Nature Speaks

“No disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person has his own peculiarities…” wrote Tolstoy. Perhaps he meant that every illness is more than the body alone. Behind each symptom lies a whole world: memories, fears, hopes, and the quiet mystery of a life being lived. Medicine, in its categories, can never capture all this. What it can offer – and what often heals most deeply – is the simple reassurance of presence. Someone listens. Someone acts. Someone cares.

Science, too, reminds us that we are never just bodies in isolation. When community frays, both mind and body weaken. Depression rises earlier, more often, more severely, generation after generation. Loneliness quietly undermines our health as surely as smoking or high blood pressure. But when we are woven into belonging, something changes: the heart steadies, the immune system strengthens, even the cells seem to take courage. The story of Roseto – that small town of Italian immigrants in Pennsylvania where heart attacks were once mysteriously rare – shows us this truth. Their protection was not in diet or genetics, but in the strength of their shared lives: meals taken together, familiar rituals, kinship and laughter. When those bonds loosened in later generations, the protection dissolved. The heart suffered.

Philosophers have tried to speak of this mystery. Martin Foss called the body not an obstacle, but an instrument – like a violin that disappears into the music it makes. Merleau-Ponty spoke of the necessary transparency of the flesh: that we live through the body, not in constant awareness of it. When the body is well, it steps aside and allows life to flow. When it is sick, it blocks the view, and we notice it again. The danger of our time is to forget this transparency altogether – to treat the body as a machine of parts, to see flesh as surface only, or to imagine ourselves as objects without spirit. In this forgetting, others too become objects, stripped of soul.

So pause now. Let your eyes close. Notice your body, not as a set of mechanics, but as a doorway. Feel the breath moving in and out. Feel the warmth in your chest, the subtle pulse of life. Allow the body to become transparent again – not a problem to be solved, not a machine to be tuned, but a vessel through which the music of living flows. Remember belonging: a circle of friends, a shared meal, a moment of laughter. Let this memory settle in you like medicine.

Healing is never only chemical. It is not only in tablets or procedures, nor even in the hands of doctors. Healing is also in connection, in meaning, in the soul that shines quietly through the flesh. The body is whole when it is no longer just matter, but music – transparent, alive, and open to the life it was made to serve.