Muddy Footnotes: The Conspiracy of Spring
by Ruby Sara
Greetings, friends and beloveds, from the silver, charcoal and spring-wet streets of the fiercely-wild urban midwest! Things are looking up. A new wind is blowing, and there is snow melt everywhere, seeping into the ground, seeking seeds and telling them stories about light. The empty lots are heavy with flooding. I have crocuses and rich earth and rain on my mind. The conspiracy of spring is afoot.
Inevitably, in this fragile time between winter and spring, when we are treated to precious days of wind and water followed by brief bouts of freeze, my heart too seems to do this sweet and awful dance with the earth, freezing and thawing, sighing and singing. And these tremulous, shattering and mystifying days where that promise on the tongue is capped with silver skies, creating some sacred marriage of brilliant hope and sorrowful stillness, a kind of breathlessness, some holding of secrets…they do bemuse, and whatever good thoughts I may have are quickly lost. In his new book Becoming Animal (which I have almost finished [too many books, too little time] and which has thrown open my heart-mind like a great wide door carved with shadows and crows, and has thoroughly wrenched me into thrilling knots…more on this incredible book later), David Abram talks about these moods of earth, and on days like this one it is easy to see what a bedrock truth that is. I am consumed with the moods of the Mama – the sack of my heart driven to some strange emotion by the flooding of the skin of earth.
So it is that the threads of meaningful discourse pinging around my head as I slosh happily through huge pots of wet earth seem all wound into a tangled ball at the moment, and all I have to report are muddy footnotes…
1. I attended a lecture on honeybees last night. The journey was fraught with human experience – train, sidewalk, grocery, up to the lecture room crowded with bee-friendly folks and jars of honey. The fierce joy of winter’s relenting seemed to rock through people, and I was filled with affection for our complicated, weird selves. We human animals and our relationships – the negotiations with honeybees, our potato harvests, our bread. I thought about the vivid, critical importance of the Real – how the smell of mud rising up through the city makes us all quit our inner turmoil and turn, even for a moment, into the wind, lifting our faces…embodied creatures after all – skin and muscle and feeling. I thought of a sermon I heard once – our blood, full of salt; the sea, full of salt…how this is makes us “the salt of the earth,” – a people connected to each other and to the earth by these miraculous materials from which we are made. Solidarity, honey, and salt.
2. I ran across word of a recent kerfuffle involving Goshen College, a Mennonite liberal arts college in Ohio, and their recent decision involving the national anthem. From what I’ve gathered, for many years Goshen didn’t play the national anthem at sports and other events due to an Anabaptist conviction regarding giving allegiance to God before human rule. However, they have recently changed their policy, and the anthem is now played instrumentally before sporting events. As a result, there have been a number of faculty, staff, alumni and students of Goshen who have protested this decision, and some of their thoughts on the matter can be read here.
I am not a Mennonite, and I’m not going to comment on Goshen College’s decision. But the continuing conversation has sparked some questions for me about allegiance and ritual; the nature of pagan allegiance and my own relationship to nation. As an anarchist I am against kyriarchy, top-down systems, and nation-states. I don’t have all the answers, but I believe in what I see, and I believe in the power of small groups committed to diverse community-based governmental systems, and in the difficult but noble pursuit of consensus decision making. I also believe in ritual, and I believe that ritual is powerful. Ritual, as I’ve said before, is embodied storytelling. That’s what makes it not only important on an aesthetic and celebratory level, but also a matter of survival. So I ask myself what my allegiance to the Mama, and to the creatures that comprise her sacred being, demands of me. What do art and storytelling and community demand of me? And how do the rituals I/we participate in express and communicate those allegiances?
3. I have also been reading On Liturgical Theology by Aidan Kavanaugh – considered a fundamental text in the study of liturgy and a book I highly recommend (for its graceful, impeccably gorgeous prose as well as its deeply thought-provoking ideas). Being focused on the nature of liturgy squarely from a Catholic perspective, certainly I disagree with plenty of the book’s theology, but I am fascinated by his assertion of liturgy as prima theologia, which is a concept I think is worth exploring from a pagan perspective when it comes to public ritual. From my understanding (and this is my interpretation and may be wildly off base), Kavanaugh is asserting that theology, in this case the act of considering/negotiating/analyzing and engaging in authentic relationship with god, happens first and foremost in the act of worship, in my opinion both on a personal individual level and on a communal collective level (I am personally more focused lately on the latter, as, in my opinion (*dance dance*) the pagan cultural gestalt/milieu/egregore tends to focus rather a lot on the individual spiritual journey). The notion that theology is something that all worshiping people do, not just academics and philosophers, and that theology is engaged in worship, where the people come before their god… initiating contact, giving praise and thanks, pondering difficulties, making contracts, receiving grace, feeling awe, wrestling with angels, etc. Any analysis after this critical and seminal experience then is secondary theology – the commentary that springs out of experience. And therefore it is critical that we look at liturgics, worship and ritual deeply as we construct our theologies. It is very possible that this is a severely limited and half-baked understanding, but I am fascinated nonetheless. I plan to explore this more at length in a later post, including thoughts on a slightly different but related assertion of Johnny’s, which springs from our experiences writing and performing rituals over the past couple of years.
4. The intrepid spouse and I have joined a local food share in our neighborhood, and this weekend was our first pickup. We’ve done this in many places, so this is not our first foray into the world of food co-ops and CSAs, but I am continually amazed still every time by the bounty of earth and the ingenuity of human beings in the tumble of food that rolls out onto our kitchen counter, humble and covered with dirt, perhaps on the skinny and wrinkled side (it is still winter, after all), but full of promise. Carrots and onions and apples. An artichoke (the intrepid spouse and I eyeballed the artichoke with apprehension, seeing as how we love artichokes but have never prepared one ourselves, but we are a brave people). Avocados. Ginger root. Yes.
Take. Eat. This is Her body. All this. All this.
—————
Muddy footnotes with no text – seeds in the dirt. The spring will come rolling and rocking over the fields and the plains and into the city. The Mama will laugh and you will not be able to keep from laughing. The birds are making ready. Rhizomes and roots and the veins of trees all whispering with the grass. The wind. They all know something. These delicious secrets.
The conspiracy of spring.
Grok Earth, best beloveds. Pray without ceasing.
p.s. For those in Chicago, don’t forget that I will be teaching a workshop on Spirit & Poetry at Life Force Arts Center starting March 1st!! For more details, and to register, please see this page.
This is just a side comment on a rather thought provoking post: I find the image of “salt of the earth” to be an interesting analogy as salting the earth results in degradation of soil nutrient cycling and ultimately has detrimental effects on plant growth. It also references the ritual curse of sowing the earth with salt once performed on conquered cities. The dichotomy of precious mineral deposits that preserve, give flavor and in minute amounts are necessary for life, but in larger amounts destroy life and create barrenness becomes a fascinating statement when applied to humans.
Any thoughts?
Hi Doug,
I think it’s a very interesting observation regarding the result of sowing salt, though I don’t know if it has correlations to this specific reference. The biblical reference (Matthew 5:13-16) is referencing salt in its capacity to improve the taste of things, so that I understand it as a metaphor for being, say, spiritually tasty – for not letting the flavor of one’s relationship to one’s god be lost (as in the next passage, not letting one’s light be hidden). Some Christians interpret this as a call to evangelism or “discipleship” (both multi-layered terms), and some see it as a commandment to be true to one’s vocation/calling in life (and I’m sure there are a billion other interpretations and complexities), though the sermon I referenced above was considering the phrase in terms of connecting our earthly bodies, which are full of salt, to the body of earth (“creation”), which also contains salt in the oceans, etc., which to me was making a point about the fundamental relationship between us and the planet.
Taking the phrase out of this context, it *would* be a really interesting turning of the phrase to note, as you’ve said, that salting the earth damages it, and as humans have no doubt done damage to the earth, perhaps it is in this way too that we are “salt of the earth,” though this is a different angle on the term than the one I was referencing.
Thank you for your thoughts!
RS
Wonderful post – keep up the great writing.
On the CSA – We’ve found it to be absolutely life bringing. My wife even started a blog on the produce we’re getting and how she’s using it in cooking and how it mixes with her skills as an artist. VERRY cool. http://artandtable.com (shameless spouse-promo? YES!
)
Miss you guys already. Looking forward to our next talk. Keep up the great bloggin’
Thanks, Mark! I look forward to our next talk as well.
Love Katrina’s blog!! I will definitely subscribe.
You put the artichoke in boiling water and then, after a bit, you take it out.
(Sung to the tune of “You put the lime in the coconut . . . .”
I am sympathetic to the Mennonite protesters. My children and I never stand for flag or pledge allegiance. As a teenager, I refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance and was kicked out of homeroom for it. That year, I was forced to wander the halls during the pledge so I wouldn’t “be a bad influence on the other children”. It was a bit weird really. I was to just check in to let them know I was in school then just kind of hang out…away from people…until the pledge was over. Perhaps the principal didn’t know what else to do with me since I was not belligerent or disruptive in any way he was used to dealing with. I was just very clear that to stand and say the pledge was a violation of my religious principles. Later, my government teacher (one of the few liberals in the joint) had me write a letter of protest against this school policy of compulsory nationalism which he posted in the hallway. And behold it came to pass that before long, I was called before the principal’s mighty throne a second time. He apologized and said he never meant for me to believe that my exclusion from homeroom was a punishment for my conviction and I was welcome back in homeroom. I declined his invitation. It was much more fun wandering the halls.