Health, Wholeness, and Death Amidst The Coronavirus Pandemic

On our culture’s misbegotten story of what Health is, and why Death must be at the centre of it.

It seems to me that this pandemic has, among other things, exhumed our culture’s story of what ‘health’ is, and displayed it in stark, disfigured relief:

It seems to me that it’s something like a mathematical formula that is applied to every context and situation, and by plugging in all the relevant variables, what you want to get to is the maximum number of humans, staying alive for the maximum amount of time.

Perhaps something like: H = P x T (Health = Population multiplied by Time)

If you do nothing else during this pandemic, I invite you to deeply ponder the consequences of this particular story of health.

What does it mean that our culture fundamentally equates health with more humans being born than dying?

What does it mean that our culture equates health with every human being alive staying alive for the maximum duration of time that our technologies are capable of squeezing out, and that we direct untold amounts of time, energy, treasure, education, and non-human lives, towards perpetually improving those technologies?

When you read or watch the minute-by-minute coronavirus body count being broadcast by every media outlet around the world, consider what definition of health they are operating under.

Consider that in the last 6 weeks or so, the fear of a virus that kills approx 3% of those humans infected has been infinitely more beneficial to non-human life than the last 50 years of environmental policy, lobbying, education, and academic research combined.

Consider that our story of health centres human beings to the exclusion of, literally, every other being on the planet, including the very planet itself.

Consider that the root of the word ‘health’ is cognate with the word ‘whole’. To be healthy means to be Whole. Your ancestors once knew this. Consider how it came to be that this was forgotten.

Consider that the etymology of the word ‘human’ means to be of the Earth — to be an ‘Earthling’ as opposed to a God.

My friends — to be a human means to BE the Earth, and OF the Earth. Not an immortal God.

I am told that Adam means soil in Hebrew — soil is literally the accumulated bodies of dead beings, from which life emerges. Your ancestors knew this. The proof is the word itself.

Health does not mean the absence, or overcoming, or transcending of death. Health does not mean immortality.

We are not Gods. We are of the Earth.

Health means wholeness, and the most sacred guest within the living concord of wholeness, is Death.

I ask you as you read this — what are you willing to lose for the sake of Health?

What are you willing to give your life for, in order that Wholeness may one day come to visit among those that would follow behind you?