Live in the Question

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart...live in the question.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

***

(Note: This is a rewrite of a little essay from the early days of the pandemic in April 2020. It again feels relevant now. The postscript is from today.)

There is so much we cannot control in these times that the only sensible choice we have is to continue (or reinstate) the small daily rituals that bring us comfort. One of these for me is drinking coffee. On certain days, I grind whole beans, filtering the grounds, and drinking the coffee black.

As I do so, I remember passing the piles of coffee beans on the side of the road in Central America and Southeast Asia. At the time I traveled there, I was gathering follow-on research from Circle of Poison, the book I wrote with Mark Schapiro.

Part of that research indicated an ugly fact: The pesticides we were researching could work their way systemically inside the coffee plant and end up as deposits in the beans -- the two flat sides of each pair nestled like a peanut inside the purplish-reddish shell.

No reputable scientist we interviewed believed the tiny residues that ended up in our cups, after shelling, grinding, filtering and boiling, represented a significant health threat to human beings.

So, almost counter-intuitively, I found myself arguing in media interviews that there was no danger from drinking coffee. In fact, it had never been my intention to focus on American consumer safety. My motivation was to highlight the dangers to Third World farmworkers who sprayed those pesticides on the coffee plantations.

As a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and a journalistic world traveler, I'd seen many examples of these dangers, including from overhead crop dusters. On several occasions I was coated by clouds of pesticides like paraquat and malathion while doing my research; in fact I was hit by malathion so often I knew its smell.

But the unwanted chemical showers I received was nothing of consequence when stacked against the daily experience of farmworkers and their children. I was a visitor who could choose to be there and get sprayed or not.

They did not have that choice.

Over the years, there has been some progress around the world in curtailing the use of dangerous pesticides, but the syndrome Schapiro and I wrote about remains.

So it goes. Now I am resuming my coffee ritual, in the midst of this pandemic. As I contemplate my life and compose my memoir, the coffee tastes good but the memories are bittersweet.

P.S. As of 2025, there are persistent reports of a connection between at least one of the commonly sprayed pesticides I wrote about, paraquat, and Parkinson’s Disease. Last October, I was diagnosed with P.D.

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