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Conversations

THE late prizewinning author Manoling F. Martinez spent a lot of daylight hours on a dreary slog through hallways of malls, soaking up sights he could lay his eyes on. As fillip to that trudge, he’d see a movie—any movie to while away a bit of time, maybe as prelude to a nocturne before hitting the road for an appointment with kindred spirits over suds and cud.

‘Tis tough to get into talking terms, even know by chance a kindred spirit. So he had to pore over books, the sort that kindles an inferno inside one’s head or slams a steamroller at the heart’s core.

Though monastic in his ways, Manoling never had a chance, maybe, a try at an interface with humble creation. If anyone were to spend time or pay attention—call it any which way it’s still an investment or time deposit-- to any being, there’s always a welcome company of the meek. They shall inherit the earth—maybe after we’ve thoroughly screwed and sucked it bone-dry.

Take that assertion by the late mystic Max Heindel on bacillus-type bacteria. Those microorganisms look like a chain of rods. They supposedly thrive in an atmosphere of loneliness, self-pity, fear, insecurity, mindless rage, well, pardon me if these are dead give-away descriptions of most blokes we know. Those afflictions aren’t exactly the lab culture on which bacterial colonies can be grown. Conversely, I’d hazard to say those bacteria can be repelled in an atmosphere contrary to those culture of emotions.

So we’re trying to get a grip on whatever passes off as communication—still in infancy-- between macrobe and microbe.

Odd that a medic once told me—I did NGO work for a time a couple of years back-- about a sweet pretty young coed’s cause of death. It wasn’t pulmonary tuberculosis or the zillions of Tubercle bacillus colonies that feasted on her lungs. It was loneliness that crushed and shriveled her into a bag of skin and bones. She had family and kin. She may have had a sprinkling of friends. But nobody paid her a visit during her prolonged stay at that pavilion for the phthisis-stricken.

So she wasted as she sunk into the depths of morose melancholy. That was a sad macrobe-microbe interface.

A not-so-silly Sunday school song rolls out barrels of fun at the depths of one’s being: “Every single cell of my body is happy. Every single cell of my body is well. I thank you Lord. I feel so good. Every single cell of my body is well.”

With a mantra like that plunked deep inside one’s self, the wonderful contagion spreads from cell to cell, each one lightened, each brimming with a revelry plus lust for life, even in the face of apoptasis or cell death.

Maybe, an affirmation like that can infect the biota (an entire gamut of humble life forms that the human body houses in its fold and hold). Maybe that sets to work the body biochemistry into something stupendous.

And just maybe, those cells which can live up to 120 years under laboratory conditions, well, they’ll go for the whole nine yards. They’ll be obliged under a spell like a cheerful affirmation.

The sattva portion in Boddhisattva originated from the Indo-European es, which means to be or is. On its way to Sanskrit as sat and sant, the word morphed as esse in Latin and einai in Greek which, in turn, became the –ont in certain words signifying being, say, “symbiont.” That’s how Dr. Lewis Thomas had it explained, whew!

I’d say Luther Burbank, that plant breeder without equal, he didn’t mind engaging in an earnest chat with roses and cacti, convincing ‘em to shed their thorns. It must have taken time and patience to convince ‘em to let go of such defense mechanisms. Much later, Burbank introduced a quaint breed of roses and cacti that bore no thorns.

And uh, he also did suggest that plants are equipped with more than 25 sense organs. Now that’s something truly wonderful to find out.

Compared to most oafs—politicos included-- who haven’t bothered to hone their five senses to a keen edge, I’d take to a serious conversation with any humble creature with a built-in panoply of senses.

Maybe, they can teach me as we commune.


I’ll learn a lot I know. I will. And I am learning.

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