and drinking my quarantine tea, doing my breathing exercises and sleeping and sitting in the sun with a scarf around my neck, getting out of the way and allowing my body, our earthly body, to take priority.
When I go out in the park I love to watch the dogs race around, and hear the birds chirp, and watch the ducks parade by. All of nature seems to be celebrating, and with good reason. The air is finally more clear to breathe. Though they may be anxious, people seem to be less stressed, and the general RPMs of society are slower than usual. We are being given the opportunity to let go of some of our stories, both individually and collectively, and cultivate flexibility, resilience, and health, in both our bodies and our minds.
Deepak Chopra recently took the opportunity to speak about the sense of non-duality inherent in our universal foundations, emphasizing that our bodies are a modified expression of our consciousness, echoing Eisenstein’s comments on the danger of trying to separate ourselves from the virus. For though our individual expressions of egoic life are full of fragile suffering, existence at its core only knows health – it only knows how to self-regulate. The fever we may experience as a result of this virus is a consequence of our bodies trying to take care of themselves, just as this virus is a consequence of the planet trying to take care of itself (and perhaps, warn of us even greater consequences to come, should we choose to remain obstinate about our specie’s habits of consumption).
I attended a virtual poetry jam last week and someone shared an anonymous Italian poem found on the internet that supposedly came from 1860. No one was clear about exactly what plague was hitting where at that time, but the sentiment clearly resonates today. It goes like this:
And the people stayed home
And read books and listened
And rested and exercised
And made art and played
And learned new ways of being
And stopped
And listened deeper
Someone meditated
Someone prayed
Someone danced
Someone met their shadow
And people began to think differently
And people healed
And in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways
Dangerous, meaningless, and heartless,
Even the earth began to heal
And when the danger ended
And people found each other
Grieved for the dead people
And they made new choices
And dreamed of new visions
And created new ways of life
And healed the earth completely
Just as they were healed themselves