Choose Your Own Adventure
It called us out of the ocean and taught us to carry it inside.
It mapped the first roads - across the world, and into the body.
It built empires and broke them open.
It sealed promises and scorched the earth.
Salt preserves, and it corrodes.
It blesses, and it banishes.
It is death’s ally, the spirit’s shield, the body’s current.
Salt is a basic human right to survive.
To impose control over it is to strip away dignity.
Salt is movement.
Salt is where we go.
Salt is protest and defiance,
from the French Revolution to Gandhi’s march.
It is power over, and power within.
You probably don’t notice it.
It is too embedded in your biology,
too woven into our systems.
Until it’s taxed again.
Until the iodine disappears.
Until its absence haunts you.
Like so many essentials of our time,
it is the invisible that will undo us
or hold us together.
Salt is a ghost in our lives.
Will it come back to haunt us?
Will it once again decide where we live,
how we move,
and what we believe is worth everything?
This is the salt of our lives.
Life is a little salty sometimes.