The Community at Large

There is a famous phrase which is “You are what you eat”. More specifically you are the soil, the air and the water of what you eat. Just as every plant absorbs its environment and trees communicate with each other through their root structure, we are a product of our daily lives. Women notice that when they live together their menstrual cycles will shift to mirror each other. When one person is stressed in a household, everyone will ramp up their stress level. It used to be that our communities included lots of varying environments from the houses of friends to sleepovers at relatives to camping out in the backyard. But more and more we are isolating ourselves and restricting our movements. More internet conversations, Zoom meetings, Facetime, Facebook, movies on demand and shopping delivered to our door mean that the number of places we visit each day or each week is less and less. Our community is shrinking and this loss of community mirrors the fragmentation that I see in our body’s health profile.

It’s so interesting that concurrently with this loss of community our families are smaller and gather less frequently, our time outside is less (just look at the fear of ticks and mosquitos!), we are choosing to eat more and more restrictively and our gut microbiome has an increasingly smaller variety of healthy bacteria. Just look at the change in education. We started out with one room schoolhouses so that every student was exposed to every other student in every grade. Then it became that all students in the same grade would be in the same class. Then we had multiple classes in each grade, but It was regardless of ability or knowledge. Now classes are scaled to group those with what is perceived as similar abilities together. So our exposure to variation has been reduced. I can remember being constantly inspired by and impressed by those in my class who I thought were really smart. They knew the answers, they could apply the information, they could ace the tests. It pushed me to always try to do more than I thought I could. It exposed me to many different students and many different lifestyles.

We used to just build a house and leave the land as it was except for a vegetable garden and some pasturing. Then came the idea of landscaping our environment, clearing vegetation, weeds and invasive plants while adding some cultivated planting. My great grandmother loved her flower gardens and grew specific flowers that she looked forward to every spring. Now I watch my neighbors fret about every tree on their property and how the loss of a branch in a windstorm is enough to cut the entire tree down. There are even towns throughout Massachusetts that prohibit vegetable gardening or having chickens, goats or bees on your property. Lately every single house seems to have the same ornamental bushes, no flowers, no vegetables and as maintenance-free landscaping as possible.

All of these things are a loss of our community. How many of us even know our neighbors? We drive from place to place instead of walking anywhere. Look at the line of cars that have driven children a few blocks to the bus stop or even to the end of the driveway.

Part of our health profile is the amount of control we have over our body and over the things that affect our health. Part of the immense fear with serious illness is the unexpected nature of it, the loss of control we feel. When we had a community, we had others who understood our experience, who truly cared about us and our life. We could spread out our lives through an interwoven fabric of community, feeling part of a supportive environment outside of our own four walls.

There was something to be said for community celebration, acknowledging the changes of the seasons, taking part in revered holidays. There is nothing more magical than waking up on Christmas morning with your family around you knowing that the same magic is being played out in every household in your community. It did give a sense of belonging, a sense of control over our destiny.

Now more and more it seems that both physical and mental illness reflect our lack of community, our search to replace that sense of belonging. This is a key factor in natural medicine … the idea that all of our body systems, organs and glands make up a community that works together to create life, our life. By separating the body into individual “specialist” systems, we fail to recognize the inherent connections and pathways that join the thyroid to the gallbladder, the mammary glands to the uterus, the gut to our immunity. We only view each group of symptoms, each illness as an isolated problem, instead of the result of a loss of community, communication and cooperation that is the lifeblood of our body. By restoring our body community, we create the joy, the support and the reverence that being part of a community provides. By understanding how our isolation and separation has changed us, we can find our way back to the community that we so desperately need.