Perfect Woes
By Chelle Stockman
As I sat in my back yard early one morning, a hawk landed on a low branch just four feet above my head. I spoke to it in a gentle voice and in like gentleness it peeped back at me. Until that moment, I had only heard the shrieking of the hawks, never a peep. Our conversation ended abruptly as the beautiful bird took off in swift flight.
My mother-in-law broke the spell when she announced, "They found a dead hawk with the West Nile Virus up in Dixon."
"You don't suppose that bird was sick do you?" I got a sinking feeling.
"Dunno...maybe. They don't usually get that close to humans."
I shrugged under the burden of our environmental woes and my morning meditation took a different path of reason. I recalled a story one client shared about a woman who came to stay with her for a year. The woman was from India. The most impressive thing the woman enjoyed was our grocery stores. She was amazed at our fruits and vegetables; amazed by their size, their perfection, and their availability. In India, they get bugs and are much smaller; you know, like ours used to be. This woman was a total vegan. She never ate anything of animals, not even of fish. When she returned to her homeland a year ago, she had gained twenty pounds. Amazing.
So much of what we eat has been genetically enhanced and altered leaving me to wonder what this does to our immunities. There are many articles available that warn us about the direction our agriculture is heading which cause our immune systems to break down. I wonder if the other animals who feed off the same fields become more susceptible to viral and bacterial invasion, too. It would stand to reason that if we become less healthy and more susceptible to diabetes among other things, the animals would as well.
With the climbing health care costs and the degree of breakdown in our bodies, I thought, "We really are becoming what we eat. Just what the heck are we eating anyway?"
How can we do this better? I mean, how can we create a healthy environment for all? I can't imagine a world with no peeps. I'd rather not live in that world, but then again, I might not have a choice. It would seem that in our quest for perfection we have paved a road of woes-plenty of good eats, no resolution in sight. Bon appetite.
1 comment:
I feed the neighborhood birds here in the back yard. The line has usually formed by the time I get up, with the Sparrows and Mockingbirds in the shrubs and low trees , the Doves on the lower telephone wires, the Pidgeons on the higher wires where they feel safest. All gather for the Morning Feed, the only conspicous absent these days are the Crows, who used to always be first and bragged about it terribly, you may see 2 or 3 on occasion but not the dozens that used to live in the neighbourhood.
As I went to check out the backyard the otherday, Sun I believe it was, a Coopers Hawk burst out of the lemon tree chasing after some of the sparrows, he hit the brakes and glided up to a low wire, and I thought to myself, "hmmm, He must not be very hungry". But now that I think about it, perhaps he didnt feel up to the hunt.
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