May 16, Symbiosis
Almanac for Post Moderns
At the root of beans, or legumes, is a life giving and essential symbiosis with bacteria. Mr. Peattie points out, beans wouldn’t live without bacteria at their root. We would not.
So, by what gut do I survive? Goethe said: “We see only what we know.” On the other hand, Spinoza said, “The brain doesn’t know what the body can do.” Seems the eyes may suffer from being too close to the brain. Not to mention the gut is our ‘second’ brain, with its own brain-synapses firing a back-channel knowledge . . .
It is the gut that fends off the constant near-suicide of depending too much on mental apprehension. It gives us embodied (and blind) proprioception.
Take Micrococcus luteus (pictured). You likely have some on your skin or in your mouth, have had some in your beer; it’s found in water and soil.
They are but one of the “germs” in three pounds of bacteria in the human microbiome — all of it under assault by fear long lurking in what we cannot see, can smell all too well and try to dodge in the balderdash of “germ-free” antibiotic consumerism.
