Our technology is all about controlling the world from an outsider position. It's easy to make enemies that way. Now viruses are becoming immune to antibiotics that once killed them, the cure for Cancer is no closer, and even diseases that we once believed to be defeated are making a comeback. Science and technology have made great strides and yet something isn’t right. There is a trickster element playing games with our knowledge, popping up with new problems to solve and bringing back old problems in a more virulent form.
PQ has an incurable disease, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. The idiopathic part is a medical term that Bing defines as such: -“An idiopathic disease or condition is one whose cause is not known or one that arises spontaneously. From Greek ἴδιος idios "one's own" and πάθος pathos ..” This seems to be an up and coming disease on the increase. It’s possible that there is a particular cause or causes not known yet however, the disease is actually as common as lung cancer. Since it isn’t as well known, and there is no known cure except a lung transplant it hasn’t received much publicity. For PQ the progress of the disease has been slow. It kills some people in a few months, while others live with it for years, and of course, many die waiting for an available lung. For both of us it is both a path to greater depth and a sentence hanging over our heads. This disease is believed to be incurable, and yet the truth is life is an incurable disease and nobody knows what the future will bring or if there will be a future from one day to the next. But, having a stellar disease gives focus to ones sense of mortality. In real life we just go on doing and planning because this is how people live.
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| Medicine Man Joe J. (Dad) and Grandson Jarrack a long time ago Jarrack has kids of his own now. |
As beings, we are not an isolated case. We are cellular members of multidimensional cosmos. Everything affects everything else even if minutely and invisibly. There is an emotional and spiritual aspect to disease. It may actually have a purpose that we don’t comprehend that is yet to be explored. Dis-ease is about something no longer at ease that we either haven’t explored or deny. It’s easier just to work on obviously apparent symptoms and effects. The New Age philosophies often disseminate the idea that we cause everything in our life, but this is very egocentric. I believe that more is involved than the individual whose life expresses the disease.
It may also be that not all patients want a cure on any level deeper than the ego. I think of my mother who I still miss. I believe she had the genes to live a century as her mother did, she passed six years ago at the age of ninety-one. She was possibly the happiest she had ever been but she was gradually losing her sight to macular degeneration and she also found the rising popular culture distasteful. I believe that she quit while she was ahead. Too many assaults and adjustments lay ahead. It took me a long time to experience the reality that she was gone. I still remember walking into her apartment where she had left her cell phone charging and her cross word puzzle lying on the easy chair as if she had placed it there hurriedly because she would be back in a few minutes. Actually, that was the plan. She had been playing games on her computer and realized that she was late for lunch. She sprang up quickly and stumbled. As she fell, she broke a rib on the wooden armrest of a chair and punctured her liver. Even so, what killed her was water leaking into her lungs from a lazy esophagus made lazier by sedatives given in hospital for pain.
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| A good sign. The Iris didn't bloom last year! |
I don’t believe this world will ever be disease free because disease, like all bad things, is necessary for our evolution but the job of understanding and even fighting diseases and disasters develops our creative and problem solving abilities. Sometimes, people never experience life until they face death. In the best scenarios, diseases and problems kick us up to another level of knowing and being, to the spiritual powers that exist above and behind this familiar dimension. However, I don’t think as some do that disease is primarily a mental or emotional issue. Creation is an ongoing process and the earth and its siblings keep grinding and churning as they pursue form. Creation and destruction come in the same package. That doesn’t mean I don’t want cures for diseases and prolonged life, or that I rejoice in hurricanes, forest fires and earthquakes. I’m actually pretty loyal to the common ideas of goodness, health and happiness it’s just that I’ve learned the danger of getting stuck on it.
