Dirt Therapy

   Where have we been? Well, let’s see…lightning struck the Still room, no wait that was 2002…ahh, we went to Hawaii, no, that was a long time ago, er, aha! We moved? Not going to happen. The drought! That’s it, it didn’t rain and the pond dried up…no that was last summer. Would you believe the dog ate our notes? No dog. Guess it just comes down to the fact that we’ve been sick…down sick, both injured and sick. Now that’s the truth. We had the perfect storm this spring...all the baby plants were ready to get out of the greenhouse and one of us couldn’t walk and the other had a viral infection. Wish we’d just had a dog that ate our notes.

    Now for the good news! We’re back in the dirt and this is good, very good, probably even healing. John Wesley, trained as a cleric in the Church of England (mid 1700s), came to Georgia as a missionary to the Indians. He was greatly impressed with their good health and closely observed the use of “vegetable products” in the treatment of disease, returned to England and wrote a book entitled Primitive Physic Or An Easy Way to Treat Most Ordinary Diseases. The book was so popular in England that it was edited and reprinted 32 times and was in common use in the American Colonies as well.

                                    

Among the many diseases/cures named, Wesley addressed Consumption:

“Every morning cut up a little turf of fresh earth, and, lying down, breathe into the hole for a quarter of an hour.” Can you imagine lying face down on the ground for 15 full minutes while all your neighbors are calling 911? Times were different. But here’s the deal…Wesley was seeing the benefits of fresh dirt, maybe he’d even seen antibiotics at work before anyone knew about antibiotics.

    But back to here and now. In his book Spontaneous Happiness, Dr. Andrew Weil devotes a chapter to the healing effects of dirt, “Hands and Nose in Dirt”. It seems that the “hygiene hypothesis”-living in environments that are too clean- could be responsible for the sharp increase in asthma, allergies and depression. Most of us (especially young people with developing immune systems) don’t have a daily relationship with dirt anymore, depriving our immune systems of routine exposure to “harmless microorganisms such as soil bacteria”. This is oversimplification for sure but if the immune system doesn’t have regular stimulation, it doesn’t “learn” when to react and just begins to react to anything and everything.

    So…we’re back in the dirt. Hope you are too even if it is dirt from potting plants for the windowsill and refusing to squeaky-clean scrub vegetables from your garden!

   By the way, John Wesley also addresses “Falling of the Fundament” but rest easy, we’re not planning to elaborate on this treatment but will just say it involves brickdust.