Huzzah and Whatnot

 

2026 - Arg

Hello Friend,

The semester is officially over, and has been for a while. May slipped by in a slow drag of job applications, job rejections, and mostly, silence. I'm stuck in a bit of a weird in-between moment, right on the cusp of change, big change, Atlantic ocean-sized change. I think new scenery would do me good. Everything's been so green and wet recently, I feel like I'm composting into a mouldering pile of leaves and moss. I'm doing wonderfully, really. 

Sometimes I get a reprieve from the silence, like a Sunday spent at the Renaissance Festival, sweating like a roasted pig, dressed like a pirate, and eating pineapple softserve with my favorite company (my siblings). As is our bi-yearly tradition, we dress up and tramp around the fairgrounds all day, dancing to bagpipes and shouting huzzah. I feel lucky to have siblings who possess plenty of whimsy and no shame. 

The crew

But usually, these days, I can be found bent over scrubbing a toilet, spreading mulch, or vaulting trash into a dumpster tucked in between a woodline and horse pasture. Solitary jobs, mostly. I take lots of walks, and when my thoughts feel too stagnant to keep moving, I sit down and chip away at a twig or piece of bark. I watch ants, I watch a distant flock of geese graze. I watch the ospray, the kingfisher, and the heron. Usually, a pair of mourning doves coos somewhere behind me. Red-breasted robins hop around. This time of year, you can hear the little peeps of baby birds, and the boulstering song of parents trying to lure their fledglings out of comfortable, but small, nests. I recently ran into a lone coyote in the midday sun, right on the dam where I usually find their excrement. Then, a moment later, I found a turtle crossing the road. 

Baby Cardinal outside my window

Fledgling

Sometimes I think the most damaging thing the Christian religion has ever taught is that I am the image of God, and a goose is not. I think about the natural instinct to revolt against this idea, a child who asks their parent if Fido the pup will make it into heaven. Who doesn't look into the eyes of an animal and see a soul? The soul? Chickadees speak in language, so do whales. A bear has ways of knowing I will never possess. I have spectrometers and microscopes as ways of knowing, external extensions of myself, translations I labor over; the bear has its nose. Both are great. 

Similarly, the tree has its ways of knowing. Light, water, temperature, touch. It might not have a central nervous system (a brain), but it does have a matrix of roots, fungi, and microbes: the universal language of soil. My stomach speaks the same language. My ability to touch, to move, to interpret is dependent on the composition of my guts, like the dregs left in a cup; they tell my future, my trajectory. 

(There's a crow and a mockingbird having a standoff outside my window as I write) 

Who's to say trees don't think? Working with plants has shown me they very much have a will. People think of plants as benevolent, but sap burns and thorns are... a thing. Plants have the will to persist, and they exercise it even in death. Even when they're dried up and shrivelled, they'll fling their seed pods open to the world at the lightest touch, hoping to once again "be".  

We know that industrial livestock practices are cruel (or at least I hope we know), but people don't think enough about factory farming in general, what it means to blight the soil, to kill the stomach of the world, to poison its blood, and rip out its lungs. 

A few semesters ago, I had to read Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, which is where I first came across the phrase "the great chain of being". Again and again, throughout my literary studies, this phrase has haunted me, straight through the Middle Ages and into the Modern. This idea, religious in origin, that everything exists as a hierarchy. God, on top, man somewhere up there, and dirt at the very bottom. 

This hierarchy, the dominance of the human soul, bleeds from religion into science. Evolution molds itself within familiar grooves and becomes eugenics; there must be a distinction, a ranking between humans, and then again between humans and 'animals'. Good and bad become smart and stupid. Or even better, rich and poor. The hungriest and strongest wins (what does it really mean to win?). We exist purely as individuals; we are the smartest and strongest individuals; therefore, the world is ours to own and extract. We are not the soil; we exist above it, separate from it. We do not breathe air, we do not drink water, we sustain ourselves on power, which we call money, an invisible force, a God, which rules us all. Powerful men think like a cancer that believes itself separate from the body that cradles it. 

"For you are dust, and to dust you shall return" (Genesis 3:19)

My mother used to tell us a story, when we were younger, about a tree (likely an oak). Every day, she'd drive to work and admire the tree, its beauty and stature, but then it was struck by lightning (likely in a summer thunderstorm) and died. The community held a vigil for the oak, as it was aperently well loved, and my mother attended along with a guy friend. As she stood in the crowd, candle in hand, her friend said, "Beth, it's just a tree", and she thought, you're right, it's just a tree, and they left. She told this story as a lesson about idolatry. The oak was her idol, a piece of nature in which she had misplaced her adoration and worship, and God, being a jealous God, had smote it in retaliation. It was just a tree.

As a child, this story taught me a few things, namely that love is a destructive force. I thought that if I loved something too much, God would destroy it, and so as a preliminary measure, I decided to detach myself from the world, constantly worrying that I loved too much, too wrong. I'd give away books I loved too much. I felt guilty for every crush I ever had, for thinking about the person too much instead of thinking about God. But it's hard to withhold love, especially as a child who only knows what is natural. 

I remember one time a cardinal flew into our side door and died from the impact. I thought if I had enough faith, I could revive it; that's what I was told. So I prayed, and prayed. I wrapped it in a towel and breathed on it. Finally, I (also possibly Rome, but I can't fully remember) wandered into the woods and found a newly downed tree. It was still tall, even in its horizontal orientation, and I reached up and laid cardinal there as an offering, choosing to believe that God would revive it. If he cared enough to revive people, why not do a little miracle and let the bird live? It made sense to me as a child. 

"Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?" (Mathew 6:26)

Not even the staunchest of religious hierarchies could perminently disuade me from loving all things, from giving the devotion of my full attention to the world around me. It was a beautiful day when I could shirk off heaven and hell and finally find myself in the dirt, moving through the knowable unknowable. Curiosity and love, the constant need to be in and among things, watching with unentitled benevolence as somewhere beyond me a tree breathes and crows gather above to discuss their days. I love them; they are apart from me and a part of the same body. I love them; I do not own them, and am not above them. They owe me nothing; I owe them every ounce of gentleness I possess, that is what it means to be human. 

Alright, essay over. I'll leave it at that for today. 

With love and curiosity, 

Mary W. 

ps. Me in the stonks