Agri/Culture

Geoff and I are artists. We live on a farm. I am a dancer and philosopher, writing about weaning bull calves. Geoff is a musician, who fixes cattle fences. Art and farming. Culture and Agriculture. Are they at all related? What are we doing here?

I am asking these questions again, as I do from time to time, trying to make sense of it all. The impetus at the moment is our upcoming performance. Next weekend, February 27 & 28, Geoff and I are reviving Genesis, an original music and dance production that we first performed in 2001. Then I was six months pregnant with my third child, Kyra. Now I am pregnant with our fifth child, “who?" There is a lot going on.

Meanwhile, as I read the papers and look around, the scene is daunting. The economy is in various degrees of crumble, corrosion, and collapse. Anxieties run high; bank accounts run low. How can we ask people to come and see a music and dance performance? Why would I want to spend my precious time creating one? Why dance?

There is no better time than now. When change is afoot and uncertainty abounds, it is more important than ever to stay in touch with our freedom and nourish our capacity to respond to whatever befalls. The performing arts can help.

Take the case of Genesis. These ideas about art and life lie at its heart.

In the Hebrew Bible, “Genesis” is a story of creation. “Genesis” is one story of how it all began, told with metaphors and images that came long after. Reading, we imagine words over the water, the separation of light from dark, the forming and falling and farming of female and male, as they learn to give birth to themselves, each other, and their progeny. As the stories suggest, we have a lot to learn. Creation is an ongoing event, and we are participants in it.

The implications are huge: if we are participating in the ongoing act of creation, then how we move in every instant of every day matters. What are we creating? What other possibilities for movement exist?

Here is where art proves its worth. What we know as possible is what appears to us within the ranges of what we are able to sense; and art brings our senses to life. Practicing art and appreciating art can offer us experiences that help us grasp possibilities for thinking, feeling, and acting that were previously unknown to us. We can imagine possibilities for moving—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling—that we didn’t before. Our range of experiences shifts. We find ourselves with new resources for making sense of the way things are and can be, and for participating in the ongoing act of creation.

So too in our dance, Genesis. Genesis is a lone woman on stage, whose rounded belly is full of new life. Emerging into time and space, she embarks on a journey through familiar shapes of human experience. With her, we discover, enjoy, lose, pursue, mourn, despair, heal, and begin again. She reminds us: we too can move. We too are always moving. And when we can see it, sense it, and affirm it, we are inspired to do it--to make new movements, create new shapes of experience, and find our freedom. When engaged in our work, we can shuffle or hop, skip, run or dance. Which will it be?

Isn't this what farming is all about too--learning to participate fruitfully in the ongoing act of creation? Farming, like the arts, also brings our senses to life--and in particular, our sense of interdependence with the natural world. In order to farm, we must learn to notice and negotiate differences that would baffle an urban dweller; and we do so to align our energies with the creative work of earth becoming. Our lives depend upon it.

I remember. Geoff and I are here on the farm because we believe that art is vital in this way—humans need to do it and appreciate it in order to bring sense to life. Geoff and I are here to create arts and ideas that remain faithful to the earth and our bodies of earth.

One particularly cold, gray day last week, a local farmer handed me a couple of bags of the greens that he and his wife are now growing in their greenhouses. Each bag was a distinct mixture of shades and shapes, light to dark, round to oval, curly and branched. When he handed me the bag, I nearly gasped. I was struck by the enormity of the gift. Such vibrant living color on such a dull day! It was alive. It was a blessing.

I thanked him profusely for the lettuces. “There is no lettuce in there,” he replied. “Lettuces don’t go in until next week.” I have much to learn.

Genesis reminds us: we can learn. We can because we are all bodies moving, constantly learning to sense and respond and give birth to ourselves. We are all blooming with new life. We all participate in the ongoing work of creation.

Our hope is that people will leave the concert inspired and encouraged to do whatever they are doing in their lives with greater awareness of why it matters.

What am I creating? There is no better time to ask than now.

Why Religion?

Understanding is overrated.

A Jungian therapist said it to me once. She was referring to my desire to understand my pain. At first I was horrified. I mean, I was a scholar of religion, keen on perfecting my ability to understand everything about everything and everyone, including myself. The comment struck deep, and my edifice of ideas trembled.

So what is the value of understanding? Particularly when it comes to matters of the heart and spirit?
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The question brings us to the ghost haunting our discussions of desire for spirit up until now: religion. In western culture, we tend to think of “religion” as referring to a system of beliefs and practices shared by a self-identified community of people. (Thank you, Emile Durkheim, and others.) When we want to know about a person’s religion, we ask, “What do you believe?” The implication is that religion is about people’s beliefs—what they think is true and good and beautiful. The implication is that being a part of a religion is a matter of understanding. It is a matter of deciding to believe that what its authorities and documents and history teach is indeed an accurate representation of what is. Choose it or lose it.

Here lies the trouble. An accurate representation. When religions make claims about what is absolute, infinite, transcendent or just plain true, they are making claims that cannot be proved by standards of scientific reason. Yet, we still operate with a sense that we can and should make rational decisions about participating in our religions based on whether or not they are true. If they are true, we believe, they will work to make us happy. They will satisfy our desire for spirit. We will know who, how, why, and for what we are. We will understand why we suffer.

This situation presents our rational minds with a conundrum. How are we to make a rational choice concerning which picture of what lies beyond reason is the best and truest?
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The situation can be unnerving. Not only is so much—if not everything—at stake, but there are so many competing possibilities, all marketing to us their visions of how happy and saved and right we will be if we believe what they do. The sheer bounty of options can provoke despair. It seems easiest simply to stick with what is familiar, dabble in many, or reject all equally. Thus we avoid the problem of having to choose what, in the end, cannot be chosen.

Or can’t it? Perhaps, when it comes to religion, understanding is overrated. Perhaps the reason why religion endures in our hearts and minds and cultures (if we can call religion an “it”) is not that it provides us with explanations for our suffering or for the origins of creation. Perhaps what we choose when we choose religion is not an understanding of the world, but something else.

Perhaps the value of religion—its purpose and efficacy—lies in the way it helps us discover and exercise our human bodily capacity for making and becoming who we are; for bringing into being the world in which we want to live—a world we love that loves us.
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Think about the religions you know. Yes, there are beliefs—one god, no god, many gods. Life is now; life will be then. Life as we know it is to be embraced, or then again rejected. There are also practices—physical actions people make with their bodies in prayer and worship, in song, and sometimes dance. There are also communities—groups of people who gather together to share in the same beliefs and perform the same actions.

However, “religion” is not any one of these things. Nor is it a simple sum of the parts. Something more is at stake here and must be to explain its stubborn persistence in human lives, especially given a world that forces it to defend itself constantly.

Religion is about making movement. Religion describes patterns of sensation and response—a complex weave of physical, emotional, intellectual movements that spur us to discover our capacity to make these movements. When we sing out or bow deeply, when we mediate for hours or twist our bodies into novel shapes, we are discovering our capacity to do so. We are feeling the pleasure—or pain—of making movements that make us able to think and feel and act as we do.

And when the movements we find ourselves making are ones that release us into a sense of greater power—when they help us to a sense of ourselves as capable of making them—then that religion works. It succeeds. We believe in it, because we know that we are different because of it. The proof lies in ourselves. In who we are becoming as we make the movements it encourages. We like the world that opens in and around us as we feel like this, sing like this, act like this--and yes, think like this.

In this view, religion is not about a picture, practice, or community, as much as it is a training ground for helping us learn to discern, trust, and move with the wisdom in our desire for spirit.
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Religion is a vital and inevitable part of human living. For what we do in religion exercises the creative reach of our bodily becoming as no other dimension of our society. It engages our full sensory range in the act of naming and making real our most remote and intimate horizons. To expect from religion that it provide us with answers is to limit our sense of our own bodily becoming to a matter of understanding. We are much more.

In religion we dream our dreams. We envision the world as it is, would be, could be, and should be. And as we do, we make it so. We participate in creation. And it is when we participate actively, in ways that unfold our potential to do so, that we feel the sense of vitality, direction, and belonging that lets us know that life is worth living. Worth loving.
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I remember a moment when Jordan was four years old. I was having a difficult moment and just blurted out, “You know, sometimes life is hard. And when it is, you just have to love it. You just have to love life.”

Jordan paused for a moment and replied, ”Yes, you gotta love life, for if you don’t love life, it won’t love you back.”

Next Week: Using the cycle of breaths to discern wisdom in our desire for spirit