Ricky’s Riffs: A blog about health and healing and a world that needs care.

Growing up in the 1960’s, one generation removed, World War II deeply informed my sense of both past and present. My father and almost all the men of his generation had signed up or were drafted. It was just the thing to do, whether it was to go and fight Nazis or because they realized the neighborhood corner was empty so they might as well go off to where their buddies were. They were spread out from England to France to Burma to New Guinea. Some guarded prisoners, some worked on intelligence, some were on aircraft carriers, and some stormed the beaches of northern France on D-Day.

A few sniffles and a light cough were the first signs. And the fact that my wife had tested positive the day before, as did her friend who sat with us at my show last Friday. With a full day of patients, it was time to test. Ah…the double blue lines; the mark of  Covid! Round two!!

For me, more than anything else, Covid is a nuisance; having to cancel my day–and week–and tell patients in pain that they had to re-schedule to next week or to find another chiropractor who might be able to squeeze them in.

Covid is here to stay. It’s endemic. Mask as you will, you will not escape it. We will all get it…all of us. And most likely, multiple times. So why not just accept this reality and relax about it. I know people who have barely left their homes for years out of the terror of getting “The Vid!”

The world has gone mad. The cloud of nuclear Armageddon hangs over us all as war rages on in Ukraine; systemic oppression, locally and globally, can no longer be hidden or denied. Hate, fear and anger have metastasized through our social and political bodies.

It is ego run amok, as politicians the world over vie for power; egos doing anything they can to insure their own survival, operating under the illusion of solidity and permanence, careening toward destruction, willing to take the rest of us along for their deadly ride.

The world cries out for healing; for medicines that can help to lift the veil that has clouded our vision, to reveal our true natures, our energetic connection with all beings, with the cosmos itself; to remind us that what happens anywhere effects what happens everywhere.

Do we ever say we were wrong?

Or have we become so polarized, so isolated in our social media bubbles, that we will maintain the “righteousness” of our positions–bolstered by reams of “evidence,”–forever.

We on the left like to believe that we have sole access to the truth; that it is only the “other side” that wanders in the desert of “alternative facts.” Of course, the other side feels exactly the same way…

We all sense the “feeling” of a space when we enter it. We might feel comforted, or irritated, sedated or energized. Whether it’s a friends living room, a doctor’s office, or a mountain landscape, every space generates a different reaction.

Solidity and emptiness: a paradox

Although the world appears to be solid, modern physics has revealed that it is essentially, and mostly, in fact, empty space. At the subatomic level, the atoms that comprise matter, are both particle and wave, solid as well as vibrational…