Queen of My Own Country
"Oh that is so gross."
My buddy Steve the fireman has just rolled of bed.
"Really?"
I'd just ruined his Breakfast of Champions by telling him that I had a case of Demodex infestation on my eyelids. Tiny mites, living on my peepers, giving me a bad case of dry eye.
"That's just nasty."
Actually it's just normal. Those little guys just got out of control and unfortunately, now I have to take care of business for a few weeks. Hot compresses, tea tree oil, baby shampoo and Q-Tips.
Now you may think this is disgusting like my buddy Steve, but consider this: more than 90% of the cells in our bodies are actually parasites. In other words, we're not us. We are, in reality, walking colonies of all kinds of bugs and bacteria that Great Nature has built to keep us alive, and for us to keep them alive. It's a symbiotic relationship.
For example, those little Demodex boys? Demodex spiders crawl out onto your nice, smooth clean skin at night- every night, party down, mate, lay eggs in your pores, and snuggle back up to hide out during the day. You are none the wiser. Now this may appall you but you need these spiders because in return for the right to have sexual commerce on your skin surface without your getting to watch, they do a superb job of cleansing your skin of infection causing bacteria- their dinner of choice- that could do you severe harm. You need them.
Growing up in Florida, I used to observe the small white herons that followed our horses and cows everywhere. They would perch on their backs and walk close by. These herons cleaned our animals of the persistent ticks and parasites that carried disease and constantly annoyed our livestock.
In the ocean, sharks are often found with remoras attached to them, which eat parasites on the shark's body and need the flow of water to survive.
Nature is chock full of symbiotic relationships like these. We just don't see ourselves as being part of that mix. The idea that our bodies - I mean, me?- would be a teeming mass of mircoscopic creatures. Externally they like hairy spots, like our scalps and yes, down there unfortunately. We can have three different kinds of lice. Don't bother to head to the drug store. Unless you happen to have the nasties as result of being where you shouldn't have been lately, these are inhabitants you want crawling around your short and curlies.
Inside, it is a teeming mass of microbial colonies- and as we have been learning lately, this microbiome has a great deal to do with our overall health. From our ability to heal ourselves to being able to digest normally, making sure we have a healthy gut is critical. Last fall, after two doctors gave me two brutally effective full spectrum antibiotics and wiped out nearly all the good guys in my gut, one of the evil operators- c.difficile, which we all carry- did a very good job of nearly killing me off. Messing with Mother Nature is serious damned business.
Understanding that we are all in effect nations unto ourselves- kings and queens of our own colonies, if you will, is the beginning of humility. Inside us are ten times more bacterial cells than human cells. You could call those intruders if you like, visitors, even immigrants. That's one way to look at it. At one point at the beginning of life, all life was single celled. Then they started swallowing one another.
Eventually those cells became us. Each of us, a walking country of diverse, unique entities and neighborhoods, bars, shops, cities and towns that make us up from top to bottom. Not unlike the Bronx or Chinatown.
In other words, we are all of us immigrants, made up of immigrants, teeming with immigrants every moment of the day.
It's extremely humbling to understand we are universes within universes, and we're not even really "us." Only about 10% of us is actually "us." We're primarily made up of outsiders who take out the trash, clean up our messes, lay eggs in our pores, scrub, wash, clean, extract nutrients, move the poop and otherwise keep us alive.
When we start trying to kill any of these neighborhoods of immigrants off, we get very, very ill. Even die. I can vouch for that.
To put this another way, we are much like the character the Oogie Boogie Man in Tim Burton's Halloween classic movie Nightmare Before Christmas. The Oogie Boogie Man strutted around in a burlap sack and was made up of squirming bugs- and was undone in the epic battle when our hero, the Pumpkin King, pulled a string and let all his bugs loose. He shrieked, "My bugs! My bugs!" as they scurried away, leaving him with nothing left. So would we.
Take away this immigrant population in our bodies, and we are nothing, just like the Oogie Boogie Man.
Before we start screaming and yelling about how bad immigrants are, I might note that diversity begins at home. In fact I can see them. Rather like illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a few Demodex mite families have set up condos on my eyelids. They need to move back where they belong: my cheeks. But just as immigrants belong in America, Demodex spiders belong on our bodies, along with all the other rich, diverse, teeming masses of immigrants that add to the mix. Without them, we're nothing.