Tick Checking Builds Intimacy
It has become a routine: as soon as we walk inside from our daily excursions in the woods, we strip and scour each others’ bodies. He has come to know every freckle and mole on my skin and I his. It feels good to have keen eyes on each other as we age. We have plucked at least one tick off of each other where no mole exists. We are paying attention.
Today he is away for work and I am checking my own body. I am becoming more intimate with my skin, too. I check in the shower and afterwards in the mirror. I want to avoid the freaky little arachnids but I can’t. Another lesson. Avoiding unsettling aspects of our lives — traumas, debilitating fears, unprocessed grief or unpaid bills — can eat away at our vitality and make us sick, too. We have to confront the scary stuff.
Though it might seem like they exist to torture us, ticks do play a role in the ecosystem as a food source for many bird species, reptiles and amphibians. Wild Turkeys like to eat ticks and so do guinea fowl who are often ‘employed’ to control large tick populations. An overabundance of ticks is indicative of ecosystem imbalance. Where ticks are abundant, populations of mice, squirrels, rabbits and deer are often high. This can have a lot to do with the eradication of essential predators like wolves. Everything is interconnected. In almost most cases the deer tick, Ixodes scapularis, is the one transmitting tick-borne diseases to humans.
Though the organism, Borrelia bacteria, which we now call Lyme, seemed to appear just over forty years ago (in it’s namesake town Lyme, Connecticut), a recent study by Oregon State University found a fifteen-million-year-old piece of amber from the Dominican Republic that is the oldest fossil evidence of Borrelia. This bacteria has been around long before humans walked the Earth.
Through consistent, daily checking (of ticks or our woes) we can assure ourselves that a ‘bite’ is relatively new. And the sooner we remove a tick, the better. Given the prevalence and persistence of ticks and potential of Lyme disease in rural environments like Western Massachusetts, we must check every day. There is less of a chance of contracting Lyme disease or other tick-borne illness when they haven’t had a chance to dig in.
But can tick-checking be a practice of self-care? Why not. I’ve been using it as an opportunity to build intimacy with my partner and my own body. I tend to my skin with more care and am finally using my luxurious herbal oils whose jars have been collecting dust. The more I make tick-checking a ritual, the less control the creepy crawlies have over my well-being.
A FEW OTHER THINGS YOU CAN DO IF YOU LIVE IN A TICK-INFESTED AREAS:
🌱 Use Cedar oil (this works pretty well) or essential oils like rose geranium
🌱 Read books like Healing Lyme
🌱 Explore herbal protocols such as Japanese Knotweed1 and, perhaps, begin shifting your relationship with invasive plant species.
🌱 Advocate for relisting of wolves
🌱 If have a intimate partner, use it as a reason to become more intimate with each others’ bodies. If you don’t, use tick-checking as a reason to become more intimate with your own.
🌱 And of course, learn how to safely remove and identify ticks. Keep tick tweezers in your pockets. Don’t avoid the unsettling stuff.
Tincture and decoction of the Japanese Knotweed root have been shown to kill the spirochetes (spiral- shaped bacteria) of Lyme disease that are found in difficult‑to‑reach areas by enhancing blood flow throughout the body. In a recent interview, herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Healing Lyme, said that “this disease is forcing people to break out of the allopathic medical paradigm because it doesn’t work for Lyme.”