Your Electricity Is Keeping You Sick

I’m not convinced that you can find the stillness your body so desperately craves while in a conventional house with electricity. The sort of ocean-deep quiet of unfurling ferns and early bird trills with sunlight whispering out over the mountain ridge. There is the holy place of pure Being that our bodies and our spirits are wanting, out from under the yoke of the imaginary clock and machine and schedule. The electricity in the walls calibrates our cells to the Buzz, magnetizes our movements to the frequency of the mechanical. How can we be well in a cage like that? How can we hold that holy place in a body being charged like a cell phone? Oh and it becomes an addiction: Have you ever been camping, and tasted that different calibration? The relaxation in the muscle? The settling of the racing mind? But for how long? It is often one can last a few days, until the shakes kick in. The withdrawal. Many people have gotten so used to the dis-order in their bodies that when the stimulus for it is gone, we start to want it again, similar to how kids in chaotic environments subconsciously choose chaotic relationships later in life because it is a known, somehow comfortable uncomfortability. Where does this anxiety with the stillness come from?

I wonder if when we experience the full release of all of our pretend realities - all of the digital world, the fake busyness, the time warp scrolling, the imagined perceptions of others receiving you on the internet, the incessant tasks and schedules, - when all that is gone, maybe there is a damn of frozen grief inside us that threatens to melt and burst forth. I know it is true for me. Whenever I spend several days in a town or city, I feel the numbness set in, the upwelling of grief that my body chooses to freeze in order to make it through the social and cultural expectations of me, the looking away from what dominant culture perpetuates upon the more-than-human world. Then when I leave, I usually go lay on the forest floor near a river somewhere, and weep and weep and weep, feeling like I might die. It is only the years of learning about grief that helps me know I won’t actually die, and that the best way through it is to fully feel all the feelings. And somehow it is still scary, terrifying in fact. Inconvenient. There is still a feeling that I could just cut it short and get back to “my day”, whatever that means. Be productive. Get shit done. But when I choose to grieve completely, to give myself to that terrifying river, it always eventually slows, the eddy becoming more gentle, until at last the creek dries into a trickle, and the sobs turn to yawns, and the searing pain melts into sorrow that disperses through the whole body, and becomes easier to carry.

I don’t think we can live a life in true integrity to the living world - the stones, the mycelium, the salmon, the wolves, the wind, in conventional houses built of poison, wired with poison, cleaned with poison, leaching poison, relying on poison. I see so many online self help methodologies out there, all requiring so much time and effort to try to regulate the nervous system out of the state of panic most folks feel. I bet it helps a bit, if you are able to focus that much time and effort. But I think it is a normal and natural reaction of the body to feel like it needs to leave, maybe like you want to run.

Run to the trees, my love. Run to the mossy carpets, the blackberry lace, the ferns unfolding. Run to the creeks of salmonberry, cottonwood, salal, and elderberries. And stay there as long as you can. Turns out you don’t need a shower every few days. You don’t need to get back to check Instagram. The world will go on.

So many of us are awakening to animism, and our responsibility to the other living beings around us. There is talk of taking care of the land, of our waters, of the plants and animals. But how can we talk of such things if our daily lives are dependent on the poisoning, displacement, and enslavement of these beings all over the planet? What happens when you switch your light switch? Where does that energy come from? What about when you open a faucet? What water is enslaved and degraded to enable us to have water pouring out of our walls whenever we want it? Have you ever thought about rainwater landing on a chemical laden roof, leaching poisons into the runoff, landing on the earth, and poisoning the soil? What about the slow decomposition of paint leaching into rainwater? Chemical treated wood, chemical laden cement, all the wastewater with soap in it? It all has consequence, even if we don’t see it.

Drink clean spring or well water. You can’t be well drinking chemicals and heavy metals and pharmaceutical waste. Eat food from the ground, not from a company. Don’t use chemicals in lotions, in cleaners, in makeup, laundry detergent, shampoo and conditioners. All these things are doable. Feasible. It isn’t an overwhelming insurmountable task. You can stop buying things from the store. Make your own, or buy from someone is who is doing the same.

Your body will reset itself. Sleep outside. Skip the electricity. You really don’t need it. Or get a battery pack that can live outside of your house. Light candles instead of bulbs. Say hello the the plants. Something sacred will happen to you, I promise.