All or Nothing

Image by Rowena Ford

If this is a blog about animism, why do I talk about everything from food to environmental policy to energy to politics to agriculture? If this blog is at least half spiritually directed, the other half is pointed in many other directions. Why?

There is to me no difference. A phrase that has become a mantra of sorts for me is "All Or Nothing." Either everything is sacred, or nothing is. Either everything is spiritual, or nothing is. Either everything is religion, or nothing is. It is ONE LIFE, and what we are talking about is oneness IN that life. To see all the world as a whole. The whole universe is my body.

If your religion stops in the bedroom or in the bathroom, or in the corporate board room, it isn't a religion that can be taken seriously as pertaining to the whole of existence, because obviously by your actions you show your truth. You believe it does not pertain in those places. Pardon the language, but when I go to the bathroom and take a dump, either that is part of my spiritual practice or I don't really have one. Not one that pertains to everything. And if it does not pertain to everything but only what you WANT it to pertain to, how should we take that seriously? We shouldn't.

Nothing to me shows our schizophrenic spiritual state like our attitude towards food and the growing of it. Of course, there are unfortunate people in the world who think that food is a product of factories and technology, and who have no idea of the bodies of the plants or animals that actually produce and store that food so that our factories can have their way with them. Even people who know where food comes from usually will not find any particular spiritual significance to the way that their bodies gain the wherewithal to continue existing. Does nobody besides me find that peculiar? The very fundaments of our existence, THAT we consider profane and worthy of no consideration, beneath our consideration, but the philosophies and dogmas in our heads or the gods in the sky we pay our attention to, we consider those important??

And of course, what we are doing to the planet reflects our conceits, that the down-to-earth and real is of no consequence, but the vain ideas in our heads are all that are important. Our religions and philosophies we entrust to priests and other experts who are genuinely supposed to be working for our benefit, whereas the life of the planet and the sources of our food we entrust to capitalists who patently have no motive but profit? What madness is this? Is it not completely clear that corporate agriculture and the corporate food industry have no financial motivation to make our food actually better for us or better for the planet, and every motive to make food cheaper, more addictive, and to make it with fewer extraneous concerns like the condition of the soil or the waterways or the air? After all, they aren't in the life business, they are in the money business. Pollution costs them nothing to make. The soil, to them, is just a preferably sterile medium in which petrochemicals of various sorts are inputs and "food" is the output. Water is simply the medium which exports their wastes to the rivers and ocean so that they don't drown in their own filth. Air is simply the medium which whisks their sprayed poisons away so that they don't become a Superfund cleanup site. Which otherwise they assuredly would become. Our system oppresses the lives of animals in the most despicable kind of slavery so that their costs to produce cows or chickens or pigs are lower. This indeed is the religion that many subscribe to, whatever words come out of their mouths. Oppression of the living in service to the dead. Oppression of the living in service to that which never lived and never could. Oppression of the living in the name of Capital and Progress and "Jobs". 

Most of my ancestors for the last 700 years or so were almost certainly oppressors of one sort or another, and they followed the Cross and abstract religion. Some may have run slave ships while reading the Bible to tell them how to be free. I know of some who were thieves and brigands and warriors. Some participated in the Civil War, on the losing side, that the practice of keeping some people as property for other people might continue.

I follow closer to the ways of other ancestors however, the ones who were here in this place for as long as anyone was here on this continent at all. Turtle Island, my home. North America. 

The ones who called the land sacred, the waters sacred, who asked forgiveness for the slaying of an animal for food. I am sure that they could be as bloodthirsty and as thoughtless as my European ancestors in their own ways, these are common human traits, but if they didn't do better at least they should have known better. The land is sacred. The land is everything, we are merely passing through it, we are not higher or better than it. It is higher than us. More important. Eating is sacred, the corn is sacred, water is sacred, air is sacred, just as much as dreaming or thinking or the ingenious inventions of our brains are. All are, or none are. It is only our blind arrogance that we think we can lift ourselves above the network of living things. 

I have been gardening seriously this year for the first time in my life, and there is nothing that has taught me the connections between all living things better. I love my plants, sincerely, and they and I are really part of one extended body. They produce some of the food I eat, and then I pee some of those nutrients out, and I save that pee and use it to fertilize them again (diluted fermented urine is a superior fertilizer) so they grow bigger and produce more food in a mutually reinforcing cycle that lifts up all the life which the plants and myself are entwined with. So my peeing is sacred too in its own way, just as my eating is, just as their lives are and my life is. As the land is, which we are both a part of. Not abstractly, not as an intellectual idea. Physically, chemically, emotionally, electrically even, really, we are connected. We are connected through the Sun, which powers all life; through the air, which they and I both breathe; through the soil, which I feed through my labors and which then feeds the plants and then me. We are connected through the waters, which make up most of their bodies and mine. We are one extended body, and I am part of the extended body of all that exists, the Universe, the stars now shining and the ones that exploded aeons ago to build the carbon and the oxygen and calcium that the plants and I both need to live.

All or nothing. You must include everything. You show by your actions whether your religion is a conceit in your head or your connection to the Cosmos. I see this connection in what people think of as the most mundane things. A drink of water. A bite of a tomato. All or nothing. You care about the whole world, or about nothing, and isn't care, love, what we really mean when we say we revere what is holy? To say that something is holy is to say that you love it. You can either love the world or not. In actual reality, you don't get to pick and choose. You cannot love yourself and hate the means by which you are sustained. Hatred of nature is hatred of self.

All is spiritual, or nothing is. 

The Ocean

A Fool went to the seashore and scooped up a bucket of seawater and proclaimed proudly, "I have caught the ocean!"

The Ocean said, "You have not caught the ocean, you have only caught a bucket of seawater, and only for the moment. Eventually the water will evaporate or the bucket will decay and the water will return to the Sea. No matter how many buckets you fill, you will not put the Ocean in them."

The Fool said, "How then can I ever know the Ocean if I cannot catch it?"

The Ocean looked at the bucket of seawater. "Your catching is always finite, but what you seek to catch is infinite. In the same way, no matter how wise you become, your wisdom will always be finite, but your foolishness will always be infinite."

The Fool dropped the bucket and the seawater sloshed back out to sea. "How then can I know anything?" he cried. 

"Look at the wave washing in at your feet," the Ocean said, and the Fool did so. The wave washed in and around his feet and back out again. 

"That wave is part of Me, and every wave is part of the whole Ocean," the Ocean said. 

"So?" the Fool replied.

"And you are part of Mankind and every man is, and Mankind is part of the world and everything else is," the Ocean said.

"So?" the Fool replied.

"So you start by looking at what is at your own feet, like that wave, and in that way you can come to know better what the whole is. You can travel the whole world to vainly try to understand the whole world, or you can start by looking at what your feet are standing on. It's the same world. You can understand much of the world without leaving your own garden, and you can understand much of the ocean by seeing the waves at your feet. Do not seek to understand everything, it is beyond you. It is also all around you, right now, and you yourself in fact are part of it. So attend to what you see and hear and feel, attend to what is under your own feet, and let the Ocean be the Ocean. You are immersed in it, you are part of it, but you will never conquer it."

"I do not understand," the Fool said.

"Now you are getting it," The Ocean said.

Changing Focus

For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 

but when completeness comes, what is in

part disappears. When I was a child, I talked

like a child, I thought like a child. When I became

a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror;

then we shall see face to face.

-1 Corinthians 13:9-12

Before one really knows their "God" one knows the symbols for God, and they take those symbols as the reality. And really, people don't often take it much further than that, because going any further would require them to give certain things up that they don't want to give up. It is like someone who lives in a shed. He paints flowers on the dark wooden walls of his shed and uses broken mirrors to shed light on his false flowers from the shafts of light that filter down from the broken-down roof, but there is a whole real garden right outside the shed door. He doesn't want to go out there though, he doesn't really want to give up the darkness and mustiness of his shed. And he genuinely would have to give some things up. 

There is a great deal of pain you have to open yourself up to, to open that shed door. So he stays inside and paint flowers instead. Symbols of the real thing.

As anyone who has read some of my other blogs from the past would know, I used to be a Christian, and one of the most valuable insights I ever had as a Christian was when I fully understood that I was far too selfish to ever live out a tenth of the love that I felt the New Testament was calling me to. I felt I was physiologically incapable of doing that. It is like asking a stone to become a bird, there is no pathway for the one to become the other. I did not understand any way for that to become possible. I was firmly in the shed, and did not even see the door.

Of course I am not a Christian now. I am an "animist," but that is only a word. It is a metaphor, for a non-metaphoric reality that I am not sure I can ever adequately explain. 

What is communication, and what is love? Is it not a sort of going-outside-oneself to the other? Our society takes the Self as the ironclad bedrock of each of our realities, a reality that you can never truly get outside of. Even the things we see and hear and touch, these are representations of reality in our minds according to conventional understanding. We never get outside the black box of our heads. But is that really true? Are we not connected always with that which is outside? 

The very substance of our bodies comes to us from outside and goes outside. We do not contain the same atoms we did when we were born, we are not like a piece of granite retaining the same crystalline structure over centuries. Our bodies are a river constantly taking things in and removing things. As an organic vegetable gardener I take in food from the plants, but nutrients also leave my body and go to the plants since I recycle my pee into plant food. We are a circle, the plants and I. We are part of one body. Atoms come into my body, leave, go into their bodies, leave, and come into my body again, and into the bodies of the other living things around here. Whatever might be going on inside my mind, that is the actual reality. 

This is what I am fumbling to explain: that this solipsistic black-box-in-your-head worldview is a choice, not an inviolate fact of your nature. That you can and really must find that shed door and start living as part of LIFE, not as only YOUR life. That you can and really should start thinking not as just a person, but.. and this sounds a little weird... you should start thinking as all the life around you. 

In other words, get out of the black box. Think and experience as one node in a whole network of living things. The lines of communication are not perfect, any more than love or communication are free from possible misunderstandings. You will assume things that aren't true, you will try to help and hurt instead sometimes. There is a learning curve. What I am saying is that the lines of communication are there, neglected and half-forgotten, but they are there, like an extended nervous system. You can open the shed door. You can get outside the shed. 

I sometimes talk of some things as gods or goddesses, Mother Water for instance. Mother Water is a goddess, but saying that gets you no closer to her. She also isn't a goddess, that is just one way of explaining my living connection to her, my respect and awe and love. Goddess is only a word. I call them my mothers and my fathers, my brothers and sisters, this says nothing except that I am connected to them in a fundamental way and there is no way I can explain that connection for you. Explaining does not connect you, it may just get you on the road to being connected, but it doesn't connect you. You and only you can do that, but you do not do it alone. You truly cannot reason your way from the solipsistic black-box self to this other connected self, you must simply reach out from the heart.

There is no substitute for this, and the lack of this and the lack of people who live this connection on a daily basis is responsible for so many troubles in our world. We live hate and isolation, not connection, and this hate and isolation poisons the whole planet. Poisons us, poisons the plant and animal life, poisons the seas. Our seas are poisoned with trash and chemicals, sure, but because we were poisoned with hate and isolation first. Our ground is poisoned with lead and mercury because our hearts were poisoned first. Our air is poisoned with carbon and acids and sulfur dioxide because our hearts and minds were poisoned first. Because we forgot that connection, we cut ourselves off from it. We are part of a living body, and we decided to go our own way. What happens in the body when some of your cells decide to secede from the rest? It's called cancer, and we have it. We are it. 

I don't know if I can make any of this make sense to you. I am trying the best I can. You just have to reach out in love to every living thing, no matter how apparently humble. Think an ecosystem's thoughts. You can change focus from only yourself to everything around you, live and think as both yourself and everything around you, and by extension live and think as part of the whole planet and the whole universe. You aren't just an isolated self in the black box of your mind. You are part of the cosmos, and that cosmos is inside you and outside you.

Vine & Fig Tree

"Everyone will sit under their own vine,

and under their own fig tree,

and no one will make them afraid."

-Micah 4:4

Two things are as clear as diamond to me. One, that it is altogether practical for individuals to live in a primarily self-sufficient, productive (in real terms, not what our culture calls 'productivity'), and ecologically sane way of life that gives benefit both to the natural world and people, and two, that practically every social, political and economic structure in this society works against people actually doing that. Why is that?

Our society is based on zero-sum interactions. More for me, essentially, means less for you. There is only one pie and it is all a matter of how you slice it up, and some get more and some don't. Given that worldview, there is absolutely no incentive to consider things from the point of view of whole communities or an ecosystem. The easiest way that we see these zero-sum games played out is in our interactions with the environment, where we despoil that environment to seize its riches. Strip mining or cutting old-growth forests or in any of innumerable other ways, we view the only possible scenario as a win for us means a loss for nature. 

However, this zero-sum game also plays out in human interactions, where each individual (and group such as a corporation) sees no reason to look out for the interests of the whole because of the belief that this would mean less for them. Almost every social, political and economic process in our society is based on a zero-sum worldview, almost the only notable exceptions being matters of love or family. There is no incentive for looking out for the whole, because it is simply viewed as a matter of who gets more and who gets less, and everyone wants to get more of course. It takes no great conspiracy theory to explain the myriad systems that are arrayed against the real interests of the individual and communities and the ecological community: it is a symptom of a disease that exists in all our minds to one degree or another. It is a kind of meme, an intellectual virus. In times past, this virus no doubt conferred some reproductive advantage. Now it threatens all of us. It does not merely threaten us in the form of ecological damage, but also degrades our own lives and interactions with others in innumerable quiet insidious ways every day. Millions or billions of people find themselves unable to live a wholesome natural life as an organism, as a living being on this world, and must continually fight a human system designed to make them lose in order to even survive. They have no modicum of security in life, no connection with nature, none of the rhythms of nature in their life and are utterly dependent on the zero-sum cannibalistic human system in order to continue existing. And existing is the right word, it is hardly living. 

On a small scale, there are all kinds of zero-sum interactions in nature too. The leopard eats the gazelle: that is a zero-sum interaction. Leopard wins, gazelle loses. We are used to thinking of ourselves as predators, that may be one reason why zero-sum interactions became so predominant in our culture. There are also non-zero-sum interactions, which can be positive (win-win) or negative (lose-lose). We are in fact as a species engaging in a massive non-zero-sum interaction with the world on a broad scale, in this case a lose-lose interaction. We are busy not only destroying the natural world but destroying ourselves as well. Ecocide. Everybody loses.

However, nature is also full of positive non-zero-sum interactions, positive synergies among communities of organisms which improve the conditions of life for all of them. Indeed, most of Nature's interactions are that way if you zoom out to a large enough scale. The death of the gazelle is a loss for him and a gain for the leopard, but also by weeding out weak, sick, unperceptive or otherwise inferior individuals it is a gain for the gazelle community as a whole that has its genetic pool strengthened thereby. The earthworm benefits from the dead leaves shed by plants, and in their guts and in the soil they form robust bacterial communities and open up the soil to air and moisture, which in turn benefits the plants. There are innumerable kinds of mutually beneficial relationships between plants, and between plants and fungi and plants and bacteria. We have a symbiotic relationship with many of the bacteria in our guts, legumes have a symbiotic relationship with the bacteria that allows them to fix nitrogen. The number of mutually beneficial relationships in nature are too innumerable to mention. We too can live lives that are either primarily zero-sum or primarily mutualistic, though primarily mutualistic lives among humans is probably pretty rare. Agriculture can be zero-sum or mutualistic, generally industrial agriculture is mostly zero-sum. The soil suffers, the genetic strength of the crops suffer, only we supposedly benefit, and that benefit in terms of non-toxic nutrition diminishes more and more. The overall nutrient content of our food has diminished in the last hundred years anywhere from 5% in certain fruits and vegetables to 40% or more in others.

We CAN use our knowledge to create food-producing ecosystems that are more diverse than natural ecosystems, more resistant to adverse conditions than natural ecosystems, and create more niches for more organisms, benefiting ourselves and the rest of the biotic community. We CAN have positive synergistic relationships with other organisms, benefiting them and us. We CAN move away from dependence on an erratic economic world for our survival, an unstable economic world which has no security, and create our own security through beneficial relationships with our environment. We CAN'T do that however if we retain our selfish zero-sum mentality. Our zero-sum mindset will only lead to more ecological destruction, more war, more starvation, more economic disruption, more human beings whose hearts and minds are so twisted by their unhealthy world that they become more like the creatures of our nightmares than real people. It is time to realize that more for Nature does mean more for us in the end.

Indigenous spiritual traditions emphasize the kinship of all living things. The deer, the tree, is your brother, not merely the means to your own ends. We have the knowledge to bring the ancient dreams of mutualistic relationships with living things to a level of fruition far beyond what these cultures could have dreamed of. We have the capability of creating relationships with nature which are vastly more productive, more secure, more diverse, and more beneficial to all organisms involved, than anything previously known. What we lack, is the heart and soul to actually do it. Our intellect is enlightened, our spirits are darker than ever. This is an age of profound spiritual darkness, and the effects of that darkness do not require any special mystical vision to see. Just look at what we do, that's all. Do we create beauty and happiness for all creatures, or do we create devastation, pollution, and death? Just look and see, there is nothing esoteric about it. It's about as abstract as a tumor.

Tar sands before and after.

In the book of Micah in the Old Testament, it describes a world where there is no need for war or disputes and every man will sit under his own vine and his own fig tree, be self-sufficient and live in peace. There is absolutely no physical reason why that cannot happen. The only reasons why that does not happen are to be found in the darkened depths of the human heart and spirit, the profound sickness within us.  

Control

A lingering sign of the 1969–71 Native American occupation of Alcatraz

It is a cardinal flaw of the human species that we are always arranging other lives to suit us. Other human lives, and the lives of other beings. We've done it all along and we are doing it now. Every human now living is both an end product of that control and also an instrument of it. We are a domesticated species ourselves, we are pets or livestock to our own machine. Part of the process of making the average man "useful" to rulers and the wealthy is to remove their self-sufficiency and make them dependent. In the factories of the 1700's, a man would have to work three days to be able to afford to buy shoes that his ancestors made themselves in a couple hours with their own leather. They would have to work to buy food that their ancestors grew for themselves. They would slave away to be able to afford a crackerbox to live in, when their ancestors and their neighbors built houses for themselves and each other. This is the process of making a man a slave: take away the physical means of his independence. That man can have "liberty" on paper all he likes, freedom of "ideas, speech and religion", but he is still a slave because he cannot now live without the commercial machine his own labor helped build. A machine controlled by others, or perhaps by itself now.

It is perhaps a symbol of how harmless and powerless the freedom of ideas, speech or religion are thought to be by those in power, that all of these things remain free to us. ;) Freedom of these things means very little if you don't have freedom of life. Freedom means little if you don't have control over the means of your own life. If someone puts you into a vacuum chamber and starts drawing out the air little by little, you can practice all the freedom of ideas, religion and speech that you want and you are still going to suffocate because you don't have the freedom you actually need. The powerful for their own part are also slaves, their minds and spirits are enslaved.

Of course, we do this in spades to the plants and animals we use for food. For plants, we have taken to playing god with their genetics so that we can rain more poisons on them. Many of the animals we use for food scarcely see the light of day, or any green growing thing. I have been thinking very seriously about getting a homestead, which I cannot at present do because I am taking care of my mother, but when I first started thinking seriously about such things I naturally assumed I would have chickens for eggs. Studying the matter, I discovered that there is no sustainable way to have chickens for eggs without involving the intentional deaths of chickens at some point in the process. Even if I only bought hens, those hens had brothers who were either killed at birth or who will be killed for chicken meat. Chickens don't only lay hens, they lay roosters too. If I were to raise chickens, I would not only be arranging their deaths to suit my purposes, I would be arranging their lives to suit my purposes too. Lives spent in one or another variety of incarceration.That's when I reluctantly decided I could live without eggs.

I have been thinking about this in the context of my garden vegetable plants. Most people would not consider this to be even an issue, which is either a comment on me or on them. I do not discount the lives of plants as most other people do. In fact I revere plants as my friends and teachers. I do not grow beets or radishes, even though I like them, because eating them entails the deaths of those plants in the prime of their lives. If you have a piece of land to grow your own food on, it is never actually necessary to kill a plant or animal in the prime of its life in order to eat. Eating seeds, yes, but not whole living otherwise healthy plants. You can pick leaves from lettuces and spinach and the like, you don't need to eat the whole plant. I do pick weeds to prevent them crowding out my plants, I also consider killing animals that try to eat your plants that you need for food to be legit too. Anyone may take a life if they are hungry enough and have few enough options, but one should try to avoid being in a situation where they have that few options. 

Again, not a question most people would ask themselves, but am I controlling to my garden plants? I do love them, genuinely. It is true that they wouldn't be where they are, growing as they are, without me. I consider the relationship to be one of cooperation, but they didn't really have a choice as to where they were planted. If they could choose, would they choose to be there? I would like to think that they would. I try to think of their interests as well as mine. Of course, for the most part we have interests in common: they want to grow and prosper, I want to help them do that.

This is my dream: to live in a way that provides the most benefit and least harm to the plants and animals and ecosystem around me, especially to the plants I rely upon for my food. To regard the plants I depend on as partners, and to treat their lives with respect.

I seek to not merely look out on the world as a selfish ego peering out from the windows of its eyes onto a world it can use for its own purposes, but to look out AS the world itself. The world looking upon itself and regarding all things and all interests as equal, and seeking the most benefit for the most beings. I and the plants are the same, my flesh is their flesh. We are part of one extended body, and the interests of that whole body must be regarded, not simply the interests of this one human. My eyes the eyes of the world looking at itself, my hands the hands of world helping itself.

I don't think this is a vain dream. I see it happening in fact in my own garden. My mostly peaceable kingdom of corn and beans and squash and melons and eggplants. We could make the world such a garden, the only thing lacking is the will and heart and love to do so, and to stop thinking that the world revolves around self-centered humans.

In a sense, it is far easier in many ways than what we are actually doing. 

Hopi blue corn in my garden.
Mother Corn, radiant beloved one, lend me your nourishment.