the holy hum
/
This year, Earth Day and the New Moon are riding close to one another, which seems fitting. We are now, more than ever, aware of the Earth’s call, but the New Moon phase echoes the darkness we feel as well. A New Moon phase is something like walking a familiar forest path at midnight: the darkness teases out sounds, experiences, and emotions we were unaware of when we traveled the path in the light of day. It’s a time to step tenderly but purposefully until we can see our way clearly again. We may feel things we didn’t expect, we may be frightened, or exhilarated, perhaps both at the same time.
It’s been nice to talk with some of you this week about this muddle of emotions, the pull we feel towards change, even the confusion we have about what to do next. No one knows the way. We are all children of the Earth born into the Machine-gods’ realm. How do we learn the language of our birthright again? How do we learn the steps that bring us into the dance?
Wendell Berry offers these thoughts in his essay, People, Land, and Community:
“…as [the mud daubers] trowel mud into their nest walls, [they] hum to it, or at it, communicating a vibration that makes it easier to work, thus mastering their material by a kind of song. Perhaps the hum of the mud dauber only activates that anciently perceived likeness between all creatures and the earth of which they are made. For as common wisdom holds, like speaks to like.”
What if the longing so many of us currently feel for change, the buzz in our chests that disturbs our peace with the status quo, is not a sense of dread, but the holy hum of our true home singing to us, like calling to like, pleading us back into our intended harmony? What if what we feel is the longing of Creation to bring us back?
Only beware…
“In a society addicted to facts and figures, anyone trying to speak for… harmony is inviting trouble. The first trouble is in trying to say what harmony is. It cannot be reduced to facts or figures - though the lack of it can. It is not very visibly a function.”
Part of the problem, Berry says, is that the things that are destructive to our world are systems that are easily explained and backed by information. Even though they make their gains by the oppression of ”nature, people, and culture”, they are surrounded by scientific reasoning and a sense of inevitability. A harmonic system, however, is not so easily explained.
“…it involves an order that in both magnitude and complexity is ultimately incomprehensible.”
Is it any wonder we are confused about what to do now? Our birthright is coherence with a complex system of mutual beneficence, wholeness, and health, yet we have only been taught the rhythms of dissonance. We are born into a system built on competition, where each decision, each tool used, has a logic that makes sense only on its own and takes into consideration only its own profit and success.
“Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information - so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers - because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious…that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another. Work is then understood to exploit the land, the people to exploit their work, the community to exploit its people. And then, instead of land, work, people, and community, we have the industrial categories of resources, labor, management, consumers, and government. We have exchanged harmony for an interminable fuss, and the work of culture for the timed and harried labor of an industrial economy.”
I fear the Problem of the Industrial Economy is only going to be solved by its inevitable collapse, but that’s not what I’m thinking about today. I’m thinking about how those of us who hear the hum can live in resonance with it (which is naturally in opposition to and in defiance of the Problem.) Last week a friend shared her happiness that with this unusual home-time she has been able to do so many things that she has wanted to do in terms of sustainable living, but she also feels a sense of dread knowing she won’t be able to maintain it when she returns to work. I understand that fully, and I want to offer more today than just an emotional invitation to join an inexplicable rhythm. I believe one reason we fail in these things is that we often take other people’s solutions and try to paste them onto our own lives. What we need is to understand our own place, our own resources, our own abilities. None of us alive now will completely escape the messy realities of our systems. We will have to compromise. We will create waste. We will have to decide which levels of exploitation we can live with. Our answers will not be easily explained or categorized, and they will not be universally applicable. We can only respond to our own situations with attentiveness and love. The important thing to remember is that we can respond.
Here are some ways to think, and some places to begin. I think they are accessible to most, if not all, of us.
Banner from The Far Woods, a couple of local artists whose Work I love.
We can simplify our diets to take advantage of our particular resources. It isn’t hard to learn what the farmers in our own regions are growing. Then a plan can be put in place to support them on whatever scale we can manage, from roadside stands to Farmer’s Markets, to u-picks, to bulk orders, to CSA’s, to looking for their produce in the regular grocery store.
We can examine our use of transportation to find the most energy-efficient and community-supportive means for us. It needn’t be all or nothing. Here at home, we cannot walk or ride straight from the house due to dangerous roads, so we drive to a parking lot a mile away and walk or ride from there when we can. My husband commutes to the city with an electric car and a bus pass. It’s not perfect, it’s what we can do.
We can turn off lights, turn down the heat, turn off screens, dry the clothes on a rack. At least sometimes. And that’s a start.
We can make our homes centers of production rather than centers of consumption. We can make birthday cards or poems or a loaf of bread or a pair of pants instead of paying others to do it for us every time.
We can support the land by community clean-ups, voting against exploitative laws and businesses, and asking businesses we have relationships with to use more sustainable means and methods.
We can reduce our reliance on convenience products by simplifying our wants. We can learn to snack on foods that don’t come in packages or boxes. We can take coffee and a water bottle from home. We can get out of the mindset that we deserve constant treats and make those things special and rare again.
We can make our spaces safe for pollinators and other creatures by refusing to use pesticides. We can grow flowers to feed them and food for ourselves, even if it is a single pot on the front step.
We can stop making so many online purchases. We can shop our local stores first and nurture a willingness to accept what is available to us rather than searching endlessly for the ideal product. By buying from a local store we can save local businesses, fossil fuels and trees, we can reduce plastic pollution, air pollution, and waste, wear and tear on the roadways from truck transportation, and our addiction to immediate gratification.
We can choose tools that are fit for our tasks and not disruptive of the natural order. A good broom, a mop bucket. Fountain pens over disposable pens (this is on my list to conquer!), cloth bags instead of plastic or paper, a good knife instead of a plethora of one-use gadgets, a pot of mint instead of a box of mint tea bags, a healthy lifestyle instead of a cabinet of pills.
We can hold simpler events. We can break up with Pinterest and decorate for these with natural and found items, make cooking and washing dishes part of the affair instead of relying on disposables, eschew favors and gifts that add to clutter, exchange gifts of pre-loved items and made things.
We can make peace with our faces and our hair and simplify our beauty products. A healthy diet and water are the best path to pretty skin and hair. Apple cider vinegar and baking soda can do a surprising number of jobs. We can keep the things we really want to keep (for me it’s cruelty-free mascara, lipstick, and a touch of powder when I go out) and let the rest go. We can stop worrying about trends and find a simple, classic haircut that is easy to maintain.
We can understand the true cost of the things we consume. Cheap chocolate is paid for on the backs of exploited people. The true cost of fairly-traded chocolate is expensive. The answer is to eat less, not buy cheaper. In the same way, budget meat is paid for by animals who suffer horrible lives and deaths, people who work in hellish conditions to butcher them, the land which is drained of fertility and poisoned, and government subsidies that promote it all. The electricity in my area is powered by dams that alter the rivers and damage endangered salmon populations and disrupt the rhythms of Native cultures. When we understand the actual price of what we are consuming so thoughtlessly, it can help us make better choices.
We can commit to going outside and learning the hum of our own place. The Earth wants to teach us her ways. We can watch the birds build and take advantage of the seasons, which teaches us what we can be doing at the same times; we can learn the weeds that grow in the sidewalk cracks and use many of them for nourishing teas or addition to our meals; we can re-learn how to handle changing temperatures and the feel of the weather on our skin. The more we listen and watch, the more discoveries we make, the more the rhythms become our own.
We can take inventory of our lives and time. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, we can choose one area at a time and ask ourselves how we could step out of the consumption cycle in our particular situations. We can make slow changes and take pleasure and pride in them.
I’m sure you have more and wiser things you could add to this list, but I offer this as a place to start.
This invitation to the holy hum is for all of us. It is not exclusive, it is not just for those who have time or money or health or off-grid cabins in the wilderness. It’s for all of us to join, in the ways we can. The more of us who do, the more we share, the louder the hum.
Happy Earth Day, my friends. <3
