The Pandemic of Disconnection
How Our Bodies and the Planet are Paying the Price
My body is a laboratory, a study site. What shows up in my body is a reflection of what’s going on around my body; a microcosm of the macrocosm. In empowered-feeling moments, I sense that my struggles have purpose: I can be a voice for others, for change, as well as being a powerful processor and site of healing “simply” for myself. It can be a challenge to speak about healing from the perspective of an individual, because I learn to ever greater effect that healing happens in community. We heal together or not at all. I am one link in a chain of being, one cell in this vast planetary body.
Last month, my beloved grandmother told me about a segment she watched on PBS featuring a book she thought would interest me. She was right, as grandmothers often are. As I started working through Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, something powerful began to shift within me. My interior foundational scaffolding was being rearranged. Space opened up—breathing room—between me and my invisible ailments; relief from an increasingly crushing existential depression. Suddenly, the burden was somewhat lifted. Where there was obsessive frustration, there was now curiosity and intrigue. This is the healing power of feeling seen, of seeing yourself in a story. Pieces were coming together; the fractured parts of my body’s story—my life story—were suddenly making sense within the bigger picture. I felt much less crazy, less alone. And I felt an urge to dive deeper into the murky seas of chronic illness and autoimmune disease, not as a hopeless, desperate patient, but as one of those reimagining what our relationships with our bodies, each other, and nature could look like if our understanding of disease, healing, and wholeness shifted.
While sharing her deeply relatable story, O’Rourke maps out our conceptual understandings of disease, the dismissive doctor-patient relational dynamic that chronic and autoimmune disease sufferers are all too familiar with, and our overwhelmingly siloed and bureaucratized healthcare system in the US. She traces significant changes in medical history from centuries of understanding illness as the disruption of balance to the revolutionizing adoption of Germ Theory in the 19th century—a crucial evolution of medical understanding and practice, to be sure, but we threw the baby out with the bathwater when the one-size-fits-all approach of identifying and killing microbes overwrote our previously holistic understanding of disease and healing.
The Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates is credited with saying that “it is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than to know what sort of disease a person has.” The focus was more on the soil than the seed, so to speak. Similarly, Traditional Chinese Medicine recognizes six patterns of disharmony within the patient which are gently brought to balance through herbal medicines, movement, and manipulation of energy meridians. Western medicine currently operates within the parameters set by established biomarkers and the clinically significant lab values du jour. Patients are increasingly burdened with seeking, managing, and financing their care within the ever-narrowing scope of disjointed specialized medicine, even as genomics is poised to revolutionize medical understanding.
As Covid-19 has made abundantly clear, the same illness can leave someone asymptomatic, dead, or chronically ill. The formulaic find-seek-destroy approach begotten by Germ Theory simply does not address the current landscape of human ailments. Around 50 million Americans are suffering from one or more chronic or autoimmune diseases. In the past 30 years, that statistic has grown at epidemic rates: from 1-in-400 to 1-in-12, and 1-in-9 women, who make up 80% of the chronic and autoimmune population. Why? Changes in our environment, insufficient food and chemical regulatory practices, rising socioeconomic disparity… the list goes on.
The underlying fault here is a stubborn refusal to acknowledge these interconnected systems and impacts and operate accordingly. We chase after small fires while the horizon burns. If problems can be narrow-sightedly dismissed as being an individual’s personal burden, systems need not change. But it is short-sighted indeed to imagine that any of us can sustainably thrive while a growing majority of the population is crushed by illness, poverty, and climate change impacts.
Before seminary, I worked as a watershed scientist and river advocate. When teaching others about watersheds, the key takeaway was that everything that happens on land affects the water. Everything. Animal waste, litter, vehicle runoff, pesticides, fertilizer, road salt, deforestation and impervious land cover… you get the idea. When it rains, whatever is on the land is making its way into your local stream, lake, river, ocean—more so if there is insufficient vegetation to filter runoff. At worst, so far, you get algal blooms and unswimmable, neuro- and hepatotoxic waters. Perhaps an increasingly frequent and long-lasting red tide, responsible for mass die-offs of marine life. As climate change continues, as industries adapt via increased chemical and resource use, so will these impacts. We only have so long to realize that we can not survive this change by poisoning ourselves, the water, the land.
We have to live differently.
We must focus on the soil rather than the seed—our inextricably entangled roots rather than the illusion of the individual as ultimate reality. The Earth is sick, our systems are sick—not just individuals. We need holistic understanding over tunnel vision. We need watershed thinking. It might not be easy, but it is right. I believe we are alive in this crucial moment of Earth’s history to be brave, imaginative, and prophetic. It’s time to take a leap in growth as a species for ourselves, for future generations, and for our non-human kin. Will you answer the call?
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