About Social Immune Systems, Worts and Warts

Wort (hover over the image to learn more about 'wort'.)

 "We live among crisscrossing vectors of inequality, these million specific excuses for injustice, these false divides that weigh our worth on brutally tipped scales...

"The truth is that we are also bleeding from the wounds of privilege, that obliviousness takes out chunks of our social immune systems, eats resilience, makes us stiff and stupid in each arena where we have been trained to stop thinking." -  Identity and Solidarity" Aurora Levins Morales

Through the large wagon window looking east, I see the sun is shining. A breeze tugs at the ribbons signaling there is wiring linking us up to the Cloud; we have internet connection. Spring has come: evidence of procreation is everywhere. Dozens of baby rabbits grow bigger if they are not eaten by raptors or Coyote. Alder pollen turns the roof of the Subaru golden. We sneeze.

I've spent the morning communicating thanks to that wire. We are back to emails only now that our iphone is out of commission. Slower give-and-take. Old fashion patience becomes paramount. I am a complex of endurance and impatience: All that Capricorn in me knows how to endure, but the Scorpio Sun squared with Mars in Leo is dramatic and impatient. So while I have to wait, it's good I found a partner like Pete. No. It's good I found Pete. When I was winding myself tighter and tighter into worry we lay beside each other and stories oozed from between the spirals of that worry, experiences hidden so deep I barely remember having lived them. Pete listened and spun more thread like the gremlin who spun gold from straw.

In the midst of The Virus's demands and our response to practice 'social distancing' it is the intimacy and loving exchange of human experience that heals the puka (the chunks) of my social immune system. I was caught up in worry. In the dark my partner wove stories and loved the worry wort character that is (part of) me into something different. Pete told me a tale about a wart, a childhood friend, and that friend's connection with the place Pete and his friend grew up in. The story spun and spun. Pete, the wart, the friend, and Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin would connect to me, eventually. And by the time the story ended I was freed up of worry. Distracted or transformed, the story made me different. It opened me to a much bigger picture.

It occurred to me as Pete wove this story that Louise Hay would have something to say about the wart growing on my face. Using that wire of connection, I found this: 

Wart
(Link to a description of a wart)

 "Louise Hay’s book Heal your body A-Z describes warts as “little expressions of hate. Belief in ugliness”. The new thought pattern needed to overcome the illness is the affirmation “I am the love and the beauty of Life in full expression”. Hay’s approach identifies the ‘mental’ causes of physical illness and it has been developed empirically through her experiences with healing and her own life experience of beating cancer. It’s a very interesting book and one that is definitely worth a read: it is indeed through that we don’t pay enough attention to our thought patterns." - Positive Health Online

Is it 'wort' or is it 'wart'? Re-reading what I've written I used both words almost inter-changeably. Unconsciously. But at closely examination, a 'wort' is the word used to describe plants, as in St. Joan's Wort (One of my favorite medicinal weeds; a very effective People's Medicine in the form of a tincture). A 'wart' is a small, hard, benign growth on the skin, usually caused ... by a virus. How mischievous  is the Universe! Have I grown a wort (a flower) or a wart (a small hard, benign growth on my cheek)?

If you're still reading here's where I try to make sense of worts, warts and the idea and practice of a 'social immune system.' The phrase was new to me until I read it in Morales's essay "Identity and Solidarity." She continues to educate her readers:

"The tunnel vision of considering only our own oppression, and the sense of urgency that brings, can always make solidarity seem unaffordable, inclusion a risk not worth taking. Privilege and its stupidities, " writes Morales, " are what really distract us."

All of this meandering grew out of a very intense week of adaptations necessary to live in these times of "self-quarantine" and "social distancing." Though Pete and I have lived for a decade in our version of quarantine and distancing, the added dimension of a pandemic ramps up the risk. What happens when we (humans or other sentient beings, including rabbits as we become very familiar with their wild natures) are traumatized or oppressed? It's that sense of singular and special privilege. A "pissing match" as one friend called it when we try to one up our neighbor with how much more we suffer then they.

With everybody without doubt in the same Earthbound space ship it is stupid and distracting to identify yourself as a special needs case. Oh yes, there are 'higher risk populations' and Pete and I qualify. But even then, what I am experiencing is the window of opportunity that rises because even as qualified 'higher risk' elders in fragile health, we need to learn to communicate our needs respectfully and clearly without becoming a small, hard, probably benign, growth on the face of our social immune system (Earth). A wart.

I look at the real wart that grows on my cheek, and consider the metaphor and mental 'cause' for its appearance. 'Little expressions of hate and 'small ugliness' do live at the heart of my experiences as a worry wart. I have 'always' worried; came worrying that I would be able to take the next breath. (I was born purple. Lack of oxygen.) During that dark night of the soul when Pete began to weave a tale of another wart, it was my confession of being a life-long worrier that opened a much larger place of sanctuary for that worrier.

"We need new metaphors to help us create safer, nonviolent communities everywhere. Our organizations and communities are alive; they are not machines. We each have a living metaphor freely available to us -- our own bodies. Let's use the human immune system to think about how we could improve our "social immunity." - The Sanctuary Model

Without knowing this 'sanctuary model' Pete intuitively created that space for me. A nonviolent safe space to encourage my immunity. He listened, opened his immune system to my story and life expanded.

The potential growing at this time of The Virus lies in the experiences such as mine where my personal darkness -- a life-long worrier, is given safe space even as a pandemic threatens to sweep the human slate clear. A small, hard, growth grows ... visible on my cheek; hard to ignore change is happening. The paradox and the additional opportunity rises when the language I use to explain is fiddled with. Instead of a 'wart' I use 'wort' and with that simple and accidental misuse of a name the outcome is changed.

I could be growing a 'wort' instead, and that could be a beautiful, and medicinal/healing/whole-ing experience. 

The immune system is that powerful and varied. Different from one being to another. If given space for everybody's immune system to be equally valued, just imagine the Social Immune System we could create together.

St. Joan's/St. John's Wort growing wild in a field