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Key's Keys-Do you have Garbage Balloons? July 26th, 2025

Key's Keys-Do you have Garbage Balloons? July 26th, 2025

Keyla Ohs
July 26, 2025

***I acknowledge that I work, play, dance, heal and create this newsletter on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Peoples***

*this newsletter was written and edited by a human, not AI*

Hello, beautiful soul!

I currently have family in town visiting. As with many family conversations, sometimes things get interesting.

Yesterday we randomly began discussing ‘garbage balloons’- something that a) I had no idea existed and b) mortified me to no end because of the immature commitment to sustaining unnecessary conflict.

What the heck are garbage balloons?

Ok, hear me out.

North Korea has been launching balloons filled with garbage and debris into South Korean territory as a hostile, tit-for-tat tactic rooted in the Korean peninsula’s longstanding psychological warfare.

The contents of these balloons are, bluntly, an assortment of unsavory household and organic waste intended to provoke, insult, and cause disruption. South Korean authorities have cataloged common findings such as:

Cigarette butts
Batteries (discharged)
Plastic bottles and other household waste
Scraps of cloth and torn clothing (sometimes originally from South Korea)
Soil with possible parasites (sometimes suspected to be mixed with human or animal feces)
Toilet paper, wastepaper, and vinyl wraps
Propaganda leaflets ridiculing South Korean leaders or featuring cartoon characters

Some balloons have included timers engineered to burst mid-air, scattering their contents more widely. South Korean explosive ordnance teams and biohazard units are regularly dispatched to inspect balloon debris. To date, no chemical, radioactive, or biological weapons have been found—but concerns remain, particularly about possible parasites in the soil or excrement. Both Koreas have a history of using balloons for psychological warfare—South Korean activists with anti-North materials, and North Korea with literal trash. It’s a show of disregard, an attempt at psychological harassment, and a way for both sides to demonstrate capability and resolve—albeit in an absurdly low-tech, analog format.

This isn’t just happening in Korea- it’s also happening in Palestine / Israel border, and likely other areas of the World. While Korea has the resources to remedy these behaviours, and the social organization to prevent it, Palestine and Israeli’s situation is due to the following issues:

Media and NGO documentation from the late 2000s and early 2010s reference visible mounds of trash and complaints from both Palestinian and Israeli communities affected by the dumping. This pattern aligns with changes in control, administrative confusion, and urban neglect specific to the post-Oslo Accords landscape.
The situation persists to the present day, exacerbated by ongoing political standoffs, security concerns, and inability to establish a reliable cross-boundary waste collection system. Both sides report negative impacts, including environmental hazards and heightened tensions
The dumping is deeply tied to the administrative fragmentation and fluctuating municipal responsibility that became entrenched after the barrier’s construction.

I do not intend to write about heavy, depressing topics, however, this knowledge offers us an opportunity to reflect on how the energy of ‘war’ impacts us both internally and externally in our lives. Not only war between countries and ideologies, but the war we carry on day after day within ourselves, refusing to put down the sword and simply stop fighting ourselves.

We may not carry literal ‘garbage balloons’ but we likely do transmit things we do not wish to deal with into other parts of our consciousness, dumping shame and judgment upon ourselves, or in escalated examples, sending our own personal, emotional or spiritual garbage onto another to hold, avoiding accountability, growth, and understanding of self.

Our personal garbage balloons fester, and if we do not work through the psychological components, they can meander into our physical vessel and create illness, even cancer and autoimmune disorders. Oftentimes our trauma has not allowed us to develop the mindset, emotional and psychological support, or tools to not only sort through our garbage but implement the protocols and processes required to truly work through our life challenges, and head our life in a new, healthier direction. What often ends up happening is we carry unresolved ancestral trauma- passed down for generations.

In every family, there are garbage balloons.

We carry them from our parents and grandparents and deep into our ancestral lines-the echoes of abuse, war, immigration, racism, bullying, genetic illness, abandonment, betrayal, and genocide.

It is clear that some of the structures in place in the World- our leaders, families, social systems, and current healing paradigms- are not enough to prevent the creation of garbage balloons. If our systems of governance are not working to shift the external social and political paradigms, we must do what we can within our own lives and begin to take matters into our own hands. It starts in our relationship to ourselves- can you put down the sword and refuse to engage in the patterns that got you to where you are??

Some questions for you:

What garbage balloons are you still carrying that have long since expired and are tethering you to your past?

What internal ‘garbage’ (unresolved trauma, self hatred, dualistic perspectives, intolerance of self and other) are you tired of carrying? (The use of the term ‘garbage’ is not negative here- it does not diminish the power that returns to us when we successfully move through deep healing thanks to working through our ‘garbage’.)

What would it require for you to stop playing the game (shifting responsibility outside of yourself and onto another), and claim responsibility for what is yours? Your anger, your self abandonment, your self hatred?

The same energy is used to continue an old pattern as is required to start your life in a new direction. How will you direct the energy you embody, the co-creative life force that runs through you?

Finally- what do you need to develop the internal resources required to finally destroy your own garbage balloons, and the ancestral ones you are still volleying, and actually integrate the wisdom afforded to you within those balloons?

A loving reminder, readers:

We must first love what we wish to dissolve, it is love that returns us home.

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