oh so habituous

The Lady in Blue

A story sent by a friend we made in Texas. Follow the link to incredulity...

The Lady in Blue.

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How to Create the Future?


Here is an anecdote:

Xiang Yu was a Chinese general in the third century B.C. who took his troops across the Yangtze River into enemy territory and performed an experiment in decision making. He crushed his troops’ cooking pots and burned their ships.

It comes from a New York Times article called "The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors". Which I recommend you read before continuing.

Here is the abstract from an essay called "Keeping Doors Open: The Effect of Unavailability on Incentives to Keep Options Viable" (link is to a pdf file) from the website (with a name much more tantalizing than the essay title), PredictablyIrrational.com:

Many of the options available to decision makers, such as college majors and romantic partners, can become unavailable if sufficient effort is not invested in them (taking classes, sending flowers). The question asked in this work is whether a threat of disappearance changes the way people value such options. In four experiments using “door games,” we demonstrate that options that threaten to disappear cause decision makers to invest more effort and money in keeping these options open, even when the options themselves seem to be of little interest. This general tendency is shown to be resilient to information about the outcomes, to increased experience, and to the saliency of the cost. The last experiment provides initial evidence that the mechanism underlying the tendency to keep doors open is a type of aversion to loss rather than a desire for flexibility.

The idea behind the anecdote and the experiments? What really motivates us is often the desire to avoid the immediate pain of watching a door close.

Okay, so first go back and read the New York Times article (you can read the essay later, if you want).

Now some thoughts of mine.
I have begun, paradoxically as a result of my understanding myself better, to regret, and to deeply regret, decisions I have made in the past. It hasn't mattered that I have ended up in a place where I am happy and can feel almost tangibly the possibilities still stretching before me: I am still at times overcome with regret for moments of my past, so that I feel like I am falling apart. Isn't that strange? I don't mean it in a figurative sense, but in a real sense -- as if some things unfinished or unchosen have thrown me off some sort of rail and I won't be able to get it straight now no matter what. This is not a constant or particularly persistent feeling, but when I have it it is very strong.

Without making it a matter of morality, these articles and thoughts I found today are reminding me of an understanding I have had at healthier times, when I could admit to myself that this deep regret is on the one hand a valid and important reality, but on the other hand a part of past reality, and it was/is a kind of vanity, maybe, that keeps me from closing those doors, and being able to accept my poor decisions. There are healthy and there are harmful ways of living with/in the past, and I am experienced at least in the harmful ways, which involve ignoring the loss, relishing the feeling of loss, or raging against the loss -- all of which I have done. What are the healthy ways? That is something I can only talk about abstractly and hypothetically. Maybe someone else can comment on how to be gracious with loss. It's hard to talk about when we so rarely need to face it. I guess that's why we're so scared of it, even when playing a little simulated video game.

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A strange thought on laughter, from Elias Canetti

Laughter has been objected to as vulgar because, in laughing, the mouth is open wide and the teeth are shown. Originally laughter contained a feeling of pleasure in prey or food which seemed certain. A human being who falls down reminds us of an animal we might have hunted and brought down ourselves. Every sudden fall which arouses laughter does so because it suggests helplessness and reminds us that the fallen can, if we want, be treated as prey. If we went further and actually ate it, we would not laugh. We laugh instead of eating it. laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food. As Hobbes said, laughter expresses a sudden feeling of superiority, but he did not add that it only occurs when the normal consequences of this superiority do not ensue. His conception contains only half the truth. Perhaps because animals do not laugh, he did not see that our laughter is originally an animal reaction. But neither do animals deny themselves obtainable food if they really want it. Only man has learnt to replace the final stage of incorporation by a symbolic act. It is as though the whole interior process of gulping down food could be summed up and replaced by those movements of the diaphragm which are characteristic of laughter.

Canetti is great because he is not afraid to play around with ideas, and find hidden truths in bizarre places. The easy thing to do is to find him wrong; but what fun is that!? Instead try and discover that he is on to something, and then play around with it yourself. The point is not to be right, but to be better and better at discernment, and this demands flexibility and humor. To laugh at oneself, maybe, when something you were so sure of gets stolen from you at the last moment, gets turned inside out.

Laughter is maybe thought to be vulgar only by those who are ashamed of their need to eat, and frightened by the fact that they may be eaten. The desire to live for living's sake, or eat for eating's sake, makes it impossible to laugh instead of eating; the villain and the glutton only laugh when they have had their fill, and know the food is not going anywhere, that their victims are completely within their control. They laugh between bites. The peaceful and hospitable person is able to laugh instead of eating, to refuse graciously a bite from someone else's mouth, to be merry, if need be, without the food and drink. There is a big difference between the laughter of the gluttonous villain, and the laughter of the pleased host.

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Thoughts on an idea from City and Soul, by James Hillman

The following excerpt comes from an essay a friend sent to me a few days ago. It is from the book City and Soul, by James Hillman, a psychotherapist and prolific author. The primary idea governing the chapter I was given seems to be a call for psychologists to overcome the distinction between a subjective, internal psyche, or soul, and a strictly material, external world, to be replaced by the understanding that the physical world is also psychical, or ensouled, so that it becomes entirely legitimate (and not merely figurative) to say, for instance, that "Our buildings are anorexic, our business paranoid... Our technology manic."

One part especially struck me (and Jessie when I read it to her), probably because it uses as its illustration the situation of marital disagreements leading toward divisive conflict. Jessie and I argue about stuff, of course, and quite often our arguments generate new ways of doing things, or new ways of thinking about things - recognizing the need to adjust something which is causing discomfort or annoyance, or realizing something about ourselves in a different way. But our conflicts are also sometimes caught in an uneasiness, and with being overwhelmed by things which elude us, and which we too quickly take upon ourselves (or push on the other) as a wrong which is ours (isn't it?) but which we are not able to quite get our hands on to do anything about. We are left feeling responsible (and guilty, weary, etc) for things which we do not even understand. The following from James Hillman was helpful yesterday in understanding this problem more clearly:

A decaying marriage [or any relationship, we could say: family, church, office, etc] can be analyzed to its intra- and inter-subjective roots, but until we have also considered the materials and design of the rooms in which the marriage is set, the language in which it is spoken, the clothing in which it is presented, the food and money that are shared, the drugs and cosmetics used, the sounds and smells and tastes that daily enter the heart of that marriage -- until psychology admits the world into the sphere of psychic reality -- there can be no amelioration, and, in fact, we are conspiring in the destruction of that marriage by loading onto the human relationship and the subjective sphere the repressed unconsciousness projecting from the world of things.

The inclusion of these matters into therapy...can have immediate practical effect. The married partners no longer focus only on themselves and their relationship. Together they turn their eyes to the indignities imposed on them by the world. Personal rage with each other turns to outrage, and even compassion... Those who were in couple therapy become the therapeutic couple whose patient is their world.

Hillman is employing standard psychological ideas (like "repressed unconsciousness"), but applying the term not to the subjects' internal world (i.e. repressed memories from childhood) but to actual presences exerting unconscious force and persuasive power in the material world. The objects in our world, if I understand him correctly, would be rightly understood as embodying certain psychological forces just as a human body displays and embodies (if that's the right way to put it) the soul in healthy and unhealthy ways. The idea might sound strange, but the impulse toward retreats or vacations (such as the one Jessie and I are going on next weekend) is testimony to the fact that our surroundings and daily routines are not satisfying our psychical or spiritual needs -- even that they are hostile in some sense (and so we call it a retreat).

My thinking about Hillman's ideas does not involve simply blaming the world for what before would have been considered my own personal problems. It needs to be put differently than that. For me it suggests that the sources of "my" problems do not need to be found inside of me, but in the particular environments I live in. Even if the problems are "mine" in some way, it is not that I need to go into therapy, necessarily, but instead that I need to recognize the fact that I am permeable and am influenced and shaped in even very subtle ways by the things of the world. And so it is part of my responsibility to help fix, or at least to be responsible for my participation in, the things of the world that themselves need a kind of therapy.

That is why the last phrase is the one that attracted me the most: "Those who were in couple therapy become the therapeutic couple." It is a movement away from obsession with personal guilt and personal absolution, and a movement toward recognition of the importance of the things that surround us, the very active role they play on our psyches - on our soul - and it is a movement toward re-crafting our lives and our things with this reality in mind.

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James Alison: God versus Nothing

In his essay, "Contemplation and monotheism: On the indispensability of irrelevance", Catholic theologian James Alison argues that "monotheism is a terrible idea, but a wonderful discovery." What he means by this is not easy to understand -- especially if you are inclined to believe that most discoveries need to be made up of comprehensible ideas in order for their object to be named. To say, "I discovered monotheism," is different than saying, "I discovered something I don't know what." The first is kind of like an intellectual understanding, where we are proud to put a name to something and distinguish it from other things, whereas the second is more like the beginning of an adventure (perhaps a horror film, perhaps the twilight of a vision quest...). No doubt there is some level of fear, or at least rapt anticipation, in the "I don't know what" that cannot be found in the naming game (where the field guide boxes are checked off and all the wild creatures accounted for). And so isn't "I discovered monotheism" more in the line of the clean and neat naming game than the fearful and adventurous, potentially scary, not-knowing game?

In answer to this question, Alison asks another:
Is this "monotheism" we're talking about a One versus Many type (a monotheistic view up against a polytheistic one)? Or is it more of a One versus Nothing At All?

Alison's own answer goes something like this: If it is a question of One versus Many, than God is not the One and Only, but merely the greatest of Many, and so is in some sense like the Many (since if God is better than any other, there must be some similar basis for this comparison, right?) -- and therefore we are, in a way, playing the game of MY dad is stronger than YOUR dad. Except the monotheistic idea in this case says, "MY dad is so much stronger than YOURS that YOUR dad doesn't even deserve to be counted; MY dad is the only real dad around here."

But of course the other's dad does exist in this picture, and the monotheism claimed here is only an idea, a tactic, a clever maneuver in a game of power and rhetoric. And of course also, the other's dad is actually essential to this monotheist's reality: this monotheism would not have been created if it didn't have a battle to win! And so it is merely a cover-up for an identity that depends on an enemy or a foe to understand itself. (This is a recurring theme in Alison's work, and will come up again in these notes, or future ones...)

Okay then. So what if, instead of a question of One versus Many, it is a question of One versus Nothing At All? In this case, God is more like Nothing At All than like anything else that exists. And if God is more like Nothing At All than like anything we know of, then there is nothing to compare God to, and there is no point in arguing whose God is better, or stronger, or whatever, because there is no rivalry in God at all. God is more like the invisible "I don't know what" we were talking about before than God is like something we could name and set alongside other things, in order to show in what ways God is different.

For this reason it is fair to acknowledge, as Alison says, that, "Atheism, which is untrue, offers a much less inadequate picture of God than theism, which is true. For monotheistic Judaism, as for monotheistic Catholicism…the principal temptation is not atheism, but idolatry."

But let's return to the mystery here: That there is no rivalry in God. That God is up against Nothing At All.

"If God really is true," Alison writes, "then to exaggerate the strength of the wicked other so as to strengthen the faith of the believer is the worst sort of nihilistic atheism."

Again: "If God really is true, then appearances are deceptive, and what look like wicked conspiracies by the wicked other are much exaggerated, because God is much stronger than they." (To say "stronger" is even to risk misunderstanding, it seems, because the type and degree and scope of God's strength is completely unlike, in tactic, intent, and everything else, than the types of strength we typically fear and hope to banish from our holds. It's like "I don't know what.")

So Bin Laden isn't believing a true God when he convinces Muslims they need to kill anyone who threatens their God, and neither do those Christians who believe that homosexuals "could really be such a threat to the order and stability of the Creator of all things" believe a truly monotheistic God (to use Alison's examples).

It follows that those of us who consider ourselves monotheistic Christians should not be too concerned at all, for instance, about who wins the next, or any other, American election. As if George Bush III (or Hillary Clinton for that matter) could genuinely threaten the Creator of the whole thing.

Alison is saying that we do not need to defend God, and we do not need to fight for God, because God isn't "against" anyone!

Instead, says Alison, we need to sit with our fear and the strange pressure of this discovering "I don't know what". It is almost everyone's impulse to explain away this or that uncertainty or jarring fact with a pretended understanding of how God works, or of how the world works, or by blaming one person or thing and taking comfort in another. But all of these are part of the phony demonizing/divinizing game which, occasionally, leads to the idea of monotheism -- which in turn becomes that totalitarian monotheism where we insist that everyone must deal with their problems and stresses and desires the same way as ME!!!

This, says Alison, is not God. This doesn't hardly have anything to do with God (even though it is in these types of contexts that the word "God" is mentioned probably more than any other). What it does have to do with is our fear, our need to be in control, and our need to reinforce our feeling of "being in control and not needing to fear" by subjecting others to the same medicine we used on ourselves -- in this way proving to ourselves again and again that our medicine works. This is called drawing a not-so-perfect circle.

(It also has to do, in my opinion, with a lack of imagination. Like seeing the Oedipus complex everywhere, or phalluses, or Jesus in birthmarks, or the number 253, or whatever it is you think is magical or deeply true because you see it everywhere…)

This post needs to suddenly stop; more thoughts will undoubtedly come out later.

Please, if you want to start a critical conversation, read the piece itself and not just my own thoughts on it! Thanks.

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Some thoughts on Lars and the Real Girl

A couple weeks ago now I saw Lars and the Real Girl, a film by Nancy Oliver (who wrote for the HBO series Six Feet Under), and thoughts have been coming to me about it ever since.

One stream of the thoughts involve its very peculiar and subtle playing with notions of reality. On the surface it appears to be a very realistic movie; at least, it takes place in what appears to be the real world. It is easy to identify all the people and places being used. And yet there is something deeply fantastic about the world we are made to step into. At every point we cannot help but feel like something very bad or tragic is about to happen -- some violence will be done, or some hidden conflict will rear its head in an awful way, BUT...
(The film, for those of you who do not know, is about a guy, Dagmar, who lives in his brother and sister-in-law's garage, and who does not speak to anyone if he can help it, and certainly does not touch anyone. It comes about, after he orders a very "realistic" looking sex-doll in a crate and dresses it up and treats it like his new, and very chaste girlfriend whom he "met on the internet" that he is delusional. His brother, of course, is slightly distressed about it, but his sister-in-law, and indeed the rest of the northern-Midwest town --Wisconsin, maybe?-- are perfectly able and willing, with some direction and input from the town doctor/psychologist, to play along with his delusion and let it work itself out. Yes, this is all pretty much parenthetical to what I want to say. But now let me get back to it.)

... instead of witnessing an all-too predictable xenophobic tragedy, we are given a glimpse of something of a parallel universe, a truly fantastic and utopian vision of how to live with others' psychological ailments. We are not shown what is realistic (Dagmar being quarantined in the secluded care of professionals, being subjected to mockery and even suffering physical attack whenever he steps out of doors), but instead, the one who reacts most "realistically" or normally to the situation (Dagmar's brother) is shown (in a similarly gentle fashion, by the way) that it is his own "realistic" understanding that if anything helps to produce, or at least prolong, Dagmar's delusional behavior. (This he does by rejecting Dagmar's "fantasy" and trying to show him that the girl is, after all, plastic.) If everyone in the film had reacted in this way it is clear that Dagmar would have been left with the satisfaction of his delusion alone, and probably would have suffered for it. That the town plays along with Dagmar (and plays seriously, not in a mocking way), suggests to me that this movie is more in fact about saying something to those of us who are like Dagmar's brother.
And it is definitely "saying something" -- though again the subtlety of the movie carries over into its morality as well: it simply presents this world, and we are left to imagine our way into it and its way of understanding and relating. There is no pressure, and there is no damning judgment. We are brought into a world that simply suggests that certain possibilities, certain parallel universes, are only a loving condescension away.

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Birds in the Brambles

Today Jessie and I learned with disappointment that something which we had been hoping would happen for us next fall is no longer going to be possible.

Today on our midday walk I found that some songbirds had shown up, as if spring were here already, and they were darting among the thorny bushes that dominate the south side of a nearby stretch of path.

It occurred to me that I am like those thorns that Jesus describes in the parable of the sower. Especially when it speaks of desiring other things, things of the world, I identify so strongly with it, that it has begun to be a matter of encouragement for me. (I figure it is usually more helpful to be fair in your analysis of yourself than to be tormented by how you might be better, if you don't know how to address the difference. I also happen to believe that creativity demands a willingness to address your desires as they stand, and that good change demands this kind of creativity.) So I'm a thorny bramble and that's what I have to work with.

Is it any coincidence that I find birds, especially the small pretty singing ones (though not only those), to be incarnations of the Spirit in the world? The dunamis of the Spirit is such that, when the farmer's seeds have failed to produce fruit, it sends in birds to liven the dark knots and prove that there is air and hospitality and shelter even in those places that can't be harvested for sustenance in the traditional sense. The birds that pollinate the field, nest in the brambles.

Jesus, when he told us to consider the sparrow (it was Jessie's and my wedding text), spoke to the brambles. Brambles are shelter; in the midst of our daily worrying and our uncultivated desires, we unwittingly host the birds that do not worry or labor in the least.

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Quaker Thoughts, part two. The Business Meeting.

Last week at the Friends' Meeting was their monthly business meeting, which they conduct during the worship service, after twenty minutes of silent worshipful preparation. If that sounds strange to you, it sounded strange to me too; who would ever want to take care of business in a time usually set aside for worship?

In the Quaker tradition, monthly Meetings for Business are an essential part of the worshiping community, and as nearly all of the Friends we have met have found time to tell us (from the time we started going there, not just last week, when we finally went to a Meeting for Business for the first time), this practice is an essential part of what it means to be Quaker. In fact, it is, I am told, the only practice that remains ubiquitous throughout the vast diversity of Quaker groups. So we of course felt that we would need to go at least once to see what it was all about. Also, at home before the service last week, and since then as well, I have been reading bits and pieces of the book published by the North Pacific Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, Faith and Practice. This has helped a lot in developing an understanding of how the community understands itself, and I have been reading especially about the monthly Meeting for Business, in order to form some thoughts of my own about it.

I think all I want to do here is to quote for you a couple paragraphs from the book Faith and Practice, and offer just a few thoughts. But first of all I should say, if it isn't immediately clear, that the Meeting for Business is just that, and it covers all the practical matters of running a community with a shared set of resources and, hopefully, a shared sense of unity and purpose in the use of these resources. In fact, the achievement of a genuine sense of unity transcending any selfish desires in order that the Meeting may be truly responsive to the Spirit in all of its affairs is why they do business the way they do. Or at least, I think that is more than fair to say! (One thing I am always conscious of here is the way a person can idealize something new because it answers some of the difficult questions/conflicts in the old -- and only after awhile do the questions/conflicts in the new come out and "threaten" the ideal...)

So here are some passages, which I have chosen not because they explain what the Meeting for Business is all about, but because they address directly and practically problems that all decision-making bodies face, and do this in a way that anyone can certainly understand. At least when I read this, I feel very aware of the kinds of experiences and conflicts they are trying to avoid.

Friends are urged to seek Divine guidance at all times, be mutually forbearing, and be concerned for the good of the Meeting as a whole rather than to press a personal preference. Time should be allowed for deliberate and prayerful consideration of the matter in hand. Everyone must want to reach a decision and be open to new understanding. Friends should come to each Meeting for Business expecting that their minds will be changed. It is important that all memebers be heard if they feel concerned to express a point of view. They should speak briefly and to the point, express their own view, avoid refuting statements made by others and give each other credit for purity of motive. When someone has already stated a position satisfactorily Friends need offer only a word or two expressing agreement.
Before speaking, Friends should seek recognition from the Clerk; they should not speak to individuals, and should be hesitant about speaking more than once unless they have new light on an issue. Each vocal contribution should be something which adds to the ideas already presented. (p.75)

This for me addresses many of those problems which I and others face in decision-making settings, including big things such as factionalism and scapegoating, as well as the more subtle difficulties of stubbornness, pointed attacks/criticisms, distracting and unnecessary speech, domination of a single individual, or exclusion of any individual, and just that simple self-indulgence we cater to when we repeat and relish a good point we may have made. I know I suffer from all of these things in my speech (even when I am talking to myself! :) ) and so it was a pleasure to witness a meeting or people attempting to let their community be managed by these kinds of rules for business.

It makes me wonder, coming from a Calvinist background (where we like to manage things as if the Kingdom of Heaven depends on it), why we don't, to the best of my knowledge, have a particularly prayerful or spiritual understanding of conducting this business itself. Is it because of the extreme emphasis on the law, so that there is less need for the dunamis of the Spirit to have a say, less of an idea that the Spirit may have something new to say to any particular context? Calvinists, or neo-Calvinists, or whatever name fits best, are definitely strong thinkers, but when it comes to management of a community or society, well, let's just say I'd rather have lived in Penn's City of Brotherly Love than in Calvin's Zurich! (And that isn't meant to be estranging: wouldn't most Calvinists today also prefer to have been Calvinist in Philadelphia...?)

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Quaker Thoughts, part one. The Silences of Worship.

Jessie and I have been attending fairly regularly the Friends Meeting near the University of Washington (a nice 15 minute bike ride away - or five minutes by car if the rain is too heavy...). Speaking for myself, I already feel surprisingly at home there, and am regularly uplifted and strengthened in a way that I have felt few other places - not that my being uplifted is unique, but the way I feel uplifted is very rare: I believe last week someone said it well when they referred to something they called "tenderness".

What I want to try and think through here, for you to witness and respond to, if you like, is what it is that attracts me to a Quaker worship service, and to a Quaker sense of life in general.

First of all, Jessie and I are both somewhat used to worshiping with a good deal of silence, given our participation at the Faith House Fellowship (a Mennonite group) in Goshen, Indiana, where we regularly kept silence together in the last couple years; -- And it is of course the characteristic of silence, of waiting for the Spirit to speak, that is most commonly associated with Quaker worship. [Though I have learned from one of the ministers here that that is by no means a ubiquitous trait of Quaker groups.] Of course, worshiping with the Quakers (or at least these Quakers we do worship with, who practice silent, or waiting, worshsip) is something else entirely, as the silence is almost total, until the words of worship both slowly and suddenly (so it seems to a "non-speaker" like I have been so far) start to come. But we came here from the Faith House with the understanding that this silence of worship can be just as -and sometimes even more?- essential than the impulse to speak in worship.

I find this practice increasingly rewarding, as I seem to be learning, after several weeks of going regularly, how to not let it be just a time to allow your thoughts to wander, but to genuinely (as far as I know something like prayer to be genuine when I do it) begin to pray in and with the spirit. Irremediably concurrent with this experience (if anything, the genuine prayer is an effect of it, it's so important), is the sense, becoming stronger all the time, that there is some sort of common and dynamic, though probably very vulnerable, unity in the silence of the group of Friends gathered. This is not simply a bunch of individuals gathering together to navel-gaze, and the reason I know this is the case is because I have seen the evidence in what is said and what is testified to in the Meetings themselves.

So that is my first reaction to the Friends, after a couple months with them on Sunday mornings: the silence has not been alienating or remained, as it was at first, just a time to sit with my own thoughts, but has started to grow into a sense of congregation and common worship, giving the idea of the silence of worship renewed and qualitative meaning to me.

[At other Meetings Jessie and I have gone to (including the earlier service at this House) the unity of the group is vulnerable enough to nearly dissolve my experiences there into a feeling of solipsism (and I would guess that this really is due to my own newness to it, and is not a fair description of others' experiences of the silence. The practice, at that earlier meeting, of holding hands in a circle after the hour is through, is a very powerful, if simple, way of denying this interpretation. It convinces me, at least.

I would be interested to hear from Friends who tend to worship in complete silence about their experiences of worshiping that way. What are your motivations? What keeps you returning? What does it mean for the worship if it is not expected that the Spirit will speak?]

[token technorati tag: Quakers]

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Planning a Preemptive Strike Against Allergies: too good to be true? (and/or) My Body Was The Hostile Environment.

Reuters AlertNet - Japan experts find way to block allergic reactions
Scientists in Japan may have found a solution to allergic reactions. It involves blocking the functions of a molecule called STIM1. I'm no scientist at all, but I like to think my presentiments about some things are somewhat valid. So I looked around for other mentions of STIM1 and found this at the Federally Funded Medical Research blog:

the function of STIM1, a Ca2+ sensor in the ER lumen that controls Ca2+ influx into cells, and which also acts as a tumor suppressor.

Seems like the kind of function I wouldn't care to see blocked!
I figure it's btter to bear with them the old way, and, if possible, to fight against them the slow way. In that spirit, here's an old post from last June, when I was in the hayday (groan) of allergies, and found another interesting study, this time by scientists from Poland...

29 May 2007
What makes for hospitable environments?

Yesterday at our "Goodbye, Indiana!" party, I was subject to a horrible attack of my allergies; my eyes were all puffy, my nasal passage was completely packed solid, and my face felt dry and suffocated, like it was about to crack and fall away. Nice, huh? We were forced to leave early and even back in our air-conditioned apartment I was clogged all night, and have quarantined myself today.

What's aggravating about it is that Blue Heron Farm has been a place of refuge or retreat for me during my time in Indiana, as well as the home of close friends. The life that is lived there is healthier and more robust and responsible to the natural environment than most environs I find myself in - and so I feel confronted by the fact that the life I have been living is not up to the test of living, let alone thriving, in diverse conditions.

Investigating this today, I found that some scientists in Poland came up with similar conclusions through their research of small non-specialized farms in that country, and rates of allergy and asthma attacks among the farming populations:

[The] most interesting observation is the possible protective effect of small farms. It seems that the conditions that are very close to natural environment are beneficial to the health condition of the exposed subjects. Probably, the presence of endotoxin plays the key role here. We presume that such a cause– effect relationship could be observed only because our farmers had been living in these conditions since their birth. It is known that once asthma and allergic diseases are established, the relationship is generally the opposite: microbial exposures worsen the course of the disease.
"Small nonspecialized farming as a protective factor against immediate-type occupational respiratory allergy?" by Walusiak, J. et al Allergy; Dec2004, Vol. 59 Issue 12, p1294-1300, 7p

It seems safe to say that the same is true for any lived environment that demands compatibility with many interactive forms of life: that our minds and our bodies are unable to interact or even cope with foreign elements if we don't know how to "plug-in" or address these elements hospitably. Some people are trained (for instance by the military) to be able to survive in the most bizarre and extreme situations, but are made to operate according to a preordained way of thinking about the things they are made to "engage." Others are brought up to think critically and flexibly about a plurality of perspectives...but these philosophers are often helpless once they step outside of their air-conditioned office or library or home!

Before I became incapacitated we had been talking about the "organics" industry, as compared to the, I believe, incomparably more dignified and healthful ways of small-farming -- the kind of local and diverse cultivation that is in every way opposed to mass-marketing. It is not something you can pick up and package and mass-produce in cookie-cutter fashion, because it depends in its essence on a complex interdependency of place and produce, of land and its livability. It takes time for one's body and mind to know the land and its ways of generating life.

My body reacted against the pollinating elements of the field like they were my enemy. It wasn't that I was in a hostile environment, but just the opposite: my body was the hostile environment closing itself off from all apparent "intruders."

[token technorati tag: allergies, STIM1]

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