Poison in the Air

Note: I’m posting this early because I need to get this off my desk so I can take a break this weekend. I read a passage in Jeremiah that was quite convicting as far as taking Sundays off. Thank you for reading and listening.

Monday, April 14

Despite how cold it’s been the farmers are on the move. I walked out to air that bit my nose. I walked into wind blowing as hard as a roaring thunderstorm. It wasn’t long before I became lightheaded, and my stomach turned queasy. My legs didn’t work well. But there were no farmers spraying by us. Later that day we saw a big tanker truck two miles away.

This was no wind like the Holy Spirit roaring-the wind that blows where it wants to blow, sometimes a breeze that lifts up the heart, or pummels harder than a back slap. This was no swirl of a dust devil, sudden and surprising. This was wind that sickened, the poison hanging in the air. It smelled like the stuff crop dusters spray. I know because I’ve stood outside watching the air show. Pesticide, herbicide, fungicide, I didn’t know. I know what fertilizer smells like, dull, a low note, not unlike a garden shop or rotten eggs.

Every time I walked outside, I felt queasy, lightheaded. Was I having an anxiety attack? No because I felt better when I went inside. I called our farmer neighbor to see if he could identify the smell. He didn’t smell it. “Probably fertilizer,” he said.

By the end of the day I wondered if someone was trying to poison us. Cloud seeding seemed like more than just a conspiracy. It was as if our unsettled weather had plunged sulfur dioxide, or silver iodide from the sky down to earth.

Despite the bludgeoning winds, the smell leaned into our farm like an unwashed tramp. It was eerie that the smell hung around all day. I know I’m a guest here in farm country. I know farmers need to spray their herbicides and fertilizer in order to feed the world. I know. I get it.

But I wonder if I don’t have a right to not feeling ill when I walk outside. The year Tessie died they sprayed when our hay was down, wind blowing the spray into our field. The veterinarian at the equine hospital said more horses would be ill if the spray bothered them. A friend who farms in the north part of the next county gave me the number of the EPA if it happens again, but he encouraged me to talk to the applicator first. To give credit where credit is due, a giant floater, waited for me to leave the field before he drove down to spread the next round of fertilizer, right next to the field I was in. I wondered what he was doing. Being considerate. Perhaps it’s gotten around to the local chemical companies to be careful here.

Then I read “Forked Redux” by Jeff Childers on his Coffee and Covid Substack and was set back on my haunches. I always thought cloud seeding was pure conspiracy and pretty much ignored when people noted it. I thought what I was seeing was contrails. He linked Make Sunsets and noted that our current federal EPA administrator is onto them.

“Trump’s EPA Commissioner, Lee Zeldin, also seems interested in Make Sunsets operation. Yesterday, he fired off a demand letter to the shady outfit (and tweeted it). The Sunset team, whoever they are, has 30 days to float back a list of documents or face criminal penalties.”

I looked at Make Sunsets website and my hair stood on end. These guys send balloons into the stratosphere that burst apart letting out a sulfur dioxide mix made with fungicide. Apparently, this is effective to shade sunlight. Childers asked Chat GPT what the effects could be. “A quick ChatGPT query disclosed long-term risks like soil acidification, respiratory illness, heart problems, infrastructure corrosion, and even social unrest.”

Could this terrible chemical smell have been this fungicide or some other cloud seeding chemical plunged to earth by the wild weather we’ve had? Could a drone have sprayed something overhead?

I doubt it. Most likely I was smelling the spray from two miles away. But one would have to think spraying farm fields when the wind is this high would be illegal. I regret not calling the EPA because the smell was sharp, because I felt so lightheaded and queasy whenever I stepped outside. I have chosen to live in rural America, the fields more like industrial America than what we think of as farm country. This technology helps the American farmer feed the world. But the chemicals shouldn’t sicken the people living next door.

There may be other technologies in the works to strengthen plants without the use of chemical. In the Light Eaters, Zoe Schlanger notes how scientists are studying how plants respond to noise. “Researchers globally have tried to see if playing certain tones to plants can prompt them to certain actions…One study found that playing Arabidopsis a series of tones for three hours a day over tend days increased its ability to fight off a harmful fungal infection…One can imagine a future where farmers set up boom boxes instead of crop dusters” (108).

By the way, geo-engineering is a real thing. In other words, people pointing at the sky crossed with contrails that look like saw blades, are not conspiracy theorists. The Rational Optimist Society’s blog reported in Honey Crank up the Sun, on assorted geo-engineering technologies such as poking clouds with lasers to make it rain, pulling cold water from deep in the ocean in order to cool warm waters and prevent hurricanes, and putting giant mirrors in space to beam artificial sunlight to power solar farms at night.

Who do we think we are, that we think we can control a system as wild and complex as our weather systems? The unintended consequences are frightening to think about.

Poison Settles Around Me

I walk out and don’t smell the fertilizer laid down next door, but I feel sick to my stomach and lightheaded. My legs feel heavier than normal. Shame wells up. It’s like I’ve picked up the odor, the body odor of loneliness and neediness that scares people.

This odor can poison me because I am set up to think I’m being rejected when I am not, and I drop into a hole full of muddy shame because I reached out and the hand was put up, usually by saying “I’m busy.” People have been schooled in the virtues of being too busy and not in the value of friendship. We are told we need community for our health, but sometimes it doesn't seem our community wants us. And being lonely pushes people away.

I know how it feels to not want to share a meal with someone I don’t like, how awkward it is to say no, yet again. I have felt guilty about this, especially knowing how that painful that can be.

Lore Wilbert in her essay, “Who Decides Who Is Unsafe” offers wise words with regards to this, “I am not saying there aren't truly unsafe, evil, and unjust people and behaviors, just that it has been good work for me to realize that because of my own particular unhealed wounds, there are going to be times when my gut says, ‘Hmmm, that's probably not a person I need to be in deep friendship/relationship with. They're probably a great person in every way, but their way of navigating the world is probably going to hit some pain points in me that are not yet healed. And that's okay.’”

But then, but then, I wasn’t rejected. Nope, my friends were just busy, not the kind that is an excuse. They responded, “Yes let’s get together.” We made a date. And my shame was just that ugly feeling that comes when the powers-of-what-happened-before settle, but those powers can be lies. And even if they’re not, we can wait for the people who belong to our tribe to find us.

But I’ve been alone since I was born. (Though haven’t we all?) People my age face decrease in the years ahead. Someday Bruce and I will sell the farm. We will place Mrs. Horse in another home, if she is still alive when that time comes. I pray, I pray I won’t have to give up my dogs and cats because some homeowners association limits the number of pets you can have and assisted living places ban them. I look at my friends’ ages and know that we will part company someday.

Popular culture chides, “Okay boomer.” People are angry that we have used so many resources and will use more. Our culture is top heavy with aging people. It’s a loss when people see us taking rather than giving because we have so much to offer—stories, wisdom, presence. Our stories can offer a view to history. Our wisdom is rich because we walked similar roads. We have learned to listen because there isn’t much left to say. We know how powerful prayer is.

Helping elders out offers the opportunity to clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison because Jesus dwells within that service. We visited a neighbor who is in comfort care, and afterwards I felt a kind of joy being able to sit with him and offer my husband's and my company. In some ways he served Bruce and I by receiving what we had to offer.

Chris Green in God Save Us From Our View of God discusses Jesus’ last words and how our views of Jesus on the cross, can have a theological and psychological impact. Towards the end he mentions how Jesus’ final prayer from the cross: "Into Your Hands I commend my spirit" might be a useful prayer for us because it turns us toward the father and his care. What a powerful prayer for the years ahead and it runs alongside my sense from the Lord that “all will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well.” That as Jesus commended his spirit into the Father’s hands at the very extreme of torture on the cross and as he was about to harrow hell, I can pray the very same in my day-to-day life. These words pray me into knowing how we are in God’s hands, in God’s presence, as we walk. The Jesus Prayer, “Lord be merciful to me a sinner,” doesn’t always work so well, when I’m walking out, beholding the world. But this just might. “Thank you” as I look out on the fields, the sky, the birds works pretty well too.

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