Poisons growing within our world
Man is exposed to many nasty things, both in the outer world and within his own inner emotional life, which poisons and can even be fatal. In the plant world all of Toxicodendron (poison ivy) are poisonous to touching, producing in many persons a severe inflammation of the skin. The toxic resin, being non-volatile, may be carried from plants on clothing, shoes, tools, your pet’s fur… even soil, and by the smoke breathed from burning these noxious weeds. So even if you never go anywhere near poison ivy, poisoning may occur if infected clothing is worn years after contact with poison ivy.
These plants are so common and its juices so potentially dangerous that over 85 percent of Americans will be infected at some time.
Yesterday I spotted an extraordinary poison ivy bush. Where once a harmless burning bush plant had once thrived under the watchful care of a gardener, now the abandoned landscaping was killed out by the invasion of strong, poison ivy bushes which had completely taken over and killed out the desirable and attractive burning bush plants.
Not only did this plant parasite kill its host, you could also see that the leaves of the same poison ivy plants had begun to show severe leaf mal forma-tions. Ninety percent of the poison ivy leaves showed hundreds of colonies of tiny reddish leaf blisters and this mutation, whether caused by some virus or by the plants own toxic principle, urushioli within the leaves, spoke in metaphor of an appropriate analogy:
America is beginning to lose its attractiveness. It is still a beautiful country. Lady Liberty still shelters many well-balanced and inwardly harmonious people. Human goodness and unselfishness is being expressed every hour, but the poisonous negative emotions are spreading. Mankind is poisoning itself because the spread of the undisciplined expression of negative emotions is little understood.
All varieties of the human species are highly sensitive to one another’s positive and negative emotions, which are poison. A newborn is a laptop computer waiting to receive programming from its caregivers. The more mature humans strive to keep these poisonous emotions in some kind of check.
But even the professional sanitary engineers of human behavior, the doctors, the teachers, the lawyers, judges and policeman/carry within themselves the same poisonous principles so that more and more of humanity is infected everyday from contacts of the personal kind.
Even as human society put into place more and more laws to regulate the spread of criminal behaviors, the human species itself carries within itself the toxic principle of corruption which eventually brings about a condition in human society where the entire Tree of Life begins to be eaten alive by the poisons I am about to list.
The ugliness of quarrelsomeness, embarrassment, discouragement and things that allow for feelings of boredom must be cleansed from our minds.
And who wants to be in the constant company of those wallowing in self-pity, faultfinding, self-righteous indulgences and apprehension? Ridicule, sassiness, rebelliousness, repentance, and vengeance are all too human contributions to our violent world.
Feelings of guilt poisons human creativity. Stubbornness prevents spontaneous personal growth. Testiness isolates man from wife, parent from child, people from people. Bitterness breeds vengeance. Conceit, vanity, self-pride, jealousy, envy, false expectations … will these ever be exhausted? Will these poisons ever disappear from the hearts of every man, woman and child?
Irritation, anger, hatred, indignation, self-indulgence, and self justification: Would not all the world be a happier world when such emotional poisons are cleansed from our hearts and minds?
And how much sweeter everyday will be when we finally get rid of shame, dismay, dispiritedness, sarcasm and darned sorrow.
Wishful thinking? Let’s be more focused. Let’s be more practical minded. Daydreaming?
And what is the cancer of the soul that feeds off all these negative emotions poisoning human experience? It is the bittersweet fruit, which at first promises you nothing but sweet, sweet, sweet … and looks like everyone’s favorite pear -“me and mine”… but which the saints tell us must be yanked out of our soul by the roots like an aching wisdom tooth crowding out the rest.
If the pain is to no longer persist – yank it out.
S. Raymond Pohaski is a resident of Uniontown.