We feel guilty about wasting things. However, our very nature - our bodies - seem to produce lots of kinds of waste. Should we feel guilty about this basic design?
Take the lungs - air in, oxygen used, carbon dioxide out. That one seems clear.
What about ear wax? Earwax is meant to keep the dirt and grime out of the ear.
Nasal discharge - Another path for germs and dust to enter our bodies. Here's something: "on rare occasions, you might even find an eyelash when you blow your nose."
Tears - more cleaning to get rid of unwanted dirt and other objects.
Sweat - sweat is made from waste in your body - urea, salts, sugars and ammonia. Sweat is about cooling your body by using waste materials.
Vomit - there's a topic - your stomach needs to get rid of some of the contents - maybe spoiled or too much and irritating the stomach. There's a lot in vomit - bile from the intestines, stomach acid, and then the partly-digested food.
Pus - oozing from a cut or scratch..it is dead skin cells, dead bacteria, white blood cells and debris that is being removed to make way for healing.
And then the daily basics of urine and excrement. Urine is part of the water replacement that happen to keep salts and urea from building up to dangerous levels. As for excrement, there's a lot of activity to digest the solid food matter that we eat. Grinding, dissolving, adding chemicals in the stomach, special juices in the intestines to digest fats and neutralize acids so that the nutrients can pass directly into the blood. Leftover solid parts move on into the large intestine - usually a 24 hour turnaround time.
Our modern human-centric experience calls all these things waste. They aren't waste in the larger context of living. A fascinating article HERE - it is The Wonders of Bodily Waste. It outlines the use of bodily waste in scientific practice. The urine of pregnant women and post-menopausal women is rich in sex hormones and is used in the production of fertility drugs. Distilling urine produces phosphate which is fertilizer - likely we know this. In the past fermented urine was used for gunpowder production, household cleaning, tanning of leather, and dyeing of textiles.
And that solid excrement? There's a long list of uses and projects in the Wikipedia topic named Reuse of Human Excreta.
World Toilet Day is November 19th - coming up.
Is it a possible theory that this simple instrument has helped remove us from the bigger, connected world that we live in?
We are coming to the end of Sweet Autumn Clematis season.
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