I remember crossing through the panhandle of Texas during a giant, ominous dust/windstorm this past summer, in the back of a minivan, while listening to this song by Rilo Kiley:"It's 16 miles/to the promised Land" took on such significance for me, as we neared New Mexico, and i thought about the wonderful, terrifying prospect of having hope for recovering from my illness. The New Mexico sunsets are strange, unreal, and seem to reveal new dimensions to light itself. I don't know if New Mexico is the promised Land. Things haven't gone as easy or as speedily as I once hoped they would. But the experiment of going to pristine wilderness areas in the West to see what effect it has on my symptoms as a whole has yielded lots of usable data, and tantalizing possibilities for future improvement.I've had so much pain, and probably have so much more to deal with even with treatments that could possibly yield full remission, to the extent that it's hard to have hope. But I think about that moment and song, and have a hard time "managing my expectations". I hope that I get more than a glimpse at the promised Land.Pt IIIf the experiment had turned out null, and my health wasn't affected by invisible environmental signals that most people can easily weather, I would have been somewhat relieved.But that's not what happened.Realizing that your serious illness (for context , I have craniocervical instability, which involves structural damage to the cervical ligaments that ends up affecting the brainstem...among other issues) could be caused by some form of environmental toxicity would be comforting if everyone around you was treating the whole situation like a crisis. But to have this unsettling realization and be stranded by it... that is very difficult.On another note:An interesting part of this whole phenomenon... Barometric pressure drops, preceding storms, "amp up" the toxicity somehow, perhaps by causing mold spores to be released or by causing the spores to release toxins.During an early winter storm in which it snowed in Las Vegas (which on its own I found very astounding), I noticed this effect, in an area that had otherwise felt great to me before. We drove out of town up into the desert surrounding Vegas, specifically Red Rock Canyon conservation area. I went from feeling like the storm was sickening me, feverish and chilled, to feeling amazing... A sense of great catharsis and the "sublime" , as the storm clouds rolled over the red rock formations, creosote bushes and Joshua trees, and opened up to the heavens. I walked with a bounce in my step and threw up my hands in joy.There may be a metaphor in there somewhere. Something about finding places one can be grounded in in the small folds of space and time between the larger wastes of the nascent apocalypse. But since getting sick, and parsing the etiology of my illness, I have realized that we take metaphors for granted too easily. Metaphors should often be read on multiple registers of meaning, symbolic and literal, like Borges' story about story about arrows And when I read Nietzsche say to "never trust a thought you have inside" or talk of life denying philosophies as resulting from "bad air", now I intimately understand that there is no such realm as the purely symbolic , that he could have been speaking of actual environmental toxins and that still wouldn't be "reductive" or make his thought less meaningful, and that the purely symbolic realm doesn't exist, that every type of meaning is dependent on LIFE, that meaning is subject to biology and that biology is just a subcategory of ecology ... And that that is the most important thing we can understand in the midst of this nasty storm