Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Natural world evokes the return of our sense
• Money, politics corrupt language, but we don't have to listen
• Our mountains in winter is one place where human language fails

We have indigestion these days.

Americans especially. We're acid-refluxed, heartburned, hypoglycemic, anemic or nutrient-deficient. We can be replete with calories, but still malnourished. Mother Teresa said we were, meanwhile, spiritually starving.

But we don't have time for spiritual food, nor even to digest physical food, and so health declines.

That's mental health as well. Simply trying to digest even minimal, rapid-fire, headline news each day, the information overload, work stress and our natural emotional responses -- all requires time.

But when? People are harried and exhausted. We no longer have quiet gaps between events in order to process, understand or distill them into meaning.

Roanoke psychologist and executive coach Dana Ackley wrote in to comment on the topic of pondering. "My mainstay request of clients -- corporate, governmental and health-care leaders -- is to take time to stop and think."

Because "the urgency of the unimportant crowds out the awareness of this need," she said, people miss the "wisdom" available from that reflecting process.

A gut hunch

Can something as immaterial as a "pondering deficiency" matter in the big picture?

Well, it's a no-brainer -- literally. Even if we mentally deny it, the body can feel at a "gut level" the acid indigestion, food poisoning and deterioration of our whole world.

Just look around at the beleaguered Earth, and your stomach will feel unsettled by osmosis.

Landfill space (growing scarce) is packed and stuffed. It's impossible for landfills to process the crazy-meals we shovel into them -- airless compactions of garbage, plastic, foam packing materials, TV sets and furniture, old mattresses and shingles. Oof! Whose stomach could begin to assimilate all that?

So they're filled up and sealed off as essentially useless, gas-expiring acreage whose digestion will be dysfunctional for centuries.

If we could operate more slowly, using thought, we could sort out the inorganic, reusable materials and compost the rest with the digestive "enzymes" of oxygen, microbes and earthworms. A few small communities are doing this. But on a large scale, we haven't time.

Meanwhile, up on the surface, the land suffers malnutrition, its topsoil washed or blown, raked or scraped away without renewal from the organic matter we're pushing into landfills.

Even forests that are allowed to accumulate topsoil are having to ingest a heavy acid load from coal-burning plants and traffic, drifting in from nearby and as far away as China. The acidification of soil, creeks and rivers weakens not only aquatic species, but native plants and trees, because it kills the microbes needed in the ecosystem's metabolic process.

Oceans themselves -- increasingly the world's carbon sink -- have a related bellyache.

While climate change appears to have vacated the realm of science and become a matter of opinion polls, the oceans -- which have no free-speech rights nor money to enter these debates -- continue to soundlessly swallow vast loads of soot and carbon emissions -- a million tons per hour.

Currently 30 percent more acidic than before the Industrial Revolution, ocean waters are beginning to erode even their own shellfish, while the increased carbon dioxide is depleting oxygen vital for ocean life "to breathe."

But let's take a breath ourselves, here. I'm not trying to dump difficult material down your throat. The sadness of acknowledging so many depressing results of our actions, today, is one reason we'd rather not assimilate them into our awareness.

Universal coverage

This brings us back to the human system.

The Ayurvedic healing tradition considers digestion the fulcrum of life. The digestive process turns raw material into the fire of energy and consciousness. Whether that fire is clear-burning and brilliant -- or smothered and smoldering -- determines health.

This concept, say these Eastern practitioners, applies not just to the gut and physical food, but to our mental-emotional digestion of experience and thought, as well as to the entire universe of which humans are made.

The Western idea of separating human health from that of the earth, even treating isolated body parts or symptoms with no connection to a person's habits, nutrition, emotions or world view -- is proving so limited and costly, I'm surprised it rarely comes up in our health care debates.

Of course, with all the immediate political, economic and health-emergency "fires to put out" (literally), we haven't time, oxygen, light or mental spaciousness to make these larger connections.

"Making connections," however, is surely a chief reason we're here. Linking one thing to another in this universe, becoming conscious, deliberating on how to heal instead of harm -- these constitute the reflective capacity Aristotle believed unique to human beings and God.

That this is our role, instead of our ironic and mistaken identity as "world consumers," we rarely hear from anyone but dead philosophers and sacred scriptures, along with some quiet Quakers, rabbis, Zen teachers and church pastors of our own day.

So we'll heed them in this column, next time.

Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.