Vail Valley – Consider our Bodies’ Intelligence

Wednesday, December 15, 2021 3:33 PM

Our culture is excellent at ignoring symptoms of sickness. We don’t want to feel the pain and suffering of sickness; we ignore and resist. When we ignore our symptoms, what happens? 

Symptoms are warning signs. Signals that something is off. It is our bodies’ intelligence communicating to us that we, our life energy system, are not fully healthy. That we are experiencing stress. When we resist, we allow for our health to degrade, gradually eroding the whole intelligence of our being.

First, consider our individual human body. For many of us, listening to our own felt bodily symptoms is a challenge. Feeling ill, having a runny nose, a little achy, mentally exhausted, deeply anxious? We “can’t” pause and listen – give space to deeply sense how we must heal. It’s a challenge to take time from work, or school, or sport. We need to keep pressing forward, numb our symptoms – ignore and resist. 

Why? We, our collective social body, have, over past generations, conditioned these societal behaviors. We, by our collective social construction of economic society don’t leave ourselves much of a choice. Pausing to listen means lost wages, maybe rent can’t be made, less food on the table, or degraded social status. Our collective social body has constructed a culture of ignoring symptoms of sickness.  Constructing a lived environment of stress which we feel most intimately in our individual body.

Our planetary body also has intelligence in its life energy and can communicate with symptoms when it is declining in health. We, especially our societal human bodies, practice resisting listening to these planetary symptoms. Consider, what have our mountains been trying to communicate? 

I think back on my life growing up in the Vail Valley: Alarming drought as I was in pre-school. Red forests of beetle kill as I was in elementary school. Declining macro-invertebrates, indicators of aquatic health, in our streams, lakes and rivers as I was in middle school. Fragility of sage grouse habitats as I was in high school. And in my time away? Fire. And this summer I returned to flooding and mudslides; this fall has been warm and dry. Some symptoms. These few I am aware of - we continue to ignore. 

And how many more symptoms are whispers instead of screams? The dull aches we ignore before a virus overwhelms our body? The subtle indications of mental fatigue before a depressive collapse? Are we able to hear these whispers of our own body? What of our social body? The screams we’ve muffled of the ills of racism, sexism, colonialism? Or locally, the gradually felt corporate commodification of the joy humans experience playing on snow? What of the whispers of Earth through this Valley? Is our culture currently expressive in these mountains in touch with the spirit of the Peaks? Can we hear friends - rocks in soil, aspens quake, seas of sages, or pine growth? Or are they merely a good view and fun to play on – until the screams of fire, flood, or winter deciding not to visit? 

Our culture is excellent at ignoring symptoms of sickness. May we change this in our culture? Our planetary symptoms, like our bodily symptoms and our social body ask more of us than to continue to ignore and resist. May we pause and listen to our intelligence? 

-Trexler