People in Stone houses, shouldn’t throw glass…
You know what I mean… glass is fragile and shatters, stone is rigid and unbending…
When I was in my 20’s I purchased a brand new house that turned out to be formaldehyde toxic. After five years of chronic illness, a test on the house showed the toxicity. I was told to “get out”… With my two young children in tow, I did get out, but the damage had already occurred to my immune system… Although in the early 80’s they did not understand, nor have the ability to tell me what had happened, in 2000, they did. An environmental specialist, medical doctor, discovered that my auto immune response from that five year exposure activated a killer T cell over production. Over time I had several other chemical exposures that re-enforced this army of killer T cells, who, when unable to find a true enemy, decides that one of my body parts is good practice in eradication and goes after a gland, an organ, a bone, an eye,…They do not discriminate and they are mindless killer’s.
One time my neighbor across the street on two acres, just for fun, got out his mondo sprayer, hooked it into his pond, and began spraying his property with a powerful herbicide, on a very windy day. He showed me in my organic garden! The over spray hit me while I was working outside. My first clue was not the odor of the herbicide, but the blood dripping out of my mouth from the tiny blisters that had formed there. By the time I got back into the house, stripped of my clothes and jumped into the shower, I had silver dollar size welts all over my body and couldn’t breathe. That time I ended up in the emergency room. My neighbor told my husband that I did not have the right to live where “normal” people lived. His ducks went into the pond and died from the poison…That neighbor did the best he could with the tools he had in his tool chest.
So we began looking for not so normal people, and we ended up on Whidbey Island, in Washington, where many chemically injured people end up and where mostly there is an ecological consciousness. This went well for 14 years on our five acre, green built Sanctuary until the property at the beginning of our private road was purchased by individuals that stripped the forest of its trees and put in a manicured and well sprayed environment. There is the use of something like round-up, (an herbicide which causes chemical castration) daily, just in case a dandelion has the nerve to think about seeding there. At times the smell of pesticide is so severe that it is not possible to drive past their property with the windows rolled down. But, these neighbors do the best they can with the tools they have in their tool chest.
Our dream was to find a place that was safe from “normal” people and at the same time continue to be a part of the positive stuff in the universe. So after another four years of dodging this neighbors chemical bullets, we left our safe home of 17 years and made our exodus to New Mexico to 100 acres of pristine land and a house that we had been assured never had a pesticide or herbicide used anywhere in or around it….Oh, until, wait a minute, the day before we arrived with all of our life packed in the utility trailer, when the owner, who was storing their belongings in the garage, decided to place moth balls around the stuff to keep the mice away… Just moth balls right? They are not a pesticide, right?
This is straight from a USDA website…
Mothballs are made of white crystals of two very dangerous chemicals, para-dichlorobenzene (1,4-dichlorobenzene) and naphthalene. Both chemicals are solid at room temperature but produce very strong vapors. Mothballs are sold as flakes or pressed into cakes.
Both of these chemicals are fumigants and must be present in high concentration to be effective. Concentrations high enough to be effective for pest control is dangerous for anyone exposed to them.
Yes, dangerous for “anyone” but deadly to someone with an over production of Killer T cells. This unexpected exposure, without warning, without conversation, without thought, was like driving over a land mine booby trap. KA-PLOOEY, just like that…my life changed…again…Because keeping out a pest was more important than not damaging a life…So…from the moment of our arrival in New Mexico, I have been ill. The dream, twisted…Weird illnesses that only the killer T’s can produce…All my lymph nodes swelling to the size of peach pits from my neck to my groin, causing excruciating pain…blood in my mouth… high speed tremors…painful, bleeding, rashes…liver malfunction…kidney malfunction..lung malfunction…acute vertigo…high blood pressure… My normal blood pressure is 90/60. Outside the house it is 90/60 inside the house it is 150/102…Rapid heartbeats, food that won’t digest because these Killer T’s now see the digestive tract as perhaps a “sneaky enemy”…and the list goes on… I kept trying to figure out if I was receiving other exposures, after all, if they didn’t consider moth balls a pesticide, what else might there be that I don’t know about? So besides the physical stuff, my paranoids have resurfaced as well. Is everything the enemy? What do I trust? I trusted the landlord, their word…
At any rate….part of me wanted to lash out and say “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?” They told us that they had asked the handy man if he thought the mothballs would be “harmful” to me, before they placed them down, and he said “no” so on his expert opinion, they applied the pesticide. They did the best with the tools that they had in there tool box.
Another part of me did not want to see the landlord embarrassed, hurt, or humiliated because of a failing in my body…my inability to be “normal”. How messed up is that? That part actually ruled and I took the hit, without complaint. Why did I stay…I don’t know why…I didn’t want to whine…I didn’t want to fail…I didn’t want to go backwards I guess…I didn’t want to be defeated…But eight months later, several trips back to Washington to be treated medically, rent paid to NOT live there, and I just no longer want to be ill…or be dismissed for not being “normal”. I have learned this lesson…
I don’t know why I am not “normal”…I do not know why I am the canary, flying enthusiastically down the poisoned mine shaft…I don’t know why I have had so many chemical exposures that have caused so much damage and caused my body to over respond…
I also am not sure how I have lived for the past 30 years without using one pesticide, other than diatomaceous earth or peppermint, or one herbicide, other than chili peppers or corn gluten as a pre-emergent, or one chemical, literally not one. Bi-O-Kleen soy spray instead of WD 40…Ecover Hydrogen peroxide bleach instead of deadly chlorine… Enzymes to clean with instead of chemicals…Green products are so readily available for any chore…
So why do we continue to poison the planet? Ignorance is not an excuse when the information is there for anyone who takes a moment to do the research… Are your kidneys failing, do you have throat cancer, bladder cancer, breast cancer? What type of environment do you live in? Do your carpets out gas formaldehyde and benzene? There are 120 neuro-toxic chemicals in a typical sample of carpet. Toxic chemicals can be found in the fiber bonding material, dyes, backing glues, fire retardants, latex binder, fungicides, and anti static and stain resistant treatments. A list of these include: formaldehyde, toluene, xylene, the potent carcinogen benzene. Have your rugs and furniture been dowsed with flame retardant and gassed with pesticides on the boat before they are shipped here? Do your babies crawl on these rugs and sleep in these beds? Does your child have asthma? Or leukemia? Have you created for yourself a toxic environment that you believe to be safe, because why would they use these things and sell this stuff if it wasn’t safe? Did you know that flame retardants are banned for use in the State of California? Are our European neighbors more intelligent than us? Because they banned the use of many toxic chemicals 20 years ago, while we, still are poisoning ourselves and our own loved ones…Does that make sense? Even Canada, just a hop, skip, and jump away has banned the use of garden chemicals…The products we use are safe…”Right? Why would they be on the market if they weren’t safe…Like Teflon Pans…or hornet spray…round-up, or moth balls…
We are a country, maybe a world, that walks slowly towards the suicide we commit each day that we poison ourselves and our planet with products we haven’t researched and things we deem “safe” because someone making a buck assured us it would make us happier, more beautiful, with less work, less effort…
We hold our noses and jump into the vat that has been prepared for us by the almighty corporate dollar. Only sometimes, we are making that choice for another human being, who doesn’t want to jump, who doesn’t want to die…just yet, because of something, somebody else chose to do that caused irreparable harm…Choices made for our grandchildren and their puppies.
I don’t know what the lesson is I am supposed to be learning from all this…yet……But I do know this, if I am responsible for damage to another, even unintentional damage, I make amends…I do not excuse myself… and I ask forgiveness. If I am not forgiven I work towards reparation…If I did not do these things then I would not be walking towards becoming fully human… It is not about you…your stuff… your lessons… I can’t control those…but I can control my response…
There is a song by Emerson. Lake and Powell, (after Palmer left the band) called Lay Down Your Guns…Ken and I danced to it as our first dance song at our wedding, 24 years ago. Maybe this will tell you how not normal we really are…
The lyrics are…
Lay down your guns I come in peace
No need to run my friend into the trees
We’ve been through this so much before
But still we get it wrong
Lay down your guns and stand up strong…
And though the cut is deep
We can heal it, trust me and keep
Your spirits high
It should be easy now that we’ve talked it over
And God knows we have to try
Maybe stone can bend, not be quite so rigid, maybe glass can become a bit more resilient, a little less fragile…or maybe we can be more careful not to shatter it, and maybe we could try to understand how hard surfaces became that way…
Maybe not standing up for myself and just moving farther out of the world was the thing that just allowed my son’s landlord to walk onto the property they are renting and spray a potent herbicide on the scotch broom in the pasture where my precious four year old grandson plays…where they thought he was “safe”…no cars, no strangers, no danger… Fuck That…
I laid down my guns a long time ago…Now I am picking up my pen…