by Angela Dawson
1. Because when we were small cells multiplying in the dark salt cave, we could hear muffled voices through the pounds of flesh and muscle (though we didn’t know what hearing was). Because we start life in the dark and burrow under the arch of the hips and tunnel out into a brand new world, eyes dim, only taking in blacks and blurs. Because our newly human body takes everything in and it fuses with us.
2. Because, way down the line, mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and beyond, gathered around the blazing fires, spilling songs of the earth. We tell stories because, once we’ve landed in our body and grown down and woken up, the world is a fucking miracle. At some point, we realise it is all an illusion. The world is not flat, or steady or bright. We are living on a small marble, suspended in a universe of mostly black and nothingness. Because to not blurt out the beauty of the powder-puff skies as the sun sets (even though we know the sun neither rises, nor sets, it is we who are turning) is a waste of time.
3. Because life, our time here, is both short and long and we yearn to make sense of it. So we follow the threads, weave in and out of the wider fabric, see our path—the myth we are living—more clearly.
4. Because stories are magic and in a colonised world, full of unnatural ways of being, we are desperately, wildly thirsty for some kind of magic.
5. Because, Mary Oliver says to: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it”. Because telling about it helps us all to feel a little less alone. We feel alone because we think and covet thinking. It pits us above the creatures. Dumb animals. We are the dumb ones. We feel alone when we are connected to all living things. Our food handled and grown by others. Shipped across lands, touched by all manner of people. Because the food grows, the trees blossom. Magnolia never fails to birth big bucket blooms of pink every springtime. Because the world keeps turning and we don’t fall off. And we welcome the night, say hello moon, and dream of day, sun up, even though dawn is a story we like to tell ourselves …
WILD SOUL FOOD ~
Read: Lisel Mueller’s ‘Why We Tell Stories’
Read: ‘Sometimes’ by Mary Oliver
Leave a Reply