Druidry and Microbes

(spoken by Nimue, scribed by James)

I’ve been thinking about microbes a lot recently. I’ve come to the conclusion that they ahve a lot of relevance for mdoern druids.

Microbes connect us to our ancestors. Our first microbes come to us during birth, and we pick up a lot of them from our families. Microbes have a long history of cooperating with humans so that connection is part of our relationship with deep history and our evolution.

We get many of our microbes from our food. This means that what we eat becomes part of us. It’s also the case that our food choices inform which microbes thrive inside us and which do not. Fibrous plant matter is your best bet for encouraging the more benevolent microbes.

Microbes live in our homes. If your home features plants, creatures, or bits of the natural world that you’ve brought indoors that will give you a more supportive environment in terms of the microbes living with you. If you use cleaning products that are harsh and environmentally damaging you are likely to share your home with more aggressive microbes. There’s an irony here. When we try to kill all the bacteria we’re most likely to hurt the harmless ones. When surfaces around us are largely inhabited bythe sorts of microbes that live on plants and in the soil, they crowd out the pathogens. This is why hospitals can be breeding grounds for really dangerous infections.

Any outdoors druidry we do is also an act of communing with microbes. Every walk and ritual, every outdoors meditation, every interaction with the landscape and the soil brings microbes to us. The more microbes we encounter the healthier we are, generally. The best places to find microbes conducive to human health is in the wild.

There’s a horrible irony here too. Human constructed environments are really bad for humans. Our urban spaces do not serve us at all. For this and so many other reasons, we could really do with rethinking things.