“I noticed soon after we ate, they went into the desert, emptied their bowels, and it did not have the strong smell that is associated with waste matter in our lifestyle.”
Marlo Morgan
If you live in Australia or in one of the New Age capitols of the world, or if you have an acute sense of smell, you may notice people who own their animal selves by abstaining from personal hygiene. Some do it to save water, but others believe it to be wise and good. I’d like to confuse the latter group with some facts that may lead them to experiment and share what they learn.
An experimenter par excellence is Marlo Morgan, one of those interesting folk who had an ill-defined modern illness and went out to the wilderness and came back cured. Other examples include Isabella Bird, an English woman who traveled in the wild west, and who may illustrate the dangers of women’s fashions, in her case the over-tight corset. You can learn more about her at the Bird and Jim Restaurant in Estes Park, Colorado, or from her books. Another woman with a wild cure is a seller of organic coffee who was diagnosed as having cardiomyopathy, and who went off to a Central American coffee plantation to live, and came back healthy.
In Morgan’s case, she flew to Australia sick and was taken in by a mob of Blackfellas living wild “under the radar.” In the course of her many adventures, observed and recorded in her book Mutant Message Down Under, she had such foul BO that a pack of dingoes took to following the mob under the false impression that she was—or was carrying—carrion. The Blackfellas took her to a special patch of dirt and buried her for the day. This cured her BO, disappointed the dingoes, and may have something to do with her cure. My money’s on her microbiome being replenished in the wild.
Dirt can also make you sick. In World War I, the French soil surprised British doctors with trench mouth and trench fever, arguably leading to the loss of a generation of British men—as well as saving J.R.R. Tolkien by getting him away from the front. In other words, dirt is not all the same with respect to human health.