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.
*
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?
*
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.
*
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.

Back to the Farm

We aren’t waiting any more, at least, not for what we thought we were waiting. The vet stopped by last week to steer our bull calves and we had him examine our Jersey cow, Precious. The news stopped us in our tracks.

“No,” he announced, after reaching his plastic-gloved arm into her body up to his elbow, “she isn’t pregnant.” We all stood there, silent.

Of course Precious was pregnant! We had seen the signs! We had waited and hoped and planned and prepared—for nine months! We had believed! But no, the expert evidence was in: she wasn’t pregnant.

Jessica was visibly distressed. She wanted that calf. We all did. She wanted to name it, love it, and milk its mom.

The swelling presence, moments before, of what would be was now a gnawing absence of what might have been. We all felt the pain of thwarted desire.

April is the cruelest month.
*
I just returned from a conference at Syracuse University on the Politics of Love. Philosophers and theologians, a political theorist, an historian, and a psychoanalyst, from Europe and America, were gathered to ponder common questions. What is love? What is politics? Might we develop a politics that is guided by love? That expresses love? Or that at least encourages love among concerned parties? Are love and politics even compatible?

As the papers unfolded, participants discussed concepts of love (as union or separation, public or private, eros or agape, miracle or gift), practices of love (as reconciliation and forgiveness), and various critiques of love (as masking, justifying, and even requiring violence). The discussions were animated and provoking, even passionate. It was clear: these people love their work.

Still, it seemed to me that something was missing—something that I moved to the farm to find. What?

I moved to the farm to learn about love by living a life that would enable me to do so. Yet the conference discussion seemed to assume that love simply is—that we can know it when we see it, choose it when we want it, and apply it whenever to wherever we think it is needed.

Is it so easy to get into love, or get love into us? How does it happen? Do we fall in love, grow into love, erupt with love, or will ourselves to it? Is loving simply a matter of deciding and committing? Or rather, could it be a matter of learning to discern the wisdom in our desire?

Our ability to live in love, as I have come to believe, is a matter of cultivating a sensory awareness of the movements that are always already making us. It is what our bodies know.
*
The day after the vet visited, Precious was showing signs of heat for the first time in months. Perhaps it was his muscled arm that stimulated her sensory space of want. Regardless, it was obvious: she was wanting. She was popping up on Daisy and Dandelion, heedless of their common sex; and when Jordan did the heat-testing trick of jumping up on her back, she stood uncharacteristically still.

The sperm doctor we called arrived hours later in his semen-bearing white truck. This time around we chose a bull named Echo. “She has an extra curl in there,” he confirmed while administering the dose, slowly and steadily. “She might need a bull.” He told us of a prize-winning Jersey not far from here. “A few weeks with him,” he said, “should be enough to get things going.”

For Precious, getting life started is a job best left to mother nature. And a bull.
*
How do we get love started?

Love is a primal force. Yes, it can sometimes be irrational and destructive, but the fact is, we could not and would not exist without it. Love is essential for human life—not necessarily to start life, but at the very least, to keep it going. We are beneficiaries of love long before we can debate its merits, given the gift of being carried in the womb long before we can think what a gift might be.

For without a loving touch we cannot grow. Our brain cells will not fire. Sensations of openness and pleasure will not unfold to guide us along our way. Without attention from our caregivers, we cannot learn to create the relationships we need to support us in becoming who we are.

It is not that we receive all that we desire from our caregivers. We rarely do. But if we survive, we have received enough— enough to know we want more. Our sense of it is stimulated. We want more of that pleasure we feel when becoming who we are. More of that love.
*
Back on the farm, I remember. This is why we are here: to create the conditions in which love can thrive as the most important thing, horizon and guide of every moment. So too, this process is a bodily one. Love is sensory. We can think it and analyze it, but “love” is not what it is unless we also feel it, move with it, and allow it to move us.

We learn to love when we open the sensory spaces that allow us to respond to each moment in ways that create the mutually enabling relationships with ourselves, each other, and the world we need to thrive.

It is What a Body Knows.
*
Echo’s sperm weren’t able to surf the curl. It looks like we are going to need that bull.

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?
*
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.
*
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.
*
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!

THE BOOK...

.... IS HERE!

You can now find What a Body Knows on your favorite online bookselling site (like Amazon or Barnes & Noble), soon to be found at your local bookstore!




"I simply cannot praise the book enough! The prose is positively brilliant. It is full of sparkling gems of insight and astonishing, concise yet profound formulations. The nature passages remind me of Annie Dillard. It is truly a remarkable achievement!"
--Miranda Shaw, Ph.D., Professor of Religion, University of Richmond

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