25 The Reset: I Dream of Snake
CityHive, Geraldton co-working space
One-night last week I had three strong dreams in a row. I remembered them so perfectly when I woke up that I inhabited this dream world for ages and eventually wrote them down.
A week on and I am pretty convinced that this was my subconscious showing me how the COVID19 plays out in my waking life: I’ll describe the dreams, and they are short. Don’t worry, this won’t be like sitting through a Terry Gilliam movie.
DREAM 1
The first was set at CityHive, Geraldton’s own co-working building. It’s a good place, expansive, full of networks and the energy of start-up. The idea was my friend and I would spend the night in one of the rooms. It felt like something I often did – as if CityHive was also a place where members could stay over.
But when it came time to get the jamis out I realised that all the rooms were taken. Families, kids, couples, crammed into dormitories and bedrooms. Too late - it came to me that I should have reserved a room, that this was something that a lot of people were now doing – whereas, pre-viral epidemic I had the run of the place.
My friend and I were philosophical about it and decided to go to our respective homes.
DREAM 2
The next dream involved a snake. A little black snake, of a size that could curl up in my palm. It suddenly appeared around my body – caught up in my clothing. I felt a little frisson of fear as one does around something snaky, but it quickly became clear the little thing was ill maybe even dying - I felt instantly guilty. Perhaps it needed water and food – but it was too late, had I been horribly neglectful?
DREAM 3
In the last dream I am standing in front of a mirror and react with horror to what I see. My forehead is caked with what looks like bits of torn up glossy paper – like badly applied paper-mache - and my face is caked with some kind of foundation that is as thick and cracked as the surface of a claypan. I said to a friend: Wow, is this how people see me? I look horrible. She agreed, diplomatically that I looked …strange. I started picking off the chunks of clay and realized, with huge relief, that I was fine underneath. Youthful, even.
THE REVEAL
In the awake world, I was relating this mirror scene to Geoff and he said, well that’s it, you are, you’re fine underneath. Thanks Geoff, I’m great with that as an interpretation. No-one said it had to be complex.
As for the snake, I read that as a threat, a hidden threat – and as it was a little snake – I experienced it as a little threat. A few days later, in the world of wake, still living this dream, I wondered why I felt guilt. It wasn’t my fault that the snake was crook, I was oblivious to its presence, it had remained discreetly about my person, maybe even chose me as a place to die. Why did I take it personally…?
I decided if the snake was a metaphor for existential fear – danger that comes at you, unexpectedly, furtively, there was nothing to be afraid of. And if the snake was like that American Indian story: you know the one where the Cherokee man says to his grandson: everyone has two wolves inside them battling for ascendancy. One is evil, full of anger, envy, arrogance, self pity. One is good, full of peace, harmony and joy. The little boy asks: which one wins? Grandpa: The one you feed.
So, the three dreams: the no-room-at-the-inn one about CityHive tells me that everybody is now doing what I usually do. I need to book a space because the place where we hang out, create, work together is now full of other’s released to do the same by the Lockdown.
The limp little snake tells me my fears are groundless – and I am not responsible for stuff I can’t control, and if you don’t encourage something it won’t grow/and the clay pan mask tells me I’m fine underneath.
So that is a wrap for how I am experiencing the Age of Quarantine. OK I might be giving myself a break with my interpretation of the snake dream….you are probably thinking of a few other scenarios. But I am going the optimistic path…
ZACH AND THE GUT MEMBRANE
Now for a bit of thinking about the Reset, walking in step with the inspirational Zach Bush MD. Remember I talked about Zach in the podcast Thank You, Monsanto and the impact his work to do with glyphosate and the gut membrane had on me? If not, here is a bit of a refresher on the gut membrane and its relationship to the immune system.
The gut membrane is a barrier within the human body that starts in the sinuses and encompasses the whole enteric ( as in gut) system. This membrane, stretched out, is the size of two tennis courts It is one micron, one cell thick. Pluck a human hair and halve it down its length and you have the thickness of your gut membrane.
This appears to be, in Zach’s words, an ‘unbelievably under-engineered’ piece of anatomical equipment. If you were going to design a barrier that stands between the immune system of the human body and the outside world would you have thought to design such a wafer-thin membrane?
Well, you would have – if you had done it understanding the context - that we are the environment. We are an intricately connected part of the ecosystems that make up our world - we are engineered to hum in tune, to breathe intimately in and out with the world around us.
This immediately tells us something about the problem with clinical science as it practices its dark art in sterile laboratories in pursuit of the biological processes of disease. Many things can be determined in a petri dish, but it won’t be a great way to work out how humans achieve health in the context of the extensive pulsating webs that make up our environment. Zach points out that ‘the kind of healthcare we are used to is actually sickcare’.
CO-CREATE
Well, Zach has more for us. The way to conjure health is to co-create with nature. To augment and mimic what nature does. This is what the regenerative-minded farmers are doing and I don’t need to remind anyone listening to this, of the analogies between human and soil health as linked by the microbial world we inhabit.
What struck me listening to more of Zach (via the Rich Roll podcast) is his use of the word GRACE. He talks of grace at the cellular level. What happens when you stop bad practises and bad habits in your own body and in the body of the ecosystems that support you? What happens when you take your foot off the neck of nature? You get GRACE: which Zach describes as the capacity to heal faster than you injure. There’s the Reset, right there.
CO-COMMUNICATION
Something else from Zach Bush: ‘When a cell has unfettered access to information it always goes into a regenerative state.’ What a statement. Zach is talking in the context of humans and our co-evolution over thousands of years with the vast web of living ecosystems that allow the proper functioning of all life. This proper functioning is always about the ability to be able to draw on all the resources, in the proper sequence that it is required for self healing…so what are the elements that hamper ‘unfettered access to information’? What stops things communicating? The limiting factors can be social, physical, mental, emotional, environmental – but how beautiful to imagine that the more networked, the more enmeshed and connected, the more healthy an organism within an ecosystem.
Zach’s idea is that we ‘embrace the template that the microbiome is revealing to us – we learn to mimic the communication network of the microbiome.’
THE WHIFF OF THE SPIRITUAL
I find Zach’s insights to be as beautiful as a poem – a wonderful corollary to the gut membrane story – not only are we Nature, but when we start working with, rather than against nature, we start to heal ourselves and everything around us. Immediately.
Any ideas that start pulling away from nature domination thinking towards the mimicking of nature-based processes are always going to have the whiff of the spiritual about them. It’s not easy stuff to talk about – but we need stout hearts in this strange time and the churches are closed, so let’s embrace this stuff..
We are all experiencing this period of quarantine differently – stories are so different I am learning to not making assumptions about people’s lives. There are some big terms being thrown around. Like the word Apocalypse – apparently it means literally to ‘un-cover’.
Zach Bush is using this time wisely – unearthing microbial patterns for us to live by.
EXTINCTION EVENT
I have a question. I want to know whether there are certain microbes – out of the billions of uncharted microbes that live on and around us - that we might have lost forever through an extinction event. I used to worry about Carnaby cockatoo’s, lately even koalas, heading for extinction. But these creatures, sad though it would be to lose them, are the icing on the cake – the heavy lifting of human existence, the batter, if we are talking cake, seems to be undertaken by these teeming unseen, unsung microbes that are only just starting to be counted as the most crucial partners in human life.
This is important. Be careful what you sanitise!
