It occurred to me today that I have now lived out of doors for over five years, and yet I am not homeless. Far from it.
In fact, I was standing on my front porch listening to what sounded like a freight train approaching from the Caribbean this morning when the thought crossed my mind. I pulled our porch furniture close to the wall of the house and prepared for the downpour that came five minutes later. It has been raining steadily for the last three weeks. 24/7 as they say.
Our house has screened in windows, some of which open, some are fixed, but we have no glass on any of them, and I haven’t closed the wooden shutters in over five years. We live in the jungle—the lungs of the world—and I sometimes wonder how my health would fare if I lived in a city, or just a closed-in house. I used to live that way, of course, but since we moved to Costa Rica, and especially since we built our house, I breathe fresh, jungle-fed air 24 hours a day.
Michael Jackson might have liked it here. I wonder if he had kicked back and moved to a less pressured life if he would have found a sense of calm he so desperately sought. I once read he spent a goodly amount of time in a hyperbaric chamber, but that was long before he started using things like Propofol to get to sleep. When I was in critical care nursing I used to see burn victims, among others, sent to Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT) for better healing. So, there must be something about living in an environment of saturated oxygen that has a healing and calming effect. I went looking for more information. In the pressurized system, hyperbaric therapy:
* greatly increases oxygen concentration in all body tissues, even with reduced or blocked blood flow;
* stimulates the growth of new blood vessels to locations with reduced circulation, improving blood flow to areas with arterial blockage;
* causes a rebound arterial dilation [don’t let that hifalutin’ language deter you], resulting in an increased blood vessel diameter greater than when therapy began, improving blood flow to compromised organs [see?];
* stimulates an adaptive increase in superoxide dismutase (SOD), one of the body’s principal, internally produced antioxidants and free radical scavengers; and,
* aids the treatment of infection by enhancing white blood cell action.
While the area we live is not hyper in its baric-ness, so to speak, we do experience many of the benefits of hyperbaric therapy, because we are surrounded by dense jungle that is exchanging oxygen at a great rate. It might be considered the homeopathic version of HBOT.
I know my sense of smell is acute these days, and often, although not always, I smell things our dogs smell. Granted, they smell it long before I do, but I do smell some of those hidden scents. My skin and hair are never dry, I rarely succumb to colds or other illnesses, and generally I feel healthy and fit. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that we live outside (or with the outside inside our house), or perhaps, because it is warm here, we are outside much of the time. But I can’t help thinking it’s because of the oxygen in the air.
Today it is raining; the air is moist and soft as though one could dive into it and suck it deep into the lungs.
Nice. Jealous.
Every have any issues with army ants? My GF told me stories of them when she lived down there and how people would have to briefly abandon their houses while the hordes marched through. Fascinating (as when observing it happening to others, of course).
Hi, Gary. If you type “army ants” also called driver ants into the search button on my blog, it will bring up a post called “Cleaning up around the Place.” Yes, it’s best out get out of their way. If you try spraying them, or some other disruptive thing, they get disoriented and then there is chaos. Better to let them form rivers and go through cleaning all the cracks and crevices. Free housecleaning. lol. I have turned on the overhead fans on the porch and kept them from coming in, but it’s really best to just let ‘em flow.