t w e l v e
What I have been casting about for this evening through this odd and eclectic mix of image and poetry, psychology and soil science is the idea of a different sort of metric by which we might consider our lives. As a thought experiment, what if we were to think of our purpose in the expansive terms of the making of soul and the making of soil, of contributing in our own unique, humble, yet invaluable ways to the world’s supply of these two ineffable yet utterly essential underpinnings of life?
Gardeners know the satisfaction of building soil year after year, feeling its dark, moist, crumbling tilth. Can we utilize this image as a means of envisioning what the building of soul looks like, feels like, smells like? Try walking slowly around your front yard, your neighborhood, your grocery store even, paying attention to the smallest of details – the spores on the underside of a fern leaf, the spider repairing her web after a rain storm -- opening yourself to astonishment, telling about it with pen or paint brush or whatever means of poesis calls you. Can you feel with your imagination that tiny bit of soul soil being added back to the anima mundi, to the soul of the world?
We are living in a challenging time of uncertainty and accelerating breakdown, the breakdown of ecosystems and familiar climate patters, of social norms and constructive political discourse. Soil is only made through the process of breakdown, through the digestion of what came before in order to make available and hold on to nutrients, literally laying the groundwork for what may come.
Times like ours, times of dissolution, call for soul making on a vast scale, call for our attention and astonishment, call for the digestion of the events of life in order to transform them into the experience, humility, and wisdom that create fertile, soulful ground for subsequent generations. This means paying attention to the world’s beauty and wonder but most importantly to its pain. Buddhist monk and poet Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “What we most need to do is to hear within us the sound of the Earth crying.” To which Mary Oliver would then add, and “Tell about it.”
I want to leave us with a few final images, a few last seeds of the pomegranate. We are at an unsettled, unsettling juncture of human history. Fewer and fewer of us live in the same place for the duration of our lives, let along in the same ecological niche as our forebears. More than half of us live in cities, a shrinking fraction live on farms or in rural areas. Hundreds of millions of us will be displaced by fire and flood, draught and conflict. We are once again wanderers upon this earth. But in some ways, is this not a something of a return to our pre-agricultural state? Then as now the image of a life is less that of a tree rooted in place, but of a river, a migration, a journey. The apple, the pomum, is said to have accompanied human beings on their migrations from the central steps of Asia. Groves of apples began to line these migratory routes, another image of soul-making we can take with us. Or perhaps we remember Basho, who through his poetry created apple groves of the imagination along routes that we still follow and draw inspiration from. Or perhaps we may imagine our lives like the songlines of the Indigenous Australians, maps of song, story, and image that have woven soul into world and enabled their people to navigate vast, harsh terrain for tens of thousands of years.
Let us close by turning once more to that soul-making poet, Mary Oliver. Here is a poem many of you know, but let us listen to it again with fresh ears and view it once more through the lens of re-souling our world.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
