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| 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".
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.
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.
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