Who wants to get dirty with me?

Who wants to get dirty with me?

I’ve been thinking about the meaning of ‘clean’ in a world so polluted. How our idea of what is clean has been hijacked and twisted in ways that followed to their logical conclusion have a sinister edge.

We often think of clean as ‘bacteria free’. When we wipe down our countertops with an antibacterial spray we think we are cleaning them, ridding them of bacteria. But bacteria is everywhere and on everything. You are bacteria, you are a moving pulsing multi-life supporting organism. A vital symbiosis. We cannot be separated from bacteria any more than we can be truly separated from any other facet of the living earth that sustains us. Water, food, air. Bacteria free is not clean, bacteria free is dead. Sterile, unable to produce or sustain life.

The more I begin to see myself as not separate from the living earth, the more practices we think of as common sense begin to seem like lunacy. The bacteria on our countertops is (mostly) not dangerous. The chemicals we use to clean them are. They are polluting our river systems and our soil and polluting us and endangering our health. They are arguably far more ‘dirty’ than any bacteria in residence on your surfaces.

I bet all the varied beautiful living creatures in our water systems being slowly poisoned by chemical runoff don’t think bacteria is dirty, the fish are wholly unconcerned by dirt, the dirt is their bed, their washcloth, their shower, their scratching post.They might however be concerned, with the changing temperature of the water, the change in ph, the increasing scarcity of food. I bet the worms that fertilise our soil don’t think it’s dirty, they think it’s delicious, luxurious and snug. Their whole world.

Imagine the existential terror of a worm who’s whole world is slowly turning to a sterile, lifeless dust. What used to be moist, vital and teeming with all matter of life is turning barren and lonely. His whole world is our whole world, it is us who will eat the nutritionally deficient lettuce he nibbled at and us who will not be able to feed a prebiotic rich meal to the microbes that inhabit our intestinal tract.

What does it mean for us to be clean, for our bodies to be clean when our survival relies upon us being so riddled with bacteria that we are more them than we are us.

I’m beginning to think it would be cleaner to eat my food off the dirt in my back garden than off the countertop I just wiped down. Beginning to think we all ought to get much dirtier. To sink our fingers into the soil, breathe in deep its dank aroma. Roll around in it. Play outside. Pull up a carrot and eat it straight from the ground, perhaps a little rinse to get off any large clumps of mud. We need to ferment things, ferment everything, turn our kitchens into bubbling, belching laboratories where living things are growing. To saturate our diets with living organisms.

We need to fill our guts with more bacteria not less. To thicken the layers of bacteria that surround our skin not wipe them off. The more we kill the bacteria on our skin, our surfaces, in our homes, in our rivers and in our soil the more we are killing ourselves. It’s an anti life philosophy, a pseudo Christian idea that we need to be clean, cleansed of pollution.

The natural world is not polluting. We are. And we are slowly and steadily polluting the world. We wage war on the ‘dirt’ in our homes as if an encroaching toxicity is coming for us and our children. And it is, but in the form of a polluted earth that is steadily making more and more of us sick. As is so often the case we intuit a real threat and sublimate it, transmute it into something manageable, something in our homes, something we can kill, something that can be used to manipulate us into buying something, a weapon, in order to protect ourselves and our family.

It plays on our fears. your countertops are not the enemy, they will not make your toddler sick. The toxic chemicals you use to ‘clean’ them might. As might an ever more polluted planet that may soon struggle to support human life. In order to protect our children we must protect our rivers, and our soil.

So throw out your ‘cleaning’ products, use vinegar, bicarb, water, soap.

Get down in the dirt. Roll around, sink in your toes. Get reacquainted, come home. Once you are, you will want to fight for it, for the protection of our rivers, our soil and our life sustaining ecosystems. We are so dirty, we are dirt, we are alive, in a symbiotic, mutualistic, interdependent relational alliance with every living creature, particularly the ones that inhabit our very bodies as their homes. We must protect them and by doing so protect ourselves and our multi- species bodily homes. They need us and we need them.

Who wants to get dirty with me.