A reposted blog that still feels pertinent …

It’s already October. Somehow October arrived before I even noticed that September had gone. So goes my slippery awareness of time and space. The changing seasons influence my awareness and energy levels (like troughs and crests of waves) even without my expressed perception. This shift from Summer to Fall heightens my awareness of the timeless shifts and play of polarities. They are recorded in the stories and myths our ancestors. Stories of light and dark, abundance and scarcity, pleasure and pain, feminine and masculine, sustainability and nourishment, Eros and Thanatos. Through the seeming magic of genetics and culture these stories and myths are as much a part of me as my awareness and energy.

This year’s Autumnal season seems to have arrived abruptly and my feelings quickly shifted from endless summer thoughts to being focused on exploring for my own life what sustainability and nourishment looks like. I’ve found myself dwelling on how our human ancestors developed traditions around harvests and stores for the coming months of fallowness. Their metaphors are powerful in reminding me of my need for personal practice. Autumn, known as a season of maturity verging on decline, is ripe with the metaphor of the dance of life and death, feminine and masculine. The ancients had plentiful stories of the deaths and resurrections of their metaphorical mother and her consort (the way cycling seasons affect food and shelter). The stories mirrored their relationship with the earth and with their constant pursuit of sustainability and nourishment. This season I find myself returning to the words of author M.F.K. Fisher as a guide with a lesson plan for personal practice:

“I cannot count the good people I know who, to my mind, would be even better if they bent their spirits to the study of their own hungers. There are too many of us, otherwise in proper focus, who feel an impatience for the demands of our bodies, and who try throughout our whole lives, none too successfully, to deafen ourselves to the voices of our various hungers. Some stuff the wax of religious solace in our ears. Others practice a Spartan if somewhat pretentious disinterest in the pleasures of the flesh, or pretend that if we do not admit our sensual delight in a ripe nectarine we are not guilty … of even that tiny lust! I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever-increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves.  Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.”

She wrote this as an addendum to her seminal work, How to Cook a Wolf. This was written in a time of major turbulence in our collective culture and society (1942). I’ve come to keep these words as a lesson for my personal practice; to truly re-member and cherish those moments of genuine humanity where I can emphatically know myself to be intentionally, mindfully indulging in the dignity and mutuality of nourishment. Her words remind me that we are all creatures of the flesh that need nourishments; not only those gastronomical nourishments but also nourishments of the eyes, the ears and the heart. In our current turbulent times to bend our collective spirits towards the study of our various hungers is probably more important than ever before. And this Autumn (Fall) represents a return to the season of sustainable nourishment in preparation for the coming winter season of scarcity. I’m grateful and thoughtful of what it means to practice nourishment in a dignified way.

I wonder what can I do to locate this semblance of sustainability and nourishment? Shall I look with curiosity, acceptance and compassion fully into my desires? Desire is elemental to our species around the globe. I believe to truly understand sustainability and nourishment we as a species need to find ways to embody these notions. Exploring embodiment is exploring desire and,  as M. F. K. Fisher suggested, is to get to know our hungers. This nourishment of our hungers is in my mind the best hope for our collective survival.

I’m also indebted to the teacher and author Paula Gunn Allen who I believe has described perfectly what is at the core of practice in the realms of embodiment, sustainability and nourishment. She describes the universality of the Great Mother metaphor in a way that is at once pragmatic and sublime. And when I read her words as a gender identified male of our species I’m reminded that I have an X chromosome too … that the nourishment of my body and our collective species is in dire need of more feminine balance in all our sustainability practices.

“What can we do, rejoicing and honoring, to show our respect? We can heal. We can cherish our bodies and honor them, sing Heya-hey to our flesh. We can cherish our being – our petulances and rages, our anguishes and griefs, our disabilities and strengths, our desires and passions, our pleasures and delights. We can, willingly and recognizing the fullness of her abundance, which includes scarcity and muchness, enter inside ourselves to seek and find her, who is our own dear body, our own dear flesh. For the body is not the dwelling place of the spirit – it is the spirit. It is not a tomb, it is life itself. And even as it withers and dies, it is born; even as it is renewed and reborn, it dies.

Think: How many times each day do you habitually deny and deprive her in your flesh, in your physicality? How often do you willfully prevent her from moving or resting, from eating or drinking what she requests, from eliminating wastes or taking breath? How many times do you order your body to produce enzymes and hormones to further your social image, your “identity,” your emotional comfort, regardless of your actual situation and hers? How many of her gifts do you spurn; how much of her abundance do you deny? How often do you interpret disease as wrong, suffering as abnormal, physical imperatives as troublesome, cravings as failures, deprivation and denial of appetite as the right thing to do? In how many ways do you refuse to experience your vulnerability, your frailty, your mortality? How often do you refuse these expressions of the life force of the Mother in your lovers, your friends, your society? How often do you find yourself interpreting sickness, weakness, aging, fatness, physical differences as pitiful, contemptible, avoidable, a violation of social norm and spiritual accomplishment? How much of your life is devoted to avoiding any and/or all of these? How much of her life is devoted to avoiding any and all of these?

The mortal body is a tree; it is holy in whatever condition; it is truth and myth because it has so many potential conditions; because of its possibilities, it is sacred and profane; most of all, it is your most precious talisman, your own connection to her. Healing the self means honoring and recognizing the body, accepting rather than denying all the turmoil its existence brings, welcoming the woes and anguish flesh is subject to, cherishing its multitudinous forms and seasons, its unfailing ability to know and be, to grow and wither, to live and die, to mutate, to change. Healing the self means committing ourselves to a wholehearted willingness to be what and how we are – beings frail and fragile, strong and passionate, neurotic and balanced, diseased and whole, partial and complete, stingy and generous, safe and dangerous, twisted and straight, storm-tossed and quiescent, bound and free.”

The Woman I Love Is a Planet; the Planet I Love Is a Tree,

Paula Gunn Allen

Reweaving the World: the Emergence of Ecofeminism. ed., Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990: 52-58Sa