Friday 18 May 2007

We Are Food




I've just read an excellent article by Thom van Dooren which asserts, along the way, that we are food.

Food for other organisms on this planet,that is, including, right now, some inside and around us.

There's more than just a macabre Michael Valentine Smith-ness about this idea. According to van Dooren, we're not behaving like sustainable parts of the food chain.

We take in vast quantities of - things - and give back practically nothing to the web of life. Hel, even our sewerage is neatly packaged away, scrubbed and returned to the same organisms it came out of.

It's as if your lamb-chop-and-two-veg suddenly started fighting back.

And it's going to be the death of us, as a race.

In one of those synchronous moments which happen all over the place when I'm paying attention, I then hopped over to the new issue of Matrifocus, there to read Victoria Slind-Flor's Dancing with the Dark Mother at Beltane .

In this beautiful prose piece, Victoria posits that we all have a compost bin in our future, and that therefore she will "...place a wreath of flowers on my old gray head and dance with my sisters in a verdant meadow on Beltane morn."

I loved the picture and the feelings that evoked, that we can be in such a relationship with death that dancing on a May morning can seem like the natural, nay the logical thing to do.

4 comments:

  1. May I have this dance?

    I'm going back to the earth in a natural way if I can. I'll go off to die in a forest or something. Hugs.

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  2. I wish.

    Unfortunately, our civil laws don't allow for that-bodies must be either burnt or encased in tough sarcophagi.
    Insane.
    I would like to grow a Cypress tree over what remains of my shell, but I'm not going to be allowed to do that, unless I look for loppholes.
    Maybe I will, at that.

    Love,
    Terri in Joburg

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  3. If you think geologically, instead of chronologically, we are all members of a fantastically flawed species that has evolved quickly and will go extinct just as quickly. And Gaia will rock on. You rock, Rock.

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  4. I think you're right, Anne.

    We're a blip on the radar, a moment in time.

    Love,
    Terri

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