Have dropped this ball in the last three weeks or more – writing about health hacking seems gratuitous when people are afraid they are going to die. It is, however clear that there are methods to prevent COVID from taking over your system: Zinc, Vitamin C, nebulizing peroxide, Quercetin. Sinus rinsing three times a day, preferably with a neti-pot, and gargling Listerine three times a day will dilute the viral load if it is in your system, and allow you to build immunity to it. Pharmaceuticals, hydroxychloroquine, Z-Pak together with Zinc, if you qualify, equally can clear the path for your immune system to work. We know that obesity and diabetes set you up for it, as does heart or lung disease, or anything autoimmune. Age. Here’s a statistic that should scare us all: 25% of women have an autoimmune disease.

COVID is a violent pathogen when it finds the right host as if it was a virus to cleanse the world of the weak. A version of the native Indian custom of leaving the sick and old to die alone in the woods. What intrigues me is whether it was engineered in the Wuhan labs to be so.

On to happier things! I have been using the time to stop shopping for anything but absolute necessaries, and it proves one hell of a relief. The world hasn’t stopped selling though, but now I see the targeted ads as a deep and annoying intrusion, no matter how compassionate and pretty and informative the editorial bumpf they are wrapped in.

Instead, I’ve been taking my cat for a walk in the forest.

I have also been intermittent fasting, seriously this time, 16 hours leading to 18 hours building more days of less eating ‘window’ as it is called. I feel myself getting younger. No seriously, lighter, younger, 25% more energy. It is damned wonderful.

Also have gone back to yoga since they’ve closed the parks, the gym, the swimming pool. Turns out I love it, after saying I hate it for the last 25 years. Further, our paradise of a walled garden, well-watered (an actual definition of paradise) is even more paradisical than it was a month ago. Spring is coming, flowers peeking up and out, my garden slave busy outside with his ground cover and mulch.

Plus I’ve had time to go back to meditation and am starting to take it with more seriousness, imagining I will try out the other teachers of Anapanasati rather just Larry Rosenberg of Harvard Square. My writing voice came out of deep meditation decades ago, and I am going to challenge it to a greater depth of feeling, deeper thought. Apparently, if you take it real serious you can start seeing light beings. I am all for that. Take a look at this photograph, taken just after we buried my darling Tiggy down by the creek. I was trying to distract myself from wrenching sorrow by taking photographs of Jamie’s garden for his mother, and when I looked at them, goosebumps. In two shots out of a couple dozen, there he was. That, my dears, is a light being, something they used to call ectoplasm in the 20s now called plasma in the New Age community. That swirl is otherworldly, my dog, my soul’s companion, trying to make me see him one last time. You can see he was dashing from the little greenhouse to facing me while I was taking the photo.

All the above are the intense pleasures of introversion absent the raucous demand of the getting and spending world. People are beginning to ask – here’s a magnificent essay on what’s about to drown us all – can we get these benefits permanent-like? Is there a way to not dash around like headless chickens yet still live with promise and vivacity? Maybe a little, probably not much. Six billion people on earth depend on the citizens of western economies getting and spending their little hearts out. This is a respite. And possibly a signpost to the future, 200 years in the future. A new earth.