“The (flu) virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.”
The statement above is from systems thinker, Donella Meadows. In the time of Covid19 it gives one reason for pause. A statement like this has been missing from mainstream conversations since well before the start of COVID 19. Now, in the time of Covid19, it brings into question, once again, the definition of wellness. Further, and most importantly, it makes one wonder if wellness might be more like a system like state and less like an event...
Welcome to the
Funky Miso
Soup Kitchen
Research & brainstorming on this "funky kitchen" project began in the summer of 2020. It is a work in progress. Below are some videos, images & documents related to the ontology & conceptual design for what will become an app that can be downloaded for a fee from an Apple or Android store.
CONCEPTUAL BUNDLE #1 - Relationships
If Everything is a System, why is My Wellness not Understood as a Living System? Why do we, the people, have to wait for a “black swan” event, a pandemic, like the one we are in the midst of, before questioning how to protect ourselves from such a virus? The fear of illness, specifically the fear of the COVID virus and what it means to be sick with it, dominates our media landscape. The mainstream method to avoid getting this virus has been reduced to 3 things: washing your hands, keeping your distance and wearing your mask. While these are important things to protect yourself and others, they deal only with external factors. As humans we have inner and outer parts to our body....
"As within, so without"
CONCEPTUAL BUNDLE #2 - State
Beneath our interface layer, our skin, which covers our body and protects us from the elements while hiding our internal organs lies another world, one filled with systems that interact with one another and with exterior systems to give us health or take our life, depending on how well we tend to them. These inner systems need to be protected, regulated and maintained for optimal health through FOOD. In Asia and the far East the notion of protecting your inner body temple, sometimes known as the jade temple, is essential to teachings on health and wellness. These teachings are tied to spirituality and have been in full effect for over 2,000 years in places like Africa, Asia, India and the Americas prior to invasion by the Europeans...
CONCEPTUAL BUNDLE - #3 Metaphor
The task of “guarding” the Three Treasures that comprise your being is no small undertaking. The three treasures are your Body/Essence (Temple), your Energy and your Spirit. To guard these treasures one must be active in protecting and defending these precious aspects of your being and not surrendering them to euro-centric, anti-indigenous ideologies that continue to claim that they have all the answers about what makes us sick while having no solid ideas about how to remain healthy in the face of COVID19. If you were to substitute COVID19 for flu in Meadow’s statement, what are the implications of creating an environment within us in which COVID flourishes? Does it imply that there is a way to set up conditions within the human body that create the opposite effect and make us immune to COVID? If this makes sense then other questions arise. How can I support the internal systems of my body? How do I strengthen my immune system and fortify my respiratory system to have an internal environment that COVID cannot flourish in?
