The Daily: 7 May 2024

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The Greenleaf Moon Goes Dark

Tomorrow begins the Flower Moon. There are actually flowers in my garden this year. In New Mexico, early May (and therefore Floralia and May Day) fell in a rather flowerless pause between the bulbs and the main bloom season. There were apple blossoms and sometimes roses, but not much else blooming during most Flower Moons.

But here in Vermont spring flowers are usually still blooming in May, sometimes just getting started. My garden is decorated with trilliums and spring glories and brunnera and so many bulbs — even daffodils still. The peach tree is just on the edge of full pink. The apple buds are beginning to open. It is flower season and it will last at least a moon cycle.

This is the time of year for faeries. So here is a stream of consciousness that erupted with the blossoms.

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Everything Gardens

The Greenleaf Moon goes dark tonight. It is time for the Flower Moon. So I am reading The School for Good and Evil and listening to Gary Stadler as I do my spring cleaning and generally thinking about the unseen and magic. It is faery season after all.

What I’m noticing in my old age is that none of these fairy tales are about faeries. They’re all about humans. Some maybe have powers. Some maybe get entangled with the Good Folk. But the Fae are rarely central characters. We never write about the more-than-human world from the perspective of the more-than-human world. It’s always reduced to reflections of the worst qualities of humans. Fascination with youth and eternity. Unlimited power. Selfishness and irresponsibility. Purity and Othering and blood lines. It’s all foul.

It’s certainly not nature spirits. Which probably ought to be far more… well… natural.

If there are nature spirits — and I think there must be if one believes in human spirits — then they are not human. Not like humans. Not reflections of humans. They don’t look, think, or feel as humans. They probably only have interest in humans as being the cause of destruction of their homes and lives. And yet notice that they are not malevolent (except in our fairy tales). They do not seek restitution from us. They do not inflict retribution. They retreat and ignore us to the best of their ability. They have the strongest cause to seek vengeance but they do not attack. To the contrary, they show us love. They give us life. They are part of us.

I am almost convinced that if there is a spirit world, then it is fairly undifferentiated, continuous, and interpenetrating — and probably greater than the perceivable world. I don’t believe that there are unique spirits, only Spirit, within and without all things. But even if you don’t accept that, a human spirit is not much like a human. For starters, a human spirit is not the human mind. (Nothing about the human is its mind. We are not records stored in brains. There is very little actually stored in a brain.) Humans are not minds clothed in bodies. We are bodies. Whole and interdependent organisms at all scales. Where does spirit reside in all the disparate beings that make up a human body? What of all the beings guiding our hearts and minds that are not human? Or that are nothing at all without connection to the whole organism? (Including the brain…) What is a spirit of this organism? Where does it end?

If there is spirit to this body, it is the sum of this body and probably includes such things as the food it requires, the air it breathes, the water it drinks, the sun that keeps it all warm enough to function. In other words, it doesn’t look, think, or behave as a human, this spirit thing. It is much like the Fae. It is Unseen and Unknown and utterly Unfamiliar. This might be why we don’t seem to have a reliable connection to spirit. The spirit that may or may not animate this body is nothing like this body. It is a compound organism that is interlaced with the all that makes up this body and feeds into this body, much of which we imagine is inferior to us and devoid of life or will (so how do we address it?). It is the ground of all being flowing from matter to matter to matter, maybe at times coalescing but not in forms we could recognize, so alien it is to our sensing bodies. If there are faeries, we wouldn’t know them, couldn’t know them. They are spirit. We don’t know how to know them. Just like we don’t know how to know spirit.

Faeries may be beautiful. Spirit is beautiful. But spirit may not look that way to us if we could see it. Certainly, spirit is not a beautiful, eternally youthful human wearing too little clothing. Spirit is not a fairy tale. Do you know why witches always go to the woods? It is not to sulk in hatred of human society. They go seeking out more-than-human society. They go where they are able to feel spirit, where they can craft a more-than-human being, where they can live in beauty that is greater than human imagination. They go to escape fairy tales.

But beauty is beside the point, I think. It is what we see. When I encounter the unseen, I do not see… This seems like tautology, except it is deeper than these words. I don’t have words for it. There aren’t human words, language being self-referential to humanity (though some languages are better at escaping anthropocentrism than English…). I have no words for the sensation, but my body can sense it, can feel it. There are senses in this body, unnamed and involuntary, that respond to what has no body. I do not see. I don’t know what it is that I am doing. But I am surely detecting, sensing something that has no form. It is a sense that comes from within me, a leaping up of something that is normally quiescent, maybe even deadened (probably necessarily so if I want to function in the human world). I feel stirred and aware and ready. Most of all I feel whole and connected, part of all around me. I feel a river of something that is everything moving through me.

This is why I believe spirit is undifferentiated and flowing. It wells up inside me and flows sll around me, enveloping me inside and out. It is not one thing, a Being Over-There. It is a resonance, a joy and love that sings in harmony with my world.

Bill Mollison famously said “Everything gardens”. I didn’t think much about this phrase as I was reading his books. But I came across the phrase standing alone as a book title (Everything Gardens and Other Stories: Growing Transition Culture by Luigi Russi) and, in that setting, my brain read those two words as a compound noun. I saw it as a garden of, and maybe for, everything. We have veg gardens, flower gardens, moon gardens. Why not everything gardens? And somehow that change made me chew on this phrase more and more until it gradually shifted to Mollison’s simple sentence in which everything is a noun and gardens is a verb. 

Everything gardens. Every thing gardens. That means every thing plans. Every thing thinks. Every thing knows. Every thing crafts and creates and cares and tends. Everything has desires and the agency to make dreams true. Everything may have spirit, may have something fae within its being. If you can accept that everything gardens, then it follows that everything is capable of considering and modifying its surroundings. It is considering you while you are considering it. It is aware. It has interiority. It has the means to alter its part of the world — maybe including you — to achieve its ends — which are not yours.

This thought of all things gardening everything gardens makes me wonder: why do we limit thought to humans? Is there anything in the material world that does not appear, does not seem, does not act like it has plans and the will and means to enact them? Does it not look like everything gardens? Moreover, do we see anything out there that is not seeing us gardening? And if so, why do we think we are the only beings that have any thought behind that regard? Because we have language? Because we have flexible words like gardens? Or is it because we can’t understand the language of trees and fungi? Of birds. Of our own animal companions — who all sure seem to be able to understand our spoken words. And since we can’t make sense of those non-human languages they can’t be languages? How dull we are…

And how contrary to everything we experience. We know when a bird is distressed. We can tell when she’s screaming in fear or anger. We can fairly accurately transcribe hummingbird as mostly special character words — a vast variety of variations on #$&@ you! And yet we say she is saying nothing, meaning that she is meaning nothing, that she is not expressing herself. Just a distress call, we say… Well, what is “Help!” And what is the difference between that and hummingbird words? (Apart from the, uh, color, that is…)

Who are we to say who thinks? Is it not far more likely that a being who has lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years has in that time developed means of interpreting and communicating experience? There are bristlecone pines that would have been seedlings in the days of our Neolithic ancestors. Has it never had a thought in all that time? We say that trees just are, that all things but humans just exist, no reference to time or self. But if that were true, how would the bristlecone pine count the days of winter? How would she exchange changing information with mycelia? How would she know when to slough off her old boughs? And why wouldn’t this ancient being not have her own thought-forms for rain and stars and sun and soil?

We say we are the only ones blessed — or cursed — with thought. But how unlikely is that! One very young species, one very young family of genera of species, none of which lives for more than a few decades, with much of that time spent in infancy and then senescence. This one ephemeral and infantile species is the only one to be thinking about all this? Takes far more suspension of disbelief than I have within me…

It is much easier to believe that the tree is regarding me in her slow and careful way. Or she is trying to ignore me and my penchant for digging and cutting and yanking up helpless seedlings. To her I am just another rodent to endure. (Those hairy things with legs are the worst… can we go back to the Mesozoic?) (And the thing about that imagined outburst… the tree has family stories that stretch back that far and some. She has memory of dinosaurs in her genetic line. Think on that for a moment…)

Mostly though I think trees love us, all unreasonably and undeservedly. They give us everything. They ask for nothing. Why would they not evolve toxins in their bark to keep us away? Why make fruit? Why make big, gorgeous, luscious fruit? Like peaches! Why not make cells that release poison gas when breached and suddenly exposed to air? Seems like a thing that plants might do. (What is urushiol, after all? I can’t even stand near poison ivy that has been crushed without getting a rash.) But no, trees love us. They need us. Well, maybe not humans specifically, but trees need animals, especially the hairy critters with fast metabolism that are constantly exhaling CO₂. We and trees, we are interdependent, we are an us, a whole. Trees seem to know that…

Why don’t we? Because we want to use the world. Because we want to take, dominate, rule, waste. We must be the only being who has these wants and feels the pain of our violence. We have to be especially thoughtful so we can be uniquely, thoughtlessly destructive.

What I don’t understand is why more people don’t wake up to trees. So many humans are lumped with the trees, after all, mindless bodies laid waste by the wants of a few. Why don’t we all see that everything gardens?

Enculturation can create all sorts of blindness, I suppose. That there is an Other at all is testament to the power of our stories. We can be made to believe anything. The more it conflicts with our lived experience, the more we’re likely to believe, it seems. How else to explain a fat white guy with a beard and a diaper who lives in the clouds and who on a bored Thursday offhandedly decided to create everything and then ignore most of it? (And then turned around and made a hell for most of his creation to suffer for eternity…) We believe that… We accept it as unquestionable truth. Yes, it feeds nicely into our desire to be special. It does meet a certain need… but still, we believe that. And there is literally NOTHING in our experienced lives that substantiates this nonsense. Nothing about that story at all makes sense. We have to erect all these supporting sensible stories to prop it up. Have you ever taught Sunday School? Believe it or not, I have. Do you know how difficult it is to get kids to swallow this story? I had to en-culture the heck out of those kids… and they still asked “But why?”

(Fun fact… my brother-in-law, who is now ordained, was in my Sunday School class… go figure…)

So if we can believe that, why can’t we decide to believe in something more sensible? Like the inspirited world. Like the thoughts of trees. Like the agency in all that is. Why don’t we call life divine and tell stories that celebrate that in all its miraculous, magical glory?

The interesting thing about fairy tale magic is that it decreases agency. It is not an accomplishment. It is not something done. It is an inborn trait, not something practiced and refined and perfected. It is not a work. It is not even that interesting. — Oh… so you have powers… cool, I guess — Having these stories talk about magic in terms of hand waving and escaping physics can be fun. I do like Quidditch… But framing magic as a way to get our wants with no effort or cost masks the miraculous things we actually do. We make magic. We make change. We transform, ourselves and the world around us. We live. We grow. We craft our lives. Waving a wand for make-believe instant gratification dims the glow of the achievement and power that is actually in us. It occludes the real magic of life. It negates spirit. It makes fairies tiny winged all-too-human girls.

The panentheists like St Francis got closest. God is in everything, but he’s bigger than everything. And who knows, maybe there was some preexistent agency that set creation in motion. But I doubt that being still exists. The one constant thing that we experience, that we see wherever we train our augmented eyes, is that being is change. Life is change. Life loves novelty (Look! I made a quasar!) Life is temporal. Nothing is eternal. Though there might be more of it out there beyond what we can see and experience and maybe even imagine. And it might be connected to everything in some unseen flowing spirited fashion.

I don’t know if life is a being or just the rule book. But life is what creates life. We’re the tools, the handmaidens, the stewards. And that living thing — the being or the rule — that is will. That is thought. That is agency. That is god.

And that divinity is in everything. At all scales. Everywhere. All the time. It is the Rule and the Being in everything. It is the dream, the desire, the will. It is the spirit and it is the maker. And with that life, that inspirited, magical being and rule, everything gardens. Growing everything gardens.

I believe in faeries… I just don’t see them in fairy tales. And maybe we should do something about that. 

A task for the Flower Moon…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024