Cucumbers in a Cup

It is an interesting time of year to be nine months pregnant. I am heavy with new life. So is the earth. Everywhere I turn, surfaces I see are sticking out, popping up, swelling forth. So is my belly.

The skin of my abdomen is taut and hard, yet yields to the touch and moves on its own accord, rocked by internal rhythms of its own beating and breathing. Dandelions poke. Violets unfold. Iris blades pierce the air.

The shell of winter is cracking, crumbling, shifting, and rearranging its pieces. Something else is coming forward in shape and shade, opening and being opened, seeing and being seen by the light of the sun. The bumps have different sizes—knee or hand, back or elbow.

Even so, as revelations shout forth, the mystery of it all only increases. I can no longer see the ground for the greening grass. Silvery leaves block my view of branches, bark, and the arc of a hill. What was so clear and reassuringly bare in winter recedes behind layers into depths.

Nor can I see what will become of what is appearing to me. I can see the life force in stems and petals, exposed and expressed. I can feel the pulse animating vessels and veins. I bear witness to beauty unfolding.

But what will happen to all these seeds? What will the story of each one be? Will it bend in the breeze or break with the snap of a dry twig? Will it unfurl in all its resplendence or disappear into the mouth of a bug? And what about the latest leaf on the LaMothe/Gee family tree—what will its story be?

Each bump and bang, each movement given, deepens the mystery. At this very moment I may know as much as I will ever know about this life inside of me.


The tomato seeds we planted a few weeks ago are now sprouts, some of them six inches tall. Following the directions, we put three seeds to a cup, prepared to “thin” the seedlings as needed. But thin is a devious word—a euphemism for kill. I find it devastating. Seeds that worked so hard to rupture their skins, emit roots, and reach for the sun must be mercilessly plucked by some hand of fate—mine—and left to die.

At first I waited. I just couldn’t face up to the task of playing eternal judge. I know it is good for the plants that remain to have a cup to themselves. Still. The plucked ones smell so good, so green, so worthy.

Then, as some plants grew faster than the others, the task seemed easier. For here was a clear reason, a definitive principle to apply: sacrifice the smaller. I am still stymied, however, when the plants are the same size. How do I separate twins? Each one has an equal claim. I just want to transplant one of them to another cup.
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It is a time of life, and a time of death. We know two people who have died in the past week: the ever-glowing mother of childhood friends, plucked by cancer. The twenty-two year old brother of friend, broken by a motorcycle accident. Life cut off too early.

What will my story be? What will the story of my children be?
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This child will be my fifth, and I still don’t know what it means to be a mother. With every birth, the answer seems farther away.

I moved here to the farm to be a mother, or so it seems. I was nine months pregnant, again. I was also here to be a dancer and a philosopher, and to create a way of living that would allow me to weave these three threads of my life so as to think thoughts differently, and think different thoughts.

One thing I had learned during my tenure in the academic world was to look for what was hidden by reason’s clearest revelations. So many tomes of western philosophy and theology—including my favorite books—were written by middle-class white men, educated and often single, cared for by mothers, sisters, servants, and sometimes wives, largely left alone to write. Their tracings of human experience can be luminous in shape and shade, expressing and exposing vital currents of life full and formed.

Even so, I found that each revelation deepened the mystery: how did this life become what it is? How did these thoughts emerge? Where were the wombs?

I wanted to write about this becoming—the bodily becoming that happens as a helpless infant unfolds into a thinking/feeling adult and learns to love. I wanted to hold our western traditions accountable to the rhythms of nurturing life.

I wanted to be a mother—to participate consciously in the process of bodies becoming who they are—and to allow this action to pull my thinking and dancing into new shapes and shades, new stories about what is possible. I wanted to be a mother in order to be a better philosopher—to expose and express what bodies know.

So we moved. So I wrote. Perhaps it should not surprise me. By accident and coincidence, it turns out that my first television interview about What a Body Knows will air on Mother’s Day. When I am nine months pregnant. Of course.
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I still haven’t thinned the tomato twins. I know I am going to have the same problem too, in another week or so, with the cucumbers. We planted cucumber seeds in cups to celebrate Eostre—the dawning of desire, its rupture into yearning, and the hard work and patience needed to tend its fruition. We planted two seeds to a cup. Each is growing. How am I to choose which should live and which should die? Who am I to write the sentence that spells life or death?

I am going to get some more cups.

Celebrating Eostre

We are waiting, as we have been for the past two weeks.

Jessica’s Jersey cow, Precious, is due to give birth—over due. At first, we were expecting a calf around March 25. Then we realized that we had misremembered the day the deed was done. Replacing the incorrect June 19 with June 25, we recalculated: back three months, forward five to seven days, and arrived at a new due date, April 1. We also realized that the “normal” gestational period for a Jersey can expand from 283 days to 291, taking us through the first week in April. Up to now.

So we are really ready!

Precious, however, seems to have other ideas.

Is she pregnant at all? It seems so. She has not come into heat regularly over the past nine months, and if you palpate her belly alongside her ribs, you can feel the lumps of what must be curled limbs. And they move.

On the other hand, her udder is still small—not yet bursting with the milk that her calf will need right out of the chute. The muscles of her tailbone have not yet sunk. She walks comfortably, munching the greening grass. As our farmer neighbor says: If she isn’t trying, nothing is wrong.

Is she waiting? Or is it just we humans who are drenched with anticipation?
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Sunday will be Easter, and I have been researching the pagan threads woven through this most important of Christian holidays. A spring celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection dates back to the second century, when it was primarily a ritual of baptism. Those seeking to join the Christian community would undergo a 40-day period of isolation, education, and prayer before being born again with the sun/son into the body of the church as a member. This ritual of new beginnings wasn’t called Easter, however.

The name Easter, or “Eostre,” dates to the seventh century, when Christian missionaries purportedly subsumed the spring celebrations of an Anglo Saxon goddess by the same name within their own Paschal rites. As Venerable Bead (679-735 BCE) writes, the month of April, or “Eostremonath,” was named after a goddess of fertility (think “estrus” and “estrogen”), spring, and the dawning of a day (think “east”). The newly-converted Anglo Saxon Christians, Bede claimed, were now borrowing this “time-honoured name” to describe the “joys of the new rite” the missionaries had introduced.

Whether or not there actually was such a goddess is difficult to verify through other means, though few suspect Bede of lying. What is clear is that the Christian missionaries to England had been instructed by their pope, Gregory, in a letter of 601 BCE, to allow the “heathens” to continue worshipping in their own temples and practicing their own rituals as long as those temples were purged of “idols” and those rituals redirected to the Christian God. Bede may be confirming, then, the continuation of pagan practices under the auspices of a spring celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, now named “Easter.”

There are no bunnies in the Bible. No colored eggs or hot cross buns. But there is evidence that Anglo Saxons considered the hare an exemplar and symbol of fertility; that they decorated and exchanged eggs in celebration of the vernal equinox (as did many cultures), and that crosses on sweet breads may have represented the horns of a bull honored—or sacrificed—in the name of a a god or goddess, like Eostre.
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We are not interested in sacrificing any bulls this Easter. (Come on, Precious! Give us a heifer!) But it is hard not to celebrate the new beginnings sprouting up around us. There is a sense of irresistible relief and joy that comes when the grip of cold breaks and new life peeks out from its hiding places.

At the same time, however, that joy is woven through with a sense of tremendous yearning for all the things yet to emerge. Spring is a time when desire wakes up—the sap runs, fluids flow, and we want what will be.

So what are we celebrating? And why?

We are celebrating the seeds. The return of desire, the return of hope and promise for what is not yet.

And we celebrate the seeds for there is work to be done. Hard work. We must plant and protect, warm and water, and watch vigilantly for signs of sickness. We must, in short, wait, and we will need all the good will and determination, all the patience and attention, that our celebration will stir in us.
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Perhaps it is fitting that my book, What a Body Knows, is out just now, on the eve of Eostre’s festival. For this book is all about desire—and about how we deal with our own. The book is not about “getting what you want” as much as it is about how we sense and respond to the sensations of longing that surface in us.

There is work to be done here, and it is the work of opening a sensory space where we can feel our desires, and welcome the feelings of frustration that so often signal their arrival as guiding us to move in ways that will align our pleasure and well being. It is the work of waiting for an impulse to move, and following it through.

We are waiting. Waiting for Precious to calve. Waiting for spring to come. Waiting for What a Body Knows to make its way into the world. Waiting to be born.

Perhaps we need to celebrate Easter so that we will have the energy and focus to wait for the harvest, the birth, the becoming. It will happen, we remind ourselves. It will happen. The spring we thought would never arrive has finally come, and so will the birth we desire.

Come on, Precious!