On what was to be one of my last walks through Portland before moving here, I was in a magical space of being between two lives. I had stepped one foot out of the world I had come to know, yet was closer to it, having begun to see it as almost an outsider. From this vantage point, the context that holds up connections… person to person, person to place, person to self, becomes fuzzy… breaking life again into mystery. Its interesting how clues light up for the investigation, clues that may have been perfectly invisible to one who dwelled in a given space, a given framework, even for years.
That’s why outside observation does color a bit of who we are, and that is what being in relationship is about. Likewise, you can think you know yourself better than anyone, but you still can’t taste your own kiss. We exist in relationship, in relationship to the entire world, and each part of that world may view us in a different way. Because we are so connected, we are, at a certain level of being, looking back at ourselves, like one wave of the ocean witnessing another.
Moving can allow us to see our lives in a new way. It is a little bit like being born in that way. It is an out-of-the-ordinary moment that can light up every inch of a simple walk and reveal it to be teeming with detail. It can dissolve what you thought you saw in the Rorschach blot test and reveal the unset fray of newness before you. My walk took me from my home halfway up the side of Mt. Tabor to the top of the extinct volcano and back down again where I stopped at the foot of a large oak tree before turning onto 56th avenue.
I imagined what that tree would look like with stop-motion photography. I imagined it as a flowing, moving, breathing entity with twisting branches reaching for sunlight as it moved through the seasons. I imagined that, from its perspective, people might appear to be blowing about like the wind, barely perceivable as they wisped through time, jumping from one task to the next. Our motion might be just as invisible to them as their motion to us. Its interesting how different things in relationship with one another share the same space, and yet overlie each other in a sense, each potentially living at the center of its own unique world.
Just the other day, I was sitting at a park in Tempe eating my lunch, and I had a similar experience. I imagined the whole skin of the earth moving this way… trees, plants and grasses waving around. What appears to be solid and still is only that way because it appears to be stuck in a moment with us. This perspective infuses the world with flexibility and shifts the canvas to impressionistic. If we could speed things up and stand there still enough to witness it, we’d see the mountains shifting too, but within our lifetime, to us they will likely remain solid enough. And I think that says something about the nature of our world… it is alive and moving constantly within its different dimensions. It is light and pliable, and yet there is a certain relative solidness to it that we can almost count on to be true.
We are like that too. We live in a society that is constantly re-creating itself and searching for rules, and yet one would assume there to be some seemingly solid bit of ground to consider in the realm of time, something to count on from the great long story of being human. All I got from hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation was this lousy t-shirt?... unlikely.
Sitting at the park, my phone rang, and it was my friend Megan who spoke of feeling overwhelmed. She went on to describe her contemplation of all of the different diet books she encountered at the bookstore. This reminded me of a video I had watched in nutrition class featuring the dentist Weston Price. He had wanted to know why westerners had so many dental problems, and (in the 1940’s I believe) he had funded his own trip around the world searching for healthy people with healthy teeth. The people he found with healthy teeth, and virtually no disease as well, were different groups of indigenous people from a variety of regions, who had eaten foods consistent with their heritage. They lived lives consistent with their heritage too. They never had their wisdom teeth pulled consequently, because the palette at birth was large enough to contain them, a function of their proper nourishment.
And now we approach the edge of cultural illusion. Most history books have a beginning, but usually that emphasis is placed on the beginning of civilization. Civilization, being a new way of life, left us with many new challenges… it left us with new diseases as a function of living in the same spot with many others. It left us with sanitation issues. Many of these are conditions which we have improved upon, which is indeed true. The illusion or the cultural myth is that these improvements (to our health and so on) were improvements on the state of man (the state of people), when in reality they were improvements on our own radically different way of living. We see our self-assumed advanced lives and the lives of cave people and there may be an, if not apparent, then subconscious, ethnocentric view.
A feeling of superiority has the potential to rise up in any one of us, myself included, at a given time. It is not who we are, but a pattern we may find ourselves operating within. Civilized people may see developing countries, as they demonstrate the catching-up process, and pair them, perhaps, with indigenous & tribal people, holding both inferior in some regard… placing us on the cutting edge. But we aren’t on the cutting edge, despite being on the edge. And the culture that gave birth to these bodies, in which we reside, has pushed many other cultures, including many native peoples, to the edge in the wake of its subtle sense of being of greater value.
My friend Brian took me with him to see a hockey game over the holidays, and I took note that only the home team players were shown on the huge video screen. I didn’t even know their stories and yet they were dipicted larger than life, shadowing the true action of the game, and making small the stories of other players, on the ice below. Like a fractal pattern that has more surface area the smaller it gets, the edges of what we barely see hide the pages of our story deep in detail. The sun is the center of our solar system and so it shines for us brighter than stars of equal or greater size that are all around.
We are advanced people?… and really what does that mean? Beyond that thin membrane, that we are taught is the beginning of our history, are many secrets. If we see all the teams with the healthy detachment of a good referee and step through that barrier, we may find a secret passageway containing a more accurate past. We may sense out a collective image. Holograms require multiple perspectives.
I would guess that timeline would not be filled with barbaric cave-people, just like the world is not filled with barbaric animals shaped by their own unfolding in the adaptation game… However there is still a squirrel at a state park that will, with the intensity of one addicted to crack perhaps, hover around visitors in lust of a Frito. There are still elephants at the zoo with foot problems as a function of their domestication. There are cows with the substantial gas of being fed corn, rather than grass, by civilized people. If a canine somewhere has asthma, it is likely of the domestic variety, not the wolf variety. It is the one who has been subjected to quick change, not the one living a slow change dance with the world all around.
It is civilization (domestication) that has come with quick change and laid down the gauntlet of adaptation for humans and other animals, as well as plants. Though the point of this is not to bash civilization as it could have unfolded, perhaps with anyone, were they to have that particular degree of awareness, were they to wear these suits, were they to collide with certain circumstances and relative pressures, were they to have access to certain resources. At any rate, we are not an unnatural occurrence. All people are natural, just as big changes are. Take an earthquake, which is the epitome of a quick change and something many of us have been thinking about lately… 30 seconds and hundreds of thousands of lives shifted. On a certain level, suffering could be said to result from an inability to adapt in time to a swift and powerful alteration. And that is what we do sometimes with our digestive and other bodily systems. We expose them to brand new foods, along with brand new ways of posturing our body, which are also big quick changes that demand our accommodation, which we may not be able to give, from a matter perspective, in a reasonable time before making ourselves a suitable home for illness and disease to move into.
So, there are many chapters to the human story and we live on the very last page of it, looking for answers within that page… We may find ourselves overwhelmed by choices such as which diet to follow… a choice that many of our ancestors never had to think about. Of course some did and they became us. How much of our choices or freedoms spring from the forgetting of what is naturally best? Perhaps if it were the best choice, it would be such a part of us as to be invisible in that sense. We don’t always notice the parts that are working. And the parts that aren’t may attract options which we may associate with freedom, and yet that freedom may be a distraction from something closer to true freedom. And while much of what we think… what I think, what I write, may prove to be false or true only in context (which I feel even as I write,) even more so the history of how people lived becomes of value.
In future writing I am sure I will extrapolate on this, but for now I’ll point out the obvious and say that these people did not consume new foods born in a laboratory. Remember how common hydrogenated oils were? Sure enough, just like fad diets, they did not hold up to the experiment of time. Typical process: New food is discovered and has the mechanics of the old food. It has the ability to attach itself to us, to dock on the receptor site of a cell for example, as components of yellow food coloring do. However, the food has been altered into something new that has a relationship with humans equaling zero years, allowing no dance of adaptation to unfold. It has no relative to which we have acclimated; because it was born of Immaculate Conception…it did not carry on a story of which we were a part. And it may kick out something we may actually need, such as B6, which needs to dock on the site that yellow food coloring may be occupying.
Our microcosm is mimicking our macrocosm. Our new foods kick out old ones in the same sense that civilization kicked out native and indigenous peoples and the relationships they (we) had established. But we were/are throwing out living textbooks, and all of this is covered over by the illusions that hold together our culture’s story. Columbus was not playing the character we have been taught to think he was. He was, at the very least, in a state of unawareness. In an alternate reality, we might hold a space of respect for those who involuntarily yielded land to newcomers. We might acknowledge those women, men and children that were torn from family life and regarded as slaves…and meanwhile subjected to the new diseases (quick change) that traveled with settlers. On the dietary front, altered vegetable oils were not the heroes we were taught to think they were either.
What if technology gave us the ability to instantly transport ourselves to other worlds? Would we be able to eat the food in those worlds? Or would the unfolding of life, having taken different turns, produce different inter-relationships, different bacteria, different atoms, molecules, energetics? When we eat food created in a laboratory, including artificial colors, oils and sweeteners, we are probably eating something from a slightly different world. I don’t want to eat food from another world right now. I want to eat food from this one.
The choices we make, under the cover of freedom, may limit the food choices others may have. The “Future of Food” DVD (free on hulu) highlights situations where Mon Santo’s genetically modified (quick change) corn cross-pollinated, by wind, with other farmer’s fields. This not only lead to further spreading of genetically modified (quick change) foods, but also to lawsuits where Mon Santo sued those small-farm farmer’s for rights to the corn and won. (Are many of today’s corporations fueled by the same dynamics of pushing out that have been applied to the rise of civilization and to the rise of new foods?)
The world is a flowing mass made of waves, atoms, molecules… no box can contain the new organisms we create once released… like cross words between lovers, nothing may be the same again, and the relationship may be forever changed. Furthermore, when we make an experiment in the world, it may, in some sense, already be released into the soup the moment it comes about, the moment it is birthed into the world. All of this, perhaps, because we see only the tip of the iceberg, one perspective on the latter part of our history that was (is?) lit up in our high school history books. (From a nutrition standpoint, it may be the FDA’s food pyramid which rises above the water, but that is going to melt away at some point and allow for the deeper story to rise to the surface.)
Myself, I recently returned from holiday travels. Many of us spent holidays with family and food, two things we have a long term relationship with. We don’t always think of it that way, but we are in relationship with food. Each of those cultures that Weston Price studied had established a relationship with food. As plants have twisted and moved through the seasons, reaching for sunlight, people have shifted along with them. People have been on a trip through time with these plants, and as the reach of our own arms have fallen short, our offspring have continued the journey and the story of being human. In this, they carried human genetic material with them, the same genetic material that danced with the plants and foods present though history.
Within each human is the human genome which evolves very slowly*, perhaps as slowly as mountains breaking down. In essence we have been passing our inner workings on to our children and like fuzzy-edged pieces of a puzzle they come together in relationship to all that surrounds us, all that is us, and that is the dance of life. All of those plants twisting out of the ground and into the sky out there have been intimately intertwined with us. The fruits that they bear are like keys that fit the ignition of our digestive and other bodily systems. The respiration of their leaves is our own ability to breath, because they provide us air just as they provide us with food. New keys… brand new foods might fit into those cellular keyholes, because the parts that attach to us have been kept, but the rest of them are something from another ecosystem than ours… No micro in-tandem adjustments…just a sudden appearance.
We are undeniably in a long term relationship. I am thinking now of this idea that you can know yourself really well, but you can’t taste your own kiss. It is difficult to know ourselves, our culture, our history, our team until we step away from it. We know nature in a way that is unique, but no matter our perspective, we are tasting the kiss of the world, more specifically, our world, the particular ecosystem we have been sharing this dance with. And I don’t think we are ready yet for a brand new lover.
What do “they” know that we have forgotten? How can it be applied to our world? What cultural assumptions might we make that limit our potential? And what secrets dwell in the great story of being and the great story of being human?
Be well.
General Disclaimer: Note that the author believes there is an exception to every rule (even this one) and likes the saying “The universe has tendencies rather than laws” as well as the idea that life unfolds in multiple dimensions as well as the idea that truth is like a finger pointing at the moon. While focusing on the world of matter, it is important to remember the simultaneous existence of other potentially less linear, energetic realms of being. So everything that be will be said is recommended with a grain of salt or as Dr. Russell Marz would say, “with a grain of potassium.” (Not that an isolated mineral would ever equivocally replace a whole food, as this hints again at the possibility of quick change!)
Suggested Reading & Viewing, Influences and Inspirations:
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn (and its sequels)
Weston Price (Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, etc)
Future of Food DVD
An Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Nourishing Traditions Cookbook (note: likely features degrees of hearsay)
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
A People’s History of the United States of America by Howard Zinn
Nutrition Classes with Don Mataez
Herbalism Classes with JoAnn Sanchez
An Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
*Fibromyalgia by (author info forthcoming)
Have we advanced our happiness?
