Disclaimer: Most of what I speak to in the world of human health isn’t universally accepted by many if any Western medicine or “holistic” practitioners. The former tend to be too steeped in reductive materialism. The latter more often than not struggle to define let alone practice “holism”. What follows in this essay is a different perspective on what is known as “flu season”, and I don’t even feel that it goes as deep as necessary to understand what we call “the flu”. I actually think my views in this very essay are in and of themselves still too materialistic, albeit a far cry from the allopathic, “Western” view of illness. In the age of social media and short attention spans, very few are able or willing to question dogma, and nearly everything that I read about in the conventional or alternative health spaces is self-masturbatory at best. This essay will please very few in its entirety, and I’m ok with that, because my true gnosis on this topic would hardly be valued by just about anybody, and I prefer not to shout into the void. I recommend you sit with any discomfort that arises upon read or listening to this essay. Maybe something new will emerge from our dialogue around these topics in the future if we can become more comfortable with the unknown.

Every autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, flu season arrives anew. Your local pharmacies and your doctors will begin offering a series of vaccines to “protect you” from some pathogen that isn’t even visible with an electron microscope. Generally speaking, these interventions are aimed to protect you from viruses.

The symptoms of the flu include fever, cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, body aches, headaches, and fatigue. These are symptoms of this so-called “illness” that afflicts many every autumn.

Meanwhile, as I’m looking out my window, my lettuces, herbs, wildflowers, wisteria, and maple trees have all discarded their leaves, stems, and flowers, sacrificial lambs to Mother Earth. She is rich in activity during the winter months, alchemizing this organic matter to support the abundance of new life that will arise come spring. We get to witness this beautiful circle of life every year.

Humans, who have long held that they are separate from nature, fortunately do not have to offer up our limbs and organs every year to Mother Earth. Thank goodness…because nature is metal. Those poor flowers gave their lives in order for life to spring anew when Mother Earth goes back into dormancy in the warmer months.

But why wouldn’t humans be included in this sacrifice to the great Mother every year? Could the symptoms of influenza “infection” reflect our participation in this annual offering?

Of apple trees, gravity, and levity

Anybody walking upright understands gravity. The apple tree grows, matures, and produces fruit. When the fruit ripens, it falls to the Earth.

In fact, everything in the cosmos gravitates towards massive objects, the Earth notwithstanding. This is what keeps our moon and satellites in orbit around our planet and what keeps our planet in orbit around the sun.

All biological organisms feel the pull of gravity, and yet what distinguishes life from non-life is that being alive seems to defy gravity. Rudolf Steiner referred to this gravity-defying force as “levity”.

But in the fall, the force of levity can no longer compete with gravity, and the sunflowers bow down to the Earth. They disintegrate, turn brown, and their constituent parts combine again with Mother Earth under the pull of gravity. When levity is sufficient, plants, animals, and humans remain upright and alive.

Levity might therefore be considered synonymous in many ways with life force energy. The Chinese called it qi. The Vedic traditions referred to it as prana or kundalini. Esoteric science calls it “etheric force”. Original homeopathy refers to this as “generative power”. But perhaps it’s all roughly the same thing…

When humans reach the end of their lives here on Earth, gravity takes over and when the embers of levity are extinguished, we die. We, too, are a part of this circle of life.

What if “the flu” is not an illness?

As a preamble to what’s to come, I am not going to argue that people don’t “get sick”. I’m simply going to reframe what is perceived as an “illness” instead as a normal part of our experience here on Earth.

I’ve already outlined what happens during the autumn season, which coincides with the advent of the flu season. The natural world experiences some degree of decay, but not totally.

My yarrow no longer has tall stems with leaves and flowers. But the roots remain along with some hearty leaves. There is still some activity in the plant that keeps it alive over the cold, winter months. In the spring, however, my yarrow will emerge anew. But this reemergence requires this plant to have been cared for during the warmer months so that it can sustain itself over the harsh winter. In other words, yarrow that has plentiful levity or life force energy will survive despite its offering of a great deal of its biomass back to Mother Earth. This is an act of love. This is also why herbal medicines are most often used to make us feel stronger throughout nearly any illness (e.g. Echinacea, slippery elm, licorice root, marshmallow root, wild cherry bark, and nearly every remedy included in the Wildcraft board game which is great for kids!).

Recall the symptoms of influenza “infection”. You are heating up (fever). And you are expelling a bunch of dead matter (skin, tissue, cells) back into the environment (coughing, sneezing, runny nose). This sounds a lot like what my yarrow experienced, just not in a form that we recognize as decomposition.

This dead biomass that we are expelling consists of cell debris, fluid, electrolytes and the rest of it. When you cough up phlegm, this mucus contains the debris of cells lining your oral and nasal cavities and your deeper airways. When cells die, they break open, releasing all of their contents, which includes the genetic material inside the nuclei of these cells. Take note of this for later…

Influenza deaths

Not all of my perennials will return in the spring. Some of them sacrificed so much in the fall that they left themselves bereft of life force energy (levity). When spring arrives, they simply can’t overcome gravity’s pull down to Earth.

I propose that the same happens in humans. After all, which of us are most susceptible to hospitalization and death from influenza? Older humans.

Older humans are already feeling the effects of diminishing levity. They are beginning to walk with a hunch. Their skin is thinning. Their blood vessels are weakening, and blood is pooling in their lower extremities. This is called aging. There never will be a cure for this any more than there will be a cure for “autumn”.

When healthy people enter flu season, many get these symptoms, which is an expression of our offering to Mother Earth, and then they recover, often feeling stronger than they had felt prior to their “illness”.

When many of our older humans get “sick” during flu season, they end up dying. The same goes for unhealthy people. Gravity, which must be quite strong in the colder months, wins in its tension with levity. This is life process in action: when levity is overwhelmed by gravity, you die.

This is why I harp so much on eating real foods, drinking living water, getting quality sleep, having good sex, connecting deeply with loved ones, and not putting poisons into your body otherwise: these acts of love for one’s self nourish your life force energy.

“I tested positive for COVID/the flu/etc.”

This is where things get uncomfortable.

You had flu-like symptoms. You went to urgent care. They swabbed your nose. The result was positive for [fill in the blank].

We have been conditioned to believe that an outside contagion made us sick, which is why the vaccines your doctor have offered you all of these years make sense. They are meant t…

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