My Bones Are Mountains: An Introduction to Falling in Love with the Land
What is the most wretched of lies? That we are just our bodies and minds, that we are just a heap of organs propped up by bones and wrapped in flesh, that we are just the dreams that haunt us at night and the thoughts that haunt us through the day, that we are but bubbles catapulted from and into the spume of the cosmos. We are not. We are more than that.
As Walt Whitman sings in “Song of Myself”:
I know I am solid and sound,
To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,
All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.
I know I am deathless,
I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter's compass,
I know I shall not pass like a child's carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.
I know I am august,
I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,
I see that the elementary laws never apologize,
(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own to-day or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.
My foothold is tenon'd and mortis'd in granite,
I laugh at what you call dissolution,
And I know the amplitude of time.
…
What is known I strip away,
I launch all men and women forward with me into the Unknown.
The clock indicates the moment—but what does eternity indicate?
We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and trillons ahead of them.
Births have brought us richness and variety,
And other births will bring us richness and variety.
I do not call one greater and one smaller,
That which fills its period and place is equal to any.
Were mankind murderous or jealous upon you, my brother, my sister?
I am sorry for you, they are not murderous or jealous upon me,
All has been gentle with me, I keep no account with lamentation,
(What have I to do with lamentation?)
I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel'd, and still I mound and mount.
Rise after rise bow the phantoms behind me,
Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time, and took no hurt from the fetid carbon.¹
This is who we are. And more.
Our life exceeds the dates that will mark our graves. We rush onwards through our descendants and the descendants of our descendants, through our lovers and their memories of our touch, through our enemies and their resentments for our sins, through our flesh sinking into the earth and blooming into a hundred flowers.
Our deeds join in the press and din of innumerable others; they ripple out in unending space; they sculpt forever a future never fully arrived. Our skin is the sky. Our bones, the mountains rising through the haze. The fire of our souls burns in the sun and glows in the moon.
We are life itself.
These are not the ramblings of a madman or mystic but the birthright of every animal. A Stone Age tribesman, a red deer, and a white-tailed eagle know this in their bones. They know that self and other, pleasure and pain, life and death are but specters of the vastness.
A doe does not live in permanent ecstatic union with the cosmos. Her eyes burst with fear as wolves cling to her hind and tear at her legs. An eagle fawns and frets over her newborns in the nest. A Stone Age hunter shivers and sighs as the autumn rains lash him. Yet beneath their miseries and joys, the world hasn’t ossified. It remains light, ethereal, seamless, magnificent, and vast amidst the play of the ten thousand things.
Again, Whitman captures this vision best:
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward . . . . and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born?
I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe . . . . and am not contained between my hat and boots,
And peruse manifold objects, no two alike, and every one good,
The earth good, and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.²
Like Whitman, I will not justify such claims here. He and I are either in the throes of psychosis or revelation. Perhaps both, and perhaps both are necessary. Whatever the case, this is how we see it, and this is the basis of the work to follow.
The task for us in the earth section is not about reconnecting with the land. We are already at one with it. The task is to cut out the cataracts that blind us to this fact. With the obfuscation cleared, we can see what always was, is, and will be: we are of one weft with the sea and the moon, the land and the sun, the condominiums and power lines.
Urbanization, industrialization, and globalization are the main culprits of this blindness. City dwellers buy mangoes from Thailand, wheat from England, melons from Japan, and beef from New Zealand - all in the same store a 10-minute drive away. Some go years without ever setting eyes on a farm or listening to the songs of a forest unspoiled by engines or chatter. Almost none have any first-hand experience working on a farm.
I had that blindness ripped from my eyes a decade ago when I first worked on a dairy farm. Every day, I would wake up at 4:30 AM, throw on a pair of wellies, and drag myself through mud, dung, and piss to corral these giants into their stalls. Next, I shoveled in feed, threw hay bails into the pen, and milked them while avoiding having my skull kicked in. After completing the morning ritual, we set the milk cans by the roadside and waited for a truck to pick them up and whisk them away to a processing facility. When we returned home for breakfast, I couldn’t comprehend that the pure white milk on the table could come from such squalor, stink, and toil. I realized I assumed it just appeared out of thin air, like clouds in the sky or presents under the Christmas tree.
My ignorance didn’t sever my link to the land; it masked it.
Outside of agriculture, the land plays an even more fundamental role as the world’s physical foundation. No matter where we live, we always live on the earth. Beneath the roads we drive to work on and the 20-story condominium complex we sleep in, it’s earth all the way down. This forgotten leviathan stretches beneath our feet for 6,000 kilometers until it finally reaches its center. To put that into perspective, that means there’s rock 100 times the height of that 20-story condominium underneath you as you read this. The kicker is that that rock also covers an area of 510 million km². Even on our earth, we’re small fries.
Modern man’s relationship with the earth is often superficial or abstract. Ancient Celts didn’t have these precise figures, yet they felt nature’s vastness in their bones. Beholden to capricious weather that dictated their fate, animals that regularly killed them or damaged crops, and an earth and sea whose ends were unknown, nature was vast, powerful, mysterious, immanent.
In the set of earth practices that follow, I’ll share tools to rediscover that primacy, vastness, and wonder of the natural world, to see that we are not contained within our boot-soles, that earth is good and the stars are good and their adjuncts good, and to know in our bones that we are home.
References
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: 1873 Press, 2004), 87-96.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass - 1855 Edition (Brooklyn: W. Whitman, 1855), 21.