Terratheism.com

Some people believe in God, and some do not.  I believe that it comes down to feelings.  I know people possessing great sensitivity to the aesthetics of the world around them. These people will sit to watch the sun redden against the red of barn and green-gold of evening summer pasture grass.  They will walk along a white sand beach grayed by gentle rain and quieted by the lapping of placid water.  How the land feels they will feel, and their contemplative humanity brings grace to the landscape.   But when you ask them how the land feels, they will answer without reference to any single presence gathering the moods of the many entities of the land into a single experience.  They feel the wholeness of the land, but it is a wholeness without personality, more akin to a stone or perhaps a tree.

By contrast, I feel a personality living within the land.  It is vague, haunting.  Often I can ignore it and often, for practical reasons, I do ignore it.  This vague personality will lie between the blades of the wind animated grass, almost like the rhythmic motion of sea water within which grow kelp forests.  It never helps to cut a blade of that grass.  I will feel this personality as a joyful sprite among my tall tomato plants, leaping it seems from summer-green leaf, to reddening fruit glistening in the sunlight like oversized jewels , and sometimes seemingly to merge itself with the streaming hot yellow sunlight itself as it cascades relentlessly upon my fields.  Is God light itself?  I don’t know, but I know that I picked those tomatoes and no one else picked any!

See the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin.

As a farmer who does feel this widespread personality lying within the wholeness of the land, my first thought about it always is, God doesn’t help much with the work.

Sometimes, when the work isn’t so heavy or pressing, I will try to get this land presence clearer in my head.  It feels like a living thing to me, so I open my toolbox of concepts for ‘living thing.’  I find that I’ve got notions of ‘dead things’, like stones, and then ‘living things’ like plants and animals.  Further rummaging around discloses to me that a ‘plant’ is a different kind of individual life form than is an ‘animal.’  In some respects, the real difference isn’t between ‘living’ and ‘dead’ but between ‘animal’ and all of the others.  Trees and rocks tend to stay in the same place, but animals not so much.

When I consider why ‘stone’ or ‘tree’ is a different kind of ‘wholeness’ than, say, an ‘animal,’ I immediately see that an animal has a personality animating its body.  Stones and trees do not appear to have a personality living within their bodies, sustained by their bodies.  But animals do; my body houses my personality. When I go to this rather abstract place, I always want to know what it feels like to be a cell in my body, with my personality also living within that body.  Surely the cells of my body feel my personality, surely my emotional life floods my body with my feelings just as the sun floods my fields each day with light.  The ‘mind-body’ connection is well-established now.

I wonder if we humans are like cells in some kind of body, the body of the land and, by extension, the body of everything.  Is there a personality residing in the body of everything, haunting the cosmos with its vast and inexplicable feelings?  Or is reality more like a stone or a tree, perhaps alive, but without any kind of cosmic consciousness. When I feel that presence upon my land, omnipresent, emotional, and not helping with a lick of my work, I suppose I am like a cell in the cosmic body which seems to feel a cosmic personality living its own life within the cosmic body.

Carl Sagan famously said, “we are the cosmos knowing itself.”  Sagan didn’t believe in God, and he makes an excellent spokesperson for the kind of spirituality an atheist might pursue.  If you don’t feel the presence of a cosmic personality, then intelligence becomes humanity’s unique offering to the world.   It is our job, as intelligent creatures rising from Earth’s goo of sugars and nucleic acids, to love the cosmos.  We have the responsibility to spread, throughout the universe, the feelings and the deeds of love for the whole of reality.   There isn’t any cosmic, loving personality out there doing this work for us.  If the meaning of life is to love, then we humans must find the meaning of life strictly within our own capacity to love intelligently, because there isn’t any intelligent love out there to guide or to help us.

I think of this position as the ‘no meaning in the world’ crowd.  You might call it secularism, you might call it humanism.  You might call it existentialism; certainly, Sartre and Camus take this position.  The labels are there, fine.  The point seems to be, humans are responsible for making their own meaning in the world.  The contrasting position is the standard answer of the various institutional, global religions.  With the exception of Buddhism, which is rather more like the ‘no meaning in the world’ position, all of the old institutional religions seem to agree that there is clearly a meaning in the world, and this meaning is the cosmic God.  Sometimes, this cosmic God stands outside the world – the general position of the Abrahamic tradition – and sometimes this God is the world – the general position of Hinduism.  But make no mistake, the meaning of human life is clearly this cosmic God in whose presence we humans find all of the love and inspiration we need.  I think of people who adopt this position as the ‘meaning clearly in the world’ crowd.

So we have these two options, the ‘no meaning in the world’ option, and the ‘clear meaning in the world’ option.  I’ve become suspicious of the two option choice.  As a vegetable farmer – actually, just as a person –  I find that the first two choices I try are usually both wrong.  For example,  I spend a lot of time killing weeds.  When I was a young farmer, I adopted the strategy of letting weeds grow.  I felt that I needed to plant rather than weed, and so everything I planted disappeared under vigorous, thick 4 foot stands of pigweed, lambsquarters, and velvet ear.  I knew the soil was good.  I quickly changed my strategy to one of killing every weed I could find, until my fields became antiseptically clean expanses of bare soil upon which seemed to float rows of vegetables.  The bare soil washed in the increasingly heavy rains of the Mid-Western summer.  So now I kill about 90% of the weeds; I kill some weeds, rather than all or none.  The crops grow better without the weed competition, but the few remaining weeds help to hold the soil.

When I apply my weed philosophy to the topic of meaning and to the feeling of a presence out there in the fields and in the world, I arrive at a position suiting my own experience:  not ‘no meaning in the world,’ not ‘clear meaning felt in the world,’ but rather ‘meaning vaguely felt.’  Vague applies to the nature of the meaning, and it applies to the location of the meaning.  I feel that there is meaning, and I feel that it seems to be ‘around’; the presence I feel dimly within the land is a place of meaning, and so, I feel, is there meaning within me.

For me, the land discloses a vague, emotionally massive presence, omnipresent, playful at times, brooding at other times, and not much concerned about the success or failure of human intentions.  I suppose I could call this presence ‘God’; I almost always do, anyway.  But the abstruse yet immense feeling of it fascinates me because I cannot well ignore it nor can I paste upon it the usual jejune notions and thus dismiss it.  What would a theology look like if it began with this land-feeling of some obscure and heavy presence, alien yet tangential to our humanity? Would it be like the God of the global religions?  Would the secularist point of view still stand in some respects?

My greatest pleasure as a farmer is to walk my land and just pay attention.  An appreciative presence is one gift to the land a farmer might give.  Theology, the land, and this ubiquitous occupant of my land, together circumscribe interesting territory; what might we find if we explore it a bit?

Here is a Gerard Manley Hopkin poem that really captures for me how Western culture has conceived the topic of ‘God and the World’ over the last two millennia.   It is called “Pied Beauty.”

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings’

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;

Praise him.

Hopkins cherishes the world around him.  He is not picking and choosing; Hopkins embraces the whole world.  He loves the world because it is multifarious, because it is fickle and freckled.  And this love for world arises from his grand sacramental vision of a creator God who changelessly fathers forth the changing world.  This is the ancient vision of God and the world, as our civilization has presented it since the Greeks.  I often feel that our Western sense of worldly engagement arises from this majestic and catholic presentation of a world charged with God’s supernatural artistry.

Still,  I hear a note of discord in this ancient vision.  Hopkins himself expresses this discord perfectly; “ with swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim, he fathers forth whose beauty is past change, praise him.”   How can a god whose beauty is past change, father forth such changing, such pied, beauty?  Doesn’t the artist herself change as she creates her dappled art?  Wouldn’t a god who had created the universe we know – earth and life and suffering and joy – be affected, be moved, be changed forever, by its creation?  The old unchanging God makes a perfection of its stolid nature.

But it is the perfection of Michaelangelo’s David:  static, objective.  Observers can go to Florence and take from David what they may, but no pilgrim of the arts will ever give to the statue of David anything at all.    David displays a perfection that can never enjoy anything the world might offer; it is a perfection that is as good as dead.

I came that you might have life, and life more abundantly

I want life more abundantly.  I want to love, and I want to be loved.  A dead perfection knows nothing of life, of abundance, of the giving and the receiving of love.  I search for a fuller perfection.  Might a fuller perfection be a perfect receiver of the world’s gifts as well as a perfect bestower of its own charms?    

I don’t feel an unchanging god on my land.  The entity I feel betwixt grass and tomato flowers possesses its own emotional life.  It responds; it reacts.  If this widespread personality is properly called God, then God has feelings.  God can change.  In fact, God can change because whatever happens in the world, is going to change God.  When I think of the idea behind ‘power,’ at first I respond with the sense of something which can impose its character upon other things.  The God of the religions is powerful because it imposed creation upon the formless void.  But, in that pulse of thrill which I can only understand as a moment of  deeper insight and fuller freedom, I see that ‘power’ can mean the infinite capacity to be impressed by creation.      There are some wonderful parts of the Tao Te Ching which capture for me this notion of sensitivity as a kind of power.   There is number 8, and in the Stephen Mitchell translation it goes thus:

the supreme good is like water,

which nourishes all things without trying to.

It is content with the low places that people disdain.

Thus it is like the Tao.

And later, in number 78

Nothing in the world is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,

Nothing can surpass it.

That’s how God feels to me.   God is not unchanging because God is receptive, pliable, sensitive.  If I want to compare God to the statue of David, then David would need to walk off of his dais.  David would feel irritable in the heat of the Italian summer, and enjoy gelato off the street.  He would smile at the bored tourists.  He would raise hell driving in the streets like every other driver I ever saw in Italy.  David would feel the world.  Now, that’s perfection.

The presence I feel on the land is like this animated David.  It has its own personality.   It both reacts to what is happening on the land, and bequeaths its own emotions to the land.  When I walk down the hill into the vegetable fields on summer mornings, I enter the land community.  The fat bumble bees drone among the reaching purple vetch flowers, the peppers ripen while hiding from the sun among dark leaves, the dog yelps again at some hissing leak in the irrigation system,  clouds fatten in the summer humidity, promising rain.  And there is me, the farmer, playing my own ecological role in the land community, the role of killer of weeds, provider of water.  There is how I feel about this land scene, feelings I sow upon the landscape as an old time farmer might throw wheat seed upon a fresh plowed field.  There is the dog with its feelings, and the bees and the peppers; the land becomes this orchestra of feeling.  And there is this feeling of a widespread personality, intelligent, appreciative, living its own life and responding to the activities of the bees and the peppers and the clouds and the farmer.  This felt presence for me is a part of the land; God is as ecological in character as anything else I know.

I grant that no study in ecosystem or community dynamics reveals God.  God does not hunt nor scavenge anymore than God harvests or cultivates.  God is felt, and only by some, I among that some.  So when I say that God is ecological in character, I am certainly not attempting to make an assertion of fact testable by the exacting methods of science nor by the rather artistic methods of farmers.  I am trying to resolve into some linguistic clarity, my feelings on the matter.  What are the concepts embedded in the welter of feeling, the feeling of this vague personality stretched about my land like the very air?   The concepts I find are interesting, because they don’t cohere entirely with the old ideas about God.  So I discover that the God I feel on the land isn’t a changeless perfection, but some kind of responsive creature, adapting, working, growing.   Adapting, working, growing, these are ecological terms.

I am aware that this land-feeling of God completely disappears when I leave the land.  If I travel to the city, I become blind, mute to this presence.  Why can I feel it on the land only? The traditional God exists everywhere.  Perhaps the God I feel is again less traditional, perhaps the loss of the sense of presence says something about me or my humanity rather than something about God, or perhaps both.   I am digging, like when I search excitedly for those first potatoes of each season, bright blues and reds emerging literally autochthonously.   But here I dig for concepts in the soil of my feelings, I dig for understanding within the dark earth of my emotions.

This kind of emotional excavation takes the method of imaginative contextualizing.  For example, I will imagine my farm dog, a young black lab, still a puppy really, innocent,  her pink tongue always hanging like wet laundry.  Farms are good for dogs; plenty of space, the scent of countless things a florid kaleidoscope and, there are many things to kill.   So in my mind I will take my poor hound, my mimesis of her including the thick aroma of rotted sun-kissed deer remains, and I will imaginatively place her in the city.  The dissonance, the sense of complete wrongness to the point of moral disturbance, strikes me at once.  Any creature includes its character of belongingness, the order of environment it needs to flourish.  Dogs, at least black labs, cannot flourish in cities, as far as I can conceive.  There are no woodchucks to kill, there are no meadows replete with ground squirrels.  Cities are such human landscapes there isn’t much ecological space for other species.  A dog can exist in a city – I have seen it – but a dog cannot express its ‘dogness’ to the fullest, in the city.

When I see dogs in the city, they don’t seem much like dogs so much as subdued, generic animals.  They cannot roam, sniff, run, or kill, according to their instincts.   Dogs are hunters and scavengers first and foremost, and city dogs cannot do much of either.  So much of the dog is missing.  But on a farm, I can enjoy the full worth of a dog; on a farm, ‘dogness’ blooms to its full potential.   A dog stinks of raccoon skat, a dog leaps over the 4 foot queen anne’s lace to kill rabbits, a dog sits under the tractor during the harvest, and snores in the tractor shade while the humans sweat in the summer sun for their living.

My mimetic relocations of our farm dog remind me that there are two feelings I can have about anything at all.  There is the feeling of the full worth of something – my enjoyment of my farm dog is my enjoyment of the full worth of the dog – and there is the feeling of partial worth – in this case, the subdued city dog.  The moral lesson is clear and it is ecological, too.  To feel the full worth of something, you must experience that something in its proper relations with everything else.  The experience of the full worth of something requires that something’s ecological context.

When I consider how much of the content of human experience, even in our cities and suburbs, is something alive or something natural, I realize at once the moral importance of the land.  The land is where we can feel the full worth of things.  ‘The land’ means the order of community in which the full worth of each member of that community is expressed and experienced.  I will say more about this observation later.

For now, I want to consider the logically prior question, how do I receive this experience of the full worth of something?  Granted, on the farm my dog can attain its full worth, but how am I able to feel it?  Ecological relations are complex and shifting; I cannot comprehend the full relations any one thing has with the rest of the land.  Even my dog, when she prances about my field pathways sniffing for ground squirrels, appears to me like a sliver of clarity dissolving into the fog of the full ecological reality.  How can I feel this ‘full worth’ of my dog, of anything, when I cannot possibly ever understand the relations giving rise to that full worth?

It matters so much, I think, that these experiences of ‘full worth’ are not continual, not regular, not predictable.  It is a feeling; how can I describe it?  I dig potatoes, my dog leaping in a nearby fallow field, catching, killing something.  We inhabit this land scene together, immersed in the heavy, moist sunlight of a summer day.  There is my feeling of the worth of my potatoes; I imagine the light, buttery flavor of a Carola, or the earthy aroma of an All-Blue.  My members will be pleased, I am pleased to feel successful, good at what I do.  This ‘feeling of potatoes’ is the feeling of what they give to me, of their worth to me.

But then, at times, another feeling illuminates me.  I must put down the pitchfork, I must stop and pay attention to the scene.  In these moments, it is wrong to say that I must ‘observe’ the scene, for I do not stand outside it, but participate in it.  I am one of Monet’s lilies, considering for a moment the grand circumstance of inhabiting a work of art.

This ‘paying attention’ is not an easy state for me.  I must stop working.  It is not wrong but vague, I believe, to say that I must surrender my ‘ego’ and see the moment in its fullness.  If ‘ego’ means that desire we have to view the world in terms of what value it gives to us, then yes, paying attention means surrendering the ego.  But it is vague to say we must become ‘egoless’ when we pay attention; the formulation is negative.   Paying attention is a positive state.  It is the desire for the world, to embrace it, to feel it all, to bring it into ourselves.  It is the desire to feel our belongingness in the world, which we can only feel if we open ourselves to the world as such.  This desire for the world-as-such and, thus, for the feeling of our belongingness, is every bit as passionate and erotic as sexual desire.  It is every bit as much ‘I’ centered, if not egocentric.

When I pay attention, when I can really do it,  instances of new feeling illuminate me.  There is this feeling of ‘worthiness as such’ or ‘worthiness to the world.’  The blue green broccoli lines feel not merely as ‘a successful crop’ protected by my ‘sturdy farm dog’ but as ‘the blue green broccoli immersed in summer sunlight among the checkered green fields supporting the play of a black puppy, all undulating gently underneath the vast and building cumulus clouds whose tops will reach into space where shine many suns warming many little worlds…’    The full worth of my dog presents itself to me for only a moment, as the feeling of that innocent soul whose play touches the stars.  The full worth of my broccoli presents itself to me also in a simultaneous moment, as one particular expression of the relentless urge of life to grow.

These feelings of the full worth of dog and broccoli do not disclose their origins, except for the very obvious disclosure that this ‘full worthiness’ does not come from me.    I, the farmer who has put down his pitchfork for the moment, am not the source of this feeling of worth.  It is given; it arises from the world itself.  The feeling of the worth of things is out there, in the world.

What makes it so utterly preposterous that I could be the source of this feeling of ‘worthiness-as-such’ is that the feeling arises from the belongingness of things in the world and to the world, and I am ridiculously incapable of comprehending all but the thinnest sliver of the world.  Yet there I stand in my potato field, with my fragmentary mind, and I feel in some vague way the massive presence of the world.    I feel this ‘full worthiness-in-belongingness-to-the-world’ as something forming out of the very mists of incomprehension. It is presented to me, it is a gift, for a moment.

The philosopher in me must reach conceptually to try to say something clear about the source of this feeling of worth.   I conclude that the land presence offers this gift.  It is the land presence that gives to me, in that moment in the potato field, the feeling of the full worth of the broccoli and of the dog.  The land presence is the only entity out there in field 2.9 who could give such a gift.  The land presence does pervade the whole scene; the land presence does experience the whole.  This land presence stretches past my fields, beyond the nearest hills of oak and maple framing my horizon, and reaches into space, to the stars.  It gives to me the gift of worth – my worth if I care to believe it -  and it discloses to anyone who would but pay attention the worthiness of every item of reality.  The land presence is also a cosmic presence.

How fortunate are you and I, that we get to be!  We who have wandered outside our individual desires, and have seen the world for what it is!  The land presence embraces the whole world, and it feels every part of it as belonging to reality.  We humans, we get to feel that feeling!  It is the ecological function of the land presence to display in any environment, the full worth of every item.  It is the ecological role of humanity to experience knowingly this full worth, and to act accordingly.  Morality is ecopoietic.

It is here that I believe my experience of the land presence makes contact with the God of love worshipped by so many.   My favorite line in the Christian Bible comes from 1 John (v. 7)

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God…for God is love

I see love as an ecological force.  It is easiest for me to see it through the commonality of reproduction.  We humans, for both joy and sorrow, so often mix love with sex.  It seems to be the case in other species, too.  There is a passion for the other, when any individual mates with another.  The passion may be one-sided, but it is there.  That other, for whom we feel so much passion, so much desire, that other we feel is worthy.   In the springtime, on the farm, when every living thing sings the lusty music of reproduction to the point that the very light quivers with its yearnings,  I walk amid my fields made young again and watch, over and over, living things bring into themselves some other whom they find worthy.  That is the meaning for love, from my farmer’s perspective.  Love means to feel some worth in another, and to bring into oneself, physically perhaps, but experientially most certainly, at least some of the qualities of that other.

By this definition, all experience is an act of love.  All of us, all living things, respond to the environment and become changed by it.  To have any kind of experience at all, means to feel the world around you in some way, and respond.  The land is a community because everything influences everything else.  There is influence because all things to some extent bring into themselves, some portion of the world.   There is influence because all things love each other to some extent.

When I stand in my orchard during the apple bloom, and hear the bees buzz furiously as they dive into blossom after blossom,  the buzzing becomes a very vibration in the air and in the light.  The light is like an aether, and I can perceive for a moment the gathering, the eating, the killing, the reproducing, the stretching toward the sun in growth, happening like an orchestra of life.  It is the orchestra of the land, and in its music, I realize that all influence, emotional influence, biological influence, physical influence down to the very microscopic forces of sub-atomic particles, all arise from instances of loving.  The orchestra of the land plays all spring and all summer its symphony of love as expressed by the creatures of Earth.

And in this land music, I hear a vague melody which I cannot describe by any words.  It is the land presence itself, and its feelings of love.  But these loving feelings, for me, arise above the din of self-centered passion, to sing of the worthiness of every item upon the land.  The robin egg fallen and crushed underfoot, receives its worth.  The broccoli transplant thrown aside by me, the farmer, to wilt unwanted by the side of the field, receives its worth.  The wastage and wreckage of Earthly life’s ruthless urge to grow, all receives its worth to the world.

I have witnessed pathetic scenes of waste and death and ill luck, and if I linger to pay attention, I will feel the resounding insistence that these pathetic little ones have worth in the world, have their belongingness, do contribute to the whole of reality.  The land presence loves in full these little ones, even as it loves in full also the stately burr oak and the grand tomato plant.   In this way, the land presences feels to me just like the God of love in 1 John.

A Religion of the Land

Farming is a lot about watching.  Before I became a farmer, I was another urban person, and I would drive through the countryside on the interstate, and in a flash of a moment I would see farmers in the fields, unmoving, as if they were put there, another prop in a pre-constructed rural scene.    And I did get the unmoving part right, if I misunderstood why.  The farmer isn’t moving because the farmer is watching, watching for weeds, watching for flowering, watching for fruiting, watching for animals and insects.  She stands Buddha-like, paying attention to the fullness of the moment in her fields.   The flash of experience granted to interstate drivers can only misunderstand the profundity of the farmer’s stillness.  She is taking in her land into herself, loving all of it.  She is the ecological self.

You see things happen when you stand still for a bit.  Farms look bucolic from the road, but things get more complicated among the vegetable rows.  There’s a lot of struggle, a lot of death, a lot of suffering, on a farm.  The community of life on the land isn’t a very peaceful one.

It makes me think, as a farmer.  It makes me think about my suffering, human suffering.  I have come to realize, after years of watching in the fields, unmoving, that I once believed that suffering and struggle were the specialty of the human world.  Out there, out in those pastoral green fields, I believed there was a peaceful world.   I believed once that this peaceful world somehow could redeem the suffering of the human world.  Maybe I thought it was a place of escape.  Maybe I took comfort in feeling that the wider world somehow knew the escape from suffering.  In the land, I once thought, was a kind of natural nirvana.

When I became a farmer, I stopped being a spectator of the land.  I joined the land.  My whole family joined.  We are all family now, the land and my human family.   Farming gave me a thinner waist, bigger muscles, darker skin, and a worsening back.  I expected those changes, wanted those changes.  But farming also changed me spiritually.  I came into much closer contact with the wider world, the natural world, the non-human world that surrounds and supports every human thing ever done.

And there is a lot suffering in that natural world, out there in the land.  The land isn’t peaceful;  it’s full of pain and suffering just like the human world.  I suppose I knew that.  I studied ecology; I knew about food webs and predator-prey cycles.  But I didn’t feel it.  I didn’t get the spiritual implications.   But cultivating broccoli and killing thousands of weeds,  seeing my farm dog kill and consume entire families of rabbits, watching my entire cabbage crop die slowly in cold, windy weather,   I realized that my spiritual habits needed to change.  I couldn’t feel at peace in the belief that out there, in the beauty of nature, there’s a place without suffering.

Farming in those first years was hard; I wasn’t good at it, and we didn’t have much money.  So I suffered, too.  When that cold late April wind killed my cabbage, I learned for the first time that my suffering and the suffering I saw on the land were entwined.  Becoming a farmer, I had exposed myself to the vagaries of the land’s ecosystem.  Again, at some level I’m sure I ‘knew’ this, but the feeling didn’t take until the cabbage died.  Standing there with the dead cabbages – once so green and lively! – I realized, too, that I had brought my suffering into the land.

I suffered, and while watching my fields, I also realized that there was no place to hope for, that excluded suffering.  I realized that the beauty and splendor of the land, which had drawn me from my urban life, was built upon suffering.  I realized that the spiritual journey couldn’t be a journey to a place without suffering, physical or psychological.   Farming taught me that I had two choices, nihilism or meaning-with-suffering.

I chose meaning-with-suffering.  The rest of this essay explains why I made that choice.  I’m not offering some kind of philosophical argument.  I’m not trying to show how irrational nihilism is, or how sensible it is to view life as a meaningful pursuit.  I know some very reasonable nihilists.  The issue isn’t about reasoning, understood as some process of thinking.  The issue is about feeling; how life feels to each of us.  Life feels meaningful to me because of the land.  But I had to stop believing that meaning begins when suffering ends, that meaning somehow means relief from suffering.  It doesn’t:  not on the land, anyway.  On the land suffering is a part of the meaning; without the suffering, the land isn’t as ecologically rich, isn’t as beautiful, isn’t as meaningful.

Bearing Witness

The land has its own character, its own order.  Scientists will name this order; it is the ‘ecosystem.’  Sometimes, to emphasize other aspects of the land, ecologists will say ‘community ecology.’  Aldo Leopold uses the phrase ‘biotic community,’ and he is clear that we humans must change our ways and become ‘plain members and citizens’ of the biotic community.

As an organic vegetable farmer, I strive to be a ‘plain member and citizen’ of the biotic community.  But I find that all of these terms – ecosystem, community ecology – they all leave me flat.  The concepts behind these terms do explain things that I see on the land, but these concepts do not point toward the feeling of living within the land.  What are the feelings?  What does the land feel like?  What does it feel like, to live with the land?

It feels wild, it feels poignant, to live with the land.  And the land itself, to me, feels ecstatic, enthused.   The land is a community, of course, but a community of what?  To say ‘of life’ is both to state the obvious and to beg the difficult question here.  What is life?  Why do living things make ‘communities’?    I can gather stones, and put them together, and I do not have a community.  But if I gather plants together, the insects come, and I do have a community.  If I add my gathered stones, they become a part of that community.

A farmer ‘grows food,’ sure, but not really.  You can grow food in a factory, you can grow food in a concrete paved greenhouse.  If we are going to connect the term ‘farmer’ with the ancient practice of agriculture, we cannot really call the production of factory raised food, and monoculture food, ‘farming.’  Farming means growing food on the land, with the land.  For the farmer, ‘growing food’ means weaving her life into a great tapestry of soil and rock and seed and cloud and insect.   That simple phrase, ‘growing food,’ points to intimacy between the farmer and the land.  There is a wildness to her work, because she grows her food with the land.  She encounters each day what is ecstatic, as she makes her livelihood.   There is no escaping it, out there in the wind and thunder and greening and  blossomings, this wildness, this ecstacy.

The farmer bears witness to the land, as she grows food with and within it.  Just recently, we had a frost in late May.  We always do, during the time when the strawberries blossom.  Frost is caprious.  The physics will say that the cold air sinks, and so the frost will settle in low spots.  My experience with frost says that there is more to the story, that the soil and the presence of weeds will also matter.  Unfortunately, there are not enough weeds in my strawberries this year.

Because the blossoms will die in the frost, I must go out and install special irrigation equipment to water my strawberry patch throughout the night.  The heat released from the freezing of the irrigation water, will warm and protect the strawberry blossoms.   I am always angry – cold, wet, with the white and sticky juice of plantain weed smeared on my hands – because each year the land tries to kill my strawberries, tries to take away a part of my livelihood .

It is a strange thing, to see the strawberry patch the next morning.  There is always brilliant sun the next morning, and the whole patch, now encased in ice, glitters and sparkles like a field of diamonds.  Blossoms have sagged to the ground under the weight, but inside the ice, they live.  They have survived the frost; my customers will have strawberries.  I always feel like the clever human, the technological species.  I am not angry now.  I feel validated; I have earned my right to be here, to walk within this sun-drenched scene.  I belong, I am a part of the scene, a part of the movements of life which must survive frost or die.  And I have survived because I have the signature virtue of survival; I know the land.

And as I walk back up to the house, my breath now visible in the strengthening morning light, I also realize that my knowing of the land is not the knowing of an outside observer.  The land is not an object to me; I do not have so-called ‘objective’ knowledge.  I know the land as one who lives within it; what I have is intimate knowledge.

So I bear witness to the land.   Carl Sagan once wrote, “we are the cosmos knowing itself.”  So it is with the land.  When I speak about the land, I am the land speaking itself.   I am no observer, but a participant, an ecological element,  and I cannot so much as report upon what I experience as I can advocate for what the land is, for what I am.  There is no neutrality.

Christians speak of the initial followers of Jesus, those who lived with him, as bearing witness.  They were not observers, either, but participants in the life of Jesus.  I bear witness to the land as they bore witness to the ministry of Jesus.  My voice advocates for the land, because the land is a revelation.  It is a constant, perpetual revelation.  Beauty, meaning, a reason for living – answers are there, in the land.

I don’t know if these answers are for everybody.  If you doubt the presence of meaning in life, or believe that we humans must create meaning rather than find it in the world, then the answers I hear in the land probably won’t work for you.  The land displays a wide beauty, and this beauty is the gathering of all that we do, we humans and all living things.  We humans must earn this meaning, yes, but we earn it by paying attention and thus by finding it.  The land creates meaning, and we humans find it.

And if you believe that meaning is found in some place where suffering ends, the land is no answer for you.  The land gathers the suffering of life, and the joys, and weaves its beauty out of both.  The land teaches me that without suffering, there is no meaning.

Wildness and Suffering

There is always the first cold day, the warning day, the day that reminds the tomatoes and the melons and the farmer that summer will end.  For the tomatoes and melons, it is the death warning.  Sometimes I imagine, while I walk among the tall tomatoes in September and that first cool northerly wind blows, that I can hear the vines whisper anxiously among themselves, “the insects speak of this time called winter, when the rain will freeze, and we will die.”

On the first cold day last year, I had to harvest tomatoes.  Tomato vines make a vigorous crop, growing high and wide to create walls of green, dotted with reddening fruit.  They are the signature vegetable crop of summer.  But on these first cold days they always lose that cheerful green which signals summer’s hospitality.  I realize how much the chalky blue sky of a hot summer day conditions the green of summer.  Today, when scuddy clouds filled with blues and greys and whites fill the sky, I can’t find that summer green, and the wonderful tang of tomato scent smells wrong, seems past.  The land warns me, too, of the death to come.

[J1]

Watching the low, grey mass of clouds move swiftly overhead, I feel a beauty emerge from the whole scene.  The tomatoes rattle in the wind, seemingly disturbed.  In the distance lie my apple trees, laden with fruit and bent with the breeze, seemingly in acceptance of the end time to come.  With a little luck, they will see the new spring of the next year.  A shaft of light pierces the ragged clouds and alights upon my fall broccoli, as if to investigate.  The broccoli lights up suddenly, all green and blue in mostly straight lines. Broccoli loves this kind of weather; it is glad for the end of the heat stress of summer.  Behind my view of the broccoli, in the far distance, other light shafts dance in the pasture grass, and the wind pushes and presses it unevenly, rolling unevenly atop the grass.   The summertime is gone from the land, and a more alien kind of beauty has taken its place, a beauty less about life and growth and more about light and sky and the moving shape of the land.

There is energy in this autumnal landscape, life and feelings.  There is purpose, and there are hopes.  But I do not understand it.  I am a farmer, and I understand the landscape of spring and summer, the time of warmth and growth and fruition.  On this first cold day, I contact the wintertime, and what it intends and wants is alien to my purposes.  All I understand is that wintertime will kill every plant I have husbanded.  All I understand is that winter will kill me, too, if I do not return regularly to my box of heat and stored food.  Whatever winter wants, it does not care about, or even notice, my interests.

So on these first cold days, I confront the alien nature of the land[J2] .  I am with the land in the spring and the summer, and the land is familiar to me then, full of rain and sun and heat and green.  Certainly there is capriciousness – it might hail, it will frost – but in the spring and summer there is a familiarity, a hospitableness to the land that lets me know that I belong, that my purposes express what the land more broadly wants to do.

This feeling of hospitableness to my purposes, this feeling of belonging with the land in the spring and summer, serve to make contact with my early observations about suffering.  Suffering is pain, suffering is loss – at least among humans and the sharper-witted animals, pain and loss is how we experience suffering.  But when I take a more philosophical slant, as I often do on that first cold day, I search for a meaning that embraces every member of the land.  I want to make sense of the onion plants destroyed by hail.  What of the worms tilled by my tractor, of the blight ridden tomato plant, of the cucumber blackened by frost?

I conclude that suffering is the failure of purpose.   The land is full of purposes: insects, soil microbes and worms, crops, weeds, chickens, the dog, even the hot compost pile by the barn, all express relentless purpose.  Ecologists look at the movement of energy in the land, they look at the dynamics of species populations in the land, but as a farmer I often wonder if the best definition of an ‘ecosystem’ is ‘the order of purposes.’  A June farm landscape is a welter of purposes, purposes ruthlessly wanted, purposes achieved, purposes frustrated.   If joy is the success of purpose,  and suffering is the failure of it, then the land is a cacophony of joy and suffering together.

The relative hospitableness of summer can seduce a farmer.  She may conclude that her clever efforts secured the season’s bounty.  Worse, she may conclude that the goddess presence haunting the land, favors her.    A cold September day reminds the farmer of the suffering inherent in the land’s way of being.  It is an existential message –  the meaning of life is not found in the success of your annual ambitions – and a religious challenge, too.  Because hail and frost may dim summer’s gentle complexion, because winter will come and kill everything,  the farmer confronts her suffering and the suffering of her fellow citizens of the land.  What is the worth of this suffering?  What is the point of it?

As a farmer, I must bear witness to this answer.  The point of the suffering is to help make the beauty of the land.  I say ‘bear witness’ because I see the land gather up the suffering into its beauty all the time.   I am not making an abstract point in the philosophy of beauty, or at least, I am not intending to do so.  I am witnessing.  What I have seen is not merely ‘ecological processes,’ but the revelation of religious truth.  Suffering is inescapable, suffering is meaningful, suffering creates beauty.

Once on a day in June we had some hard rain.  Almost three inches fell in less than hour, with hail and 60 mph winds.  Such rates of rainfall will cause the rain itself to bruise plants, as well as pulverize the top of the soil and create a brittle crust making seed germination difficult.  The hail shredded lettuce and spinach, and pitted my young apple fruits.  Afterwards, the sky cleared enough for the sun, low in northwestern sky, to appear through the storm clouds.  At once, warm and golden light flowed over my fields, the wet soil now black with a rich glow which I can only describe as ‘life.’  But quite frankly, this black hue, this tone of life – the soil had been so compacted by the hard rain that it almost reflected the light.  The compaction is very bad; I lost all of my newly seeded carrots.   But ah, my friends!, it gives a lovely light.

What is the feeling of this way of the land to gather the pain and create a greater beauty with it?  I bear witness to it, as a farmer, and I find a word for this feeling:  wildness.  Earth, the land, reality itself, these are wild things.  They are wild because they make their beauty out of pain and joy together.  [J3] That is what wildness means. The feeling of wildness is the feeling of confronting a way of things in which we belong, a way of things which, despite our belonging, offers our hopes no special concern, a way of things which yet gathers our joys and our sufferings with the joys and sufferings of everything and weaves this harvest of reality into the beauty of the land.

Glory be to God for dappled things….

My farm is a perpetual revelation of the meaningfulness of suffering.  My beautiful fields look beautiful because I have killed weeds, literally millions of them[J4] .  Once I lost a succession of early maturing broccoli to heat; the lovely yellow flowers charmed the landscape, and added to insect diversity, far more than broccoli could have done.  Another time, I tilled the land for peppers right before a big rainstorm.  I knew the storm was coming.  I should not have tilled the land then, and the rains came and washed the soil, and I lost soil and peppers in an ugly mess of mud and rivets.  A month later, the pile of mud that had once been my soil, sprouted glorious yellow mustard flowers.  I did not mow them down.

There is a poignancy to the land because it gathers up the suffering and the joy together.  This is wildness.  The feeling of wildness is like the feeling of a good family.  [J5] A good family gathers up the sufferings, and does not separate the sorrows of life from the joys.  Families share both, in whatever measures life demands.  There is a seamlessness between the land and a farm family.  The farm family brings the land into its home, and the farmhouse sits upon the land, as a part of its ecology.  It is art when we capture the image of a clean farmhouse upon the green fields of summer, and it is art when we capture the image of an abandoned farmhouse, the wood siding partially rotted, and bleached in the autumn light.

The land’s wildness gives me assurance that my failures are not meaningless, are not merely wreckage.  There is my wreckage, yes, but the land gathers what is wreckage, and builds anew.  And, so, upon my long dead pepper transplants bloom the yellow mustards.  My failures become threads in the ecological tapestry that make the beauty of the land.  In the land, I find the meaning of what I have done, for good or for ill.  The land redeems.

When I embrace this ecological redemption, I become fearless.  I do not fear the ugliness of failure.  I do not fear loss.  Of course I still feel fear.  If a tornado threatens, I still shelter what things I can, I still get the family in the basement.   I do not want the losses a tornado can bring:  the destruction, the death.  But I do not fear those losses, should they come.  The last tornado that missed my farm destroyed a small barn a few miles away.  It was a sad and beautiful thing, to see the family re-build, determined, somber.  The land makes beauty out of the destruction, and the pain and the loss are not meaningless.

The land teaches me that the pain we feel when we lose what we love, is a good and a beautiful thing to feel.  We must embrace that pain, for at times in our life with the land the way we are given to contribute is to contribute the painful part.  It is not less beautiful, it is not less of a gift to the universe, that it is the painful part.

There is a religion out there, in the spring tilled soil, and the rows of blue-green broccoli, and the drifts of winter snow.[J6] We are called to embrace reality, all of it, and we are called to embrace what is wild and free and unpredictable and dangerous.

There is harmony, there is perfection.  I’ve seen days in May on the farm, when we get everything planted, and then it rains a gentle half-inch.  That’s perfect.  I’ve seen family days that left us all filled with real pleasure at one another’s company.  It happens, this perfection.  But it doesn’t last.  Perfections rise up like snowdrops, they bloom for their time, and then they die.  The world is always making perfections, and then destroying them.   I don’t think life gets any better than that.

When I say that we are called by the land and the world around us to embrace reality, to embrace it all, it is this creating and destroying of perfections that we must embrace.  We must embrace joys and sorrows.  We must become wild like the land is wild.

Watch with me the snowflakes fall

and don’t go far but stand beside me in my warmth and I in yours too

(what are these bodies anyway but beginnings)

Watch the snowflakes me and you while they fill the world and

always filling worlds while we think about how worlds might be and how might worlds be

you can’t be scared always wanting your life if you really want to feel snowflakes, if you want to for no good reason just leave it all and stroll right out the door-

my how the obligations will stare-

into the swirl of snow and stand inside the body of everything.

But if you do you will be fearless. There will be no space at all.

the whole universe is snowflakes falling

so much motion that space hasn’t got any room at all and hides in books hoping the snow won’t smear the ink or wet the neat, dry pages

we’ve published to secure our loves all alone.

But aloneness just isn’t anything

It just isn’t anything at all there are snowflakes you stand in them and they pelt your face.

You have eyes, let them open!

But close your eyes and they will pelt you anyway.

The ice will hurt your open eyes and will always hurt them

While the snowflakes falling so persistently embracing the swells of land and dry grass and you too, standing, hearing togetherness at work, and what choice do you have?

Will you choose no snowflakes in the everywhereness of them?

So much snowflakes that

Standing still

With eyes shut

You can stick out your tongue

And taste them

I. Winter

Feng shui: now that’s a concept we’ve all perhaps heard about recently. I hear that people will try to create the right feng shui, or spiritual mood perhaps, in the rooms of their homes by rearranging, adding, eliminating various objects in the room, painting the room different colors, etc. It seems a fine thing to do, but a finer thing to me anyway would be to simply walk out the door and into sun and wind and clouds and air, where the colors of sky and light, the arrangements of tree and grass and drifts of snow, will overwhelm you with their evocation of feeling. The seasons are nature’s feng shui, and can be had by nearly anyone for, at most, the mere cost of throwing a coat upon your back.

But in the winter season, it seems we often just don’t want to throw that coat upon our backs. It is a bleak time: the days arrive short and grey, the landscape lifeless and icy, and the drifts of snow upon the cornfields do in fact resemble photos I’ve seen of portions of Mars. It is an otherworldly time; I have felt this alienness often myself in winter, as if the cold wind had stripped away the film of green life upon the world and now, the landscape laid bare to browns and whites and stick figures of trees.

This feeling of the stripping away of things, this removing of the green which is winter, brings forth in me a new awareness. It comes slowly, ponderously, as one might walk through deep snow, or work with cold fingers. The awareness is that perhaps I am seeing reality finally for the first time. The vast night sky, teeming with the light of worlds far away, descends close to the land; the cold of a winter’s night seems not so different from what the cold of space must be. I leave the warmth of my hearthstove to split dry red oak; in the dead-still cold air I catch the cherry and smoked-meat aroma of the wood, and the bizarre scent reminds me that I am glimpsing the innards of things, perceiving now, in the wintertime, what is always hidden from me. I walk our field pathways, or try anyway amid the drifts of deep snow, and exhausted I stand, hardly able to have gotten myself to this spot, this spot once so well-travelled and filled with conversation, tractor rumble, bird-call, but now lonely, silenced, grey.

But it is here that I hear the swish of falling snow, and looking up, see the so-many millions of fat snowflakes falling from nowhere, everywhere around me and upon my very tongue should I stick it out. I am hushed by what I was never meant to see, but have seen: the stars and galaxies themselves being born, the machinery of creation, there, in my snowy, winter-hushed tomato field.

So we see things in the wintertime, otherworldly things from our ordinary perspective, but real things. The mood of winter is the bringing to presentation of things usually not seen in the bustle of summery life. The ‘machinery of creation,’ for example: this is a winter vision which could only disturb me in my summer work.

The poet Robert Frost feels winter in this way, I warrant. Here is his great poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Death reveals itself to him in the snowy woods, death and the dim presence of some vague owner of the woods, in whose woods death works its own machinery. The snowy woods, too, seem strange to us – Frost’s poor horse “gives his harness bells a shake, to ask if there is some mistake” – yet Frost stops, enchanted, “the only other sound’s the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.” For he sees where his kept promises and traveled miles will end, in “woods fill[ed] up in snow.”

Frost’s disturbing vision – always the gift to those who would venture away from warm village lights holding the remnant promise of spring to come – also brings solace, for although our lives are snowflakes finally dropping into a silent wood, the woods “are lovely, dark, and deep.”

II. Freedom

A walk in winter woods is not a gay affair. It can feel a bit frightening; there is an almost overbearing silence in the winter woods, and this silence can evoke a feeling of emptiness. We humans, we are a social species, we don’t embrace emptiness. When emptiness confronts us, we are apt to fill it. We are free to fill it as we wish, I suppose, but I find that this act of filling is always an autobiographical process and compulsively so. I grew up in a Navy family so I moved every few years, and never had the close friendships which brighten and, as the years pass perhaps soften, the memories of childhood. So, during my winter walks into the grey woods, where the silence lays heavy in mist, I imagine companionship, intimate companionship, a companionship which I cannot escape, yet whose elusiveness bespeaks a strange and unhuman source. I often wonder if God is the creation of lonely children, and the refuge of those unnaturally isolated. To walk in the winter woods is to place a mirror before your soul; the chill, sparse quiet becomes the place of self-knowledge. In Wisconsin, a snowy grove of burr oak is our Bo Tree.

Robert Frost has been to this place, too, discovering his mortality in the sweep of snowflake but also discovering that, for now, he may leave the snowy woods, he may choose the village and ignore the mystic persuasion of snowy woods. “But I have promises to keep,” he says, “and miles to go before I sleep.” And so the loves of our lives pull us too, away from winter walks. We walk the winter paths, but one eye keeps always in view the warm firelight which leaves our windows and settles gently upon the new snow, waiting patiently, with calm vigilance calling us away from the swells of snowdrift and back to porch. Winter agitates us with this choice between the mystic snowy woods and the warm village woodstove. Sartre once wrote that humanity is condemned to be free, but we Wisconsinites have winter to tell us this.

In the springtime, it is obvious what to do – grow, grow, plant, plant; there isn’t time to choose, just move! Things are slow in winter; nothing moves but our own slow shuffle in deep snow, so time makes us look at the act of choosing. There is nothing like standing alone in some snowy field, the cold wind sharp and unyielding, to lay bare the mechanics of choice. Shall I stay, or shall I return home? I stand there, I grow cold; Frost stands there, too, to the agitation of his horse. How does Frost choose to move on, to the village? Why do I stand there, snowflakes melting on my nose, so cold even the dog leaves me for the house?

Choice is not merely some creatio ex nihilo. We choose for reasons, and to stand in the wintry presence of choice is to stand with whatever lightly taps our shivering shoulders, and says, it is more beautiful this way. Frost, in his poem, stands before both “the woods…lovely, dark, and deep,” and his “promises to keep”; how does he leave the woods, how does he perceive the greater beauty of his promises?

Beauty is not some intellectual exercise. The haunting colors of birch bark upon snow, against the steel-blue of a January evening: we do not decide that the birch-grove-upon-evening light is beautiful, no, the very birch-grove-upon-evening itself, the very event of it, possesses us. We are made to feel this way; the winter landscape itself creates what we are in that moment. Read Frost’s poem again; where is his own initiative? There isn’t any; there is just him being there, taken by the winter moment, telling him what it is. Frost’s poem expresses the winter message; before freedom, before we choose, we are chosen, we are created, we are product of our landscape.

III. Religion

It is discomforting, these winter discoveries; the self-knowledge brought by our winter wanderings reveals how created we are, how much we are the product of wood and wind, food and fire. Winter is the season for the solitary walk, because the stillness, the silence, the silver birch bark upon the grey-tinted snow, disclose that there is no real solitude. We are created by things every moment. To feel alone is not to feel like you are the only thing; to feel alone is to feel the formative presence of what lies behind the curtain of daily life.

Whitehead wrote that “religion is what a man does with his solitude”; and I say, religion is what a person does on a winter walk, what a person does with the vague, felt presences that create her. There is story found in the first book of the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. She recalls this story as told to her by her father one grey and dull winter Sunday, when the whole family could only sit in the little house and do quiet things. It is story about Laura’s grandfather, and in his time, Sunday was a day of sitting still on benches and studying the Bible. Well, the grandfather’s father, remembered as a forceful authority figure, falls asleep one sunny winter Sunday afternoon. Laura’s grandfather and his brothers slip out of the house, and go sledding. They have just built the sled, and they will ride it just once, just one hill, and then return home. An easy choice, perhaps, but they must be quiet, they must not shout. It is reported that the sled was well-built, the runners well-polished, and only the softest swish was made as the sled swiftly carried the boys down the steep, snow-laden hill. It would have worked, but for the pig which stepped in the way of the fast-moving sled about half-way down. The pig was not silent, the authoritarian father was awoken, and the boys paid for their profane use of sacred time. Such is the ancient connection of religious tradition with authority.

Yet I warrant from our meditations that religion is the rejection of authority. There can be self-knowledge only when we open ourselves to it; we do have to leave the house and chose to walk in those snowy woods. One thing I like so much about Wilders’ story is the courage those three children showed, to defy so forceful an authority just to play for a moment in the winter snow. We must be like that, if we want our own religion; we must walk out the door of home, office, or church, and walk among the free congregation of wood and wind and snow and sky.

These brave children also teach me how to finish my haunted winter walks. They play. Why can’t I do that? I accept that I will not rush out to play right away, as they do. It is the burden of adulthood to perceive the machinery of creation, to know it as such, and thus to stand there in the snowy field with the million snowflakes, and accept it or not. This conscious burden does not sit yet on the backs of children, who play in the world in an unchosen trust or mistrust. With the animals, it is always so.

I want to accept the world, I want to trust it. If the vague presences which haunt my winter walks create me, what else am I to do? They will make me, anyway. If I mistrust the world, I will also mistrust myself.

So I think I should play; if I play and go sledding, then I will trudge hard in the deep snow and feel that deep snow so much that I will be deep snow, I will race down that hill so fast that the cold wind will shock me and that cold wind will take up all of me. If I play in snow and wind and cold and wood, then I will be filled to overflowing with snow and wind and cold and wood, and I will for those playful moments fully know my creators. Our religion is what we fill ourselves up with when we play: sun, snow, rain, waves, children, god, lovers, soil. And I am so glad for winter, for the slowness and the greyness and the coldness of it, which slows me down, and cools me down, to see my own religion. It may be a religion of joy or pain – probably with us all it is some mixture of both – but at least now I know it.

.her bare belly cups the moonlight quietly flowing down

.resting there after the leap across space, curling now like a kitten

.above the warm brown skin rising and falling in procession,

.like gentle rain on a spring day the damp earthscent everywhere

…while whispers so gently the warm summery wind through the light curtains,

.the breath of sleeping fields

.reddening tomatoes and the melons slowly swelling like the very ocean

(and she dreams, too, her green eyes inward and her breasts are hills beyond which the

valley of her belly lies,

.seeing her brown belly bare within the falling moonlight, gathering it, working, hoping)

.there are no witnesses now.

.in the suspirant morning the light encompasses everything in bright mist

.the melon scent warm and sweet the tomatoes intense red and full

.there is laughter from the farmhouse, and this laughter plays outward in the morning

.mist

.descending upon the laden fields like a shower, descending upon Her.