Yesterday I happened to be looking at one of the Facebook pages I pay attention to, a fan page for the late great singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg [1], and there was a photo of Glenn Frey in honor to him, and since I was on break from work and did not have the time to search at leisure, I was not sure what that tribute meant, until I came home to a lively discussion on my Facebook news feed about the death of the former singer and guitarist for the Eagles. As it happens, he died of complications relating to various autoimmune gastrointestinal issues. As might be expected, those who are responsible for trying to deal with such issues in the general population used the news as a way of drawing attention to problems that are unpleasant to suffer but that are not often considered to be important matters of public health by the larger community. The frequent suffering of a young autistic man or a lovely if somewhat frail young lady from Krohn’s disease or someone in a thin country so stressed out about a houseguest that they are incapacitated by colitis is not something that tends to draw attention from the general public at large. Others chose to blame the deceased musician for drinking too much and for a bad diet that fatally inflamed his gut.

In what would seem to be entirely an unrelated matter, I read a news story about a sudden drop of water in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Oregon that was apparently connected to a sudden movement of the Juan de Fuca microplate under the North American plate. This is the sort of news story that has all kinds of implications, all of them bad. It is the Juan de Fuca microplate, after all, that provides the raw material for the volcanoes of the Cascade Range, which is its boundary with the North American plate. A large slip of the plate can be a sign of an impending earthquake, or it can be the provision of fuel for volcanic eruptions, and the people who write newspaper articles about such matters tend to focus on the worst-case scenario, which in this case is a magnitude 9.0 earthquake from over 300 years ago. Let us hope it does not come to that. After all, science news stories can often be the raw material for pointless anxieties and nightmares, of which some of us have too much material easily at hand as it is.

Nevertheless, whether we are dealing with the fires inside of our gut whose job it is to digest the foods we eat, or whether it is with the fires that are inside of the earth [2], we can never be entirely sure that those fires are working properly. The crust of the earth is fuel to the fires of the magma just as the food and drink we ingest is fuel for our own forges inside, for our physical or mental labor. As much as we individually and as much as our earth needs the fires in order to live, for without the fires inside of us, we become cold and lifeless, unable to move, as still as death, until death comes in a sleep. And the same is true of the earth at large, for without a regular heat source the whole earth could easily be a far more inhospitable place, with only the sun to warm by day, and only a hard earth to scratch to make eking out a life barely possible, like the plains of Mars.

All too easily, the heat that allows us to live is heat that can threaten that life. Life is full of risk, of tradeoffs, and there is no avoiding the fact that we all live in the space between not enough and too much, and if we err to the right hand or to the left, the end result is the same. How to stay between those two lines is the task of our lives, and also the task of all of the institutions in which we are part. If we are the Miami Heat, or, inexplicably, the Omaha Lancers [3] of the United States Hockey League, we play a Glenn Frey song like “The Heat Is On” and sit back and enjoy some chili fries, hoping that the fires within our body or the fires underneath the earth that we are but dimly aware of do their job, and do not cause us any trouble. And most of the time, we are right.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/why-arent-they-in-the-rock-roll-hall-of-fame-dan-fogelberg/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/12/20/should-auld-acquaintance-be-forgot-and-never-brought-to-mind/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/07/08/in-vulcans-forge/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/12/18/in-glickens-forge/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/the-worst-losing-streaks-of-all-time-in-professional-sports/