Walt Whitman has a poem called "The Song of the Rolling Earth" where he has a line that reads: "There can be no theory of any account unless it corroborate the theory of the earth". Pondering the divine inspiration of this line and the poem as a whole, it hit me that our bodies are in essence minature "Earths".
Although I just finished watching an episode of The Flintstones, anyone that knows me knows I am a deep thinker. Praise be to the blogosphere as my outlet. I was pondering how the human body is in essence a microcosm of planet earth.
For example, the earth is about 70% water and the human body is about 70% water. Just like the earth, the human body has it "storms", perhaps manifesting themselves as the common cold and the flu. How often do we hear of the words "stormy weather" pertaining to an individual. For me, being a taller person, over six feet, my head and feet get colder much easier in the wintertime than my torso. I suppose my head is the North Pole and my feet are the South Pole. And so far as war is concerned, there always have been wars on the earth since the dawn of man, and there are ongoing wars within the body.
Whether it works or not I try to use this "mind over matter" concept when I feel a cold coming on. The germs of the cold I always look at as this invading "army" that always attacks in the throat. When they overrun my defenses, they fan out to occupy the nostrils, the throat, and the chest. However, I always imagine, when I feel the enemy attacking, my troops with flame throwers in my throat trying to snuff out the enemy. I'm not sure if it is that thought process or a healthy eating lifestyle, but I haven't caught a cold in 10 years. I remember once on the Oprah show that a boy supposedly has a brain tumor, and he envisioned a "Star Wars" like ship that he commanded flying around in his brain taking laser shots at the tumor. A few weeks later, the doctor said the tumor was totally gone.
The earth is a Gaia system in that it a self regulation system. As long as the earth is a living planet as opposed to a dead rock, it will always do what is necessary for stability, to keep itself in balance. Global warming, the man-made deforesting of the Amazon rain forest, the pollution of waters, will all come back into balance as the earth regulates itself. I remember hearing on one of the educational Television channels that the day after 911, when every airplane was grounded, the air pollution was measurably much less than normal because no emissions were in the skies for that day. The earth got a break from modern man to catch a bit of fresh air.
Sometimes when I think about people, I see us as one celled organisms in the body of the earth. Each cell, or person, has its own function, be it to fight off attackers, to reproduce, or whatever in the bigger scope of the earth's body. Cells die off, regenerate themselves, perfect themselves through the DNA coding within the cell itself. We are one cell within the body of earth, but there are countless cells within our body as well. And I suppose each cell in our body is made of billions of atoms. The earth is just one body within the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy contains billions of solar systems, the universe contains billions of Milky Way style galaxies, and so on, and so on.
Walt Whitman
Few can ignore that the earth itself is in a certain degree of turmoil. the human body, if looked at as your own personal planet Earth, is in a crisis itself with the pollutants in the water supply, issues pertaining to nutrition, mental stresses of modern society, and so on. However, just like planet earth, the human body has the ability to shake off many, if not all it's problems and remain a vibrant, healthy Gaia system indefinitely. The earth has its own instinctive methods to make itself right over time. We, as human being, are responsible for our own instinctive methods to keep our own little version of planet earth, the unique individual "planet you" rolling along happy and healthy. ~dw~
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