Focus:
Understanding that your nervous system is listening, and giving it signals of safety.
Repetition:
My nervous system is safe.
My body knows how to heal.
I am held. I am whole.
The Sea, the Fog, and the Forest
A theory on how nature may turn wandering bacteria home, and why that medicine was never meant for the coast alone.
I have something interesting for us all to ponder this week. Not a protocol, not a claim, not a hill to die on. A wondering. The kind of wondering that keeps me looking at creation the way a child looks at a tide pool, certain there is more life in it than I can see. Take what serves you and leave the rest. This is a theory, and I offer it as one.
The Idea I Keep Returning To
There is an old and quiet thread in biology called pleomorphism: the observation that a microbe may not be locked into a single fixed shape, but can shift its form depending on the terrain it finds itself in. In the modern literature this shows up most clearly in what are called L-form bacteria: organisms that have shed their cell wall and taken on a soft, wall-deficient state.
The remarkable part, and the part that has held my attention for years, is that some of these wall-less forms are not a dead end. Under the right conditions the so-called unstable L-forms can rebuild what they lost and revert, turning back toward the walled, orderly, parent form they came from. The wall is set down; the wall can be taken up again.
The question that matters to me is not whether this happens, but what invites it to happen. For a long time the favoured answer was magnesium: that the mineral-rich environment of seawater, magnesium especially, was what steadied these fragile forms and coaxed them home. And I can see how that would be part of it. Magnesium stabilises membranes; it is a mineral of structure and calm, and the body knows it as such. But magnesium alone has always felt to me like one instrument, not the whole orchestra.
What If It Is the Company, Not Only the Chemistry?
Here is my wondering. What if the reversion is less about the minerals in the water and more about the living community in the water (the marine microbiota, the dense and ancient society of microbes that fills the sea)? What if a wandering, wall-less form, dropped into that vast neighbourhood of life, is met not by a chemical but by a conversation, and the conversation is what calls it back into shape?
If that were true, it would answer a question that has troubled me for a long time. Because if this healing belonged only to seawater (only to magnesium in the ocean), then it would belong only to those who live near the coast. And that has never sat right with me. I cannot believe the God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” would hand the mountain people and the prairie people a lesser inheritance. If nature is medicine (and I believe with my whole heart that it is), then the medicine must be everywhere, distributed with the same reckless generosity as the light.
And Then the Fog Spoke
This year something was discovered that made me sit up. Researchers sampling ordinary fog found that the droplets are not empty water at all; they are teeming. Fog water was found to hold on the order of a million bacterial gene copies per milliliter, concentrations so high that scientists compared the droplets to eutrophic lakes and ocean water. Inside those tiny suspended worlds the microbes were not merely drifting; they were feeding, growing larger, dividing faster than their neighbours in the dry air, even breaking down pollutants. In some cases there were more microbes in the air after the fog than before: life, it seems, blooming in the mist itself.
Ocean water, the researchers said. The fog resembles ocean water. You can imagine what that did to my wondering.
If the reverting, healing power of the sea is really the power of a dense living microbiota, and the fog carries a microbiota dense enough to rival the sea, then the mountain valley wrapped in morning mist, the field under a low grey cloud, the coastline and the cloud-forest alike, may all be dispensing the very same medicine. The ocean, it turns out, was never only at the ocean.
The Forest Was Already Saying It
And the forest has been saying this all along, if more softly. We already know that forest air is not sterile air. It is thick with phytoncides, the aromatic compounds the trees breathe out, and it carries an aerobiome (an airborne community of microbes) that grows richer the denser and more layered the woodland becomes. The “biodiversity hypothesis” holds that our immune systems were built to be bathed in exactly this variety, that we are quite literally kept well by the breadth of life we breathe.
Contact with that living air shifts our own microbiome and calms the immune system’s overreactions within hours. The person who walks under the trees is not simply relaxing. They are being recolonized by a wiser, older community.
So perhaps the sea, the fog, and the forest are three dialects of one language. Three places where life is dense enough to speak.
A Guess at the Grammar: Quorum Sensing
If I let myself wonder all the way to the edge, I land on quorum sensing: the beautiful, well-documented way that bacteria take a census of their own population by releasing and reading small signalling molecules, and only when enough of them are present, only when a quorum is reached, do they switch on collective behaviours. We already know these signals can govern how microbes move, whether they build community structures, and even (in at least one studied organism) what shape they take.
Morphology by consensus. Form summoned by fellowship.
So here is the whole wondering in one breath: perhaps a wall-less, wandering bacterium finds its way home not through magnesium alone, but because it is finally surrounded by enough life (in the sea, in the fog, in the forest) that the quorum is reached, the old signals are heard, and the organism is called back into its proper form.
Healing as a kind of belonging. The lost form remembering itself, because the community around it remembered it first.
The Moral of the Story
The point is this. Whether the mechanism is magnesium or microbiota, whether it is quorum sensing or something we have not yet named or something we will never fully name, the pattern underneath is the same, and it is old, and it is true: nature is a healing mechanism, and our only real job is to be out in it.
“Ask the beasts, and they will teach you,” Job says, “and the birds of the air, and they will tell you… the fish of the sea will declare to you.” St. Augustine spoke of two books God gave us, Scripture and the book of creation, and he trusted that both were reliably authored by the same hand. We do not need to finish reading the book of creation before we are allowed to be healed by it. The tide pool does its work whether or not the child can name what swims there.
So go stand in the fog before it lifts. Walk into the trees and breathe as deeply as your lungs will let you. Put your feet where the living things are thickest. You do not have to understand the sea to be made well by getting into the water. You only have to show up, and let creation do what it was made, from the beginning, to do.
I am so proud of you and love you all!
References and Further Wondering
Offered for the curious, not as proof. This remains a theory.
Errington, J. et al. “General principles for the formation and proliferation of a wall-free (L-form) state in bacteria.” eLife, 2015. https://elifesciences.org/articles/04629
Errington, J. “L-form bacteria, chronic diseases and the origins of life.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2016. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/371/1707/20150494
Kang, X. et al. “Direct Observation of Conversion From Walled Cells to Wall-Deficient L-Form and Vice Versa in Escherichia coli.” Frontiers in Microbiology, 2021. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7991099/
“The biology of fog: results from coastal Maine and the Namib Desert reveal common drivers of fog microbial composition.” Science of the Total Environment, 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969718330134
“Scientists Found Bacteria Thriving Inside Fog.” ZME Science, 2026. https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/scientists-found-bacteria-thriving-inside-fog-and-eating-air-pollution/
Roslund, M. et al. “A placebo-controlled double-blinded test of the biodiversity hypothesis of immune-mediated diseases.” Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety, 2022. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147651322007400
“Exposure to airborne bacteria depends upon vertical stratification and vegetation complexity.” Scientific Reports, 2021. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89065-y
“Quorum sensing.” Overview and signalling mechanisms. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing
“Quorum sensing mediates morphology and motility transitions in the archaeon Haloferax volcanii.” bioRxiv, 2025. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.14.633064