TAKING STOCK

 "If health is not 'cultural normality,' then it must refer to something else, must point beyond man's usual situation, his habitual habits. Health, in a word, is not typical, but ideal-typical. It is something far beyond, something to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. The 'healthy' person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the 'real'... is the one who has transcended himself." (Ernest Becker, reading Søren Kierkegaard)

It consists of Kula-grown celery and sorrel, first extract, and to concentrate it further, he added wild malunggay foliage — everything he could harvest that’s blooming in the treetop: young sprouts, leaves, flowers and seed pods; all its life-force. Hence, this hot elixir soup was pure ecological sustenance unadulterated with salt. It’s a green essence osmosis. It’s the cousin sui generis of the twinkling planktons defused in clear sea. He took stock of his health. There’s nothing pharmaceutical and agro-chemical in his body. What he ate greatly came from the unspoiled earth. They say he was "The Picture of Dorian Gray," but with a soul that’s the child of a living spring. Without a trace, cuts and scars regenerated to fresh skin; he was like a fairytale. Despite the topographical dangers in the rainforest and the waterfalls canyon, nature let him play unscathed. As a matter of course taking "inventory" of his life, he had indeed stopped growing. This is the story of Ayu Mowgli: a Peter/an orphaned-animal left to fend for itself in the jungle, God shaped like almost a man. 

The fantastical soup was foolproof bottoms up. Its healing properties included meta-mineral benefits to the endoskeleton. Mowgli always hunted food with a friend-panther and both respected the laws of the kill. They all took turns: animals had strategic mobility and range, but they’re meat to another in watch; or otherwise safe in a neutral corridor. Herbivores were meat too, unless they’re fast enough to outrun the big cat. The mighty elephant was the exception to the rule of the grass-feeding type with no known predator. Instead, its foraging controlled the choking abundance in the jungle, and then stomping on, had engineered a way to create a beautiful savanna. The python floated as long as the river and when hungry coiled in a struggling prey. Mowgli had begotten all their skills, also their capacity to design beauty and to shed new skin, leaving the old behind. Mowgli swung on vines sounding off his heart for nuts and plants’ fruits and water in flowers, picking them up on the fly. He swum in the pools like a frog, according to legend, but captured fish in his mouth like a bear.

Two thousand years ago, Empress Jingu, in the Chronicles of Nihonshoki, defeated the invading Mongols through divination, and declared: Catch the sacred river fish, Ayu, and our people will be free! The "immortal" Ayu lives on today in Maze, Japan, in the most pristine river ecosystem in the world fed by a garland of summit-mountain snowmelt, as far as heaven-like a place his home is in this earth-water paradise. Ayu is disguised a fish, mystically, yes, but only to hide his true essence of peach-apple and sweet moss nature (allegedly its miraculous taste) within. The imperial military ate off an angel’s food, and triumphed over the enemy and saved the motherland. Sure, the gods protect the Ayu, but a chosen one is a sacrificial propitiate by destiny, as kings are the first soldier to die for his crown... What did Peter eat but a panoply of mushrooms in Neverland, and the power of his adventures! He even found a girl to love — forever. The writer of this allegory (blog) is his own "soup" for thought and imagination made real to firmly believe it. And to "count the ways" for you, he drinks it.