New Growth

"With Zeus's help, the mother retrieved her daughter; but Persephone had already eaten a pomegranate seed, food of the dead, at Hades' insistence, which meant she must come back to him.  In the end, a sort of truce was arranged.  Persephone could return to her sorrowing mother but must spend a third of each year with her dark Lord.  Thus, by the four-month death each year of the goddess of springtime in her descent to the underworld, did winter enter the world.  And when she returns from the dark realms, she always strikes earthly beings with awe and smells somewhat of the grave."

We spent the day before Easter attending the funeral of our 101 year old grandmother.  She was a devout Southern Baptist, so naturally the eulogy was full of references to resurrection and rebirth in Jesus Christ.  She was also many other things, which did not get mentioned in the service, but so it is with a human life -- we are at one and the same time far more complicated, and yet far more reducibly simple, than any of us would care to admit.

Grandmother loved to bake pies -- that is a simple fact.  Is it significant alongside her testament of faith?  We don't know.  We do know her garden was beautiful, and her pies were delicious; everything made with love has a tendency to be made a little better than anything not created in such fashion.

There are other, older myths besides that of the Resurrection which it would behoove us to recall.  Our civilization has gotten so disconnected from the ground we walk on that we no longer think about the meaning of "returning to the dust".  Indeed, the proprietors of Myrtle's often joke about being "buried in the yard" because we never want to move again, but that is really only half a joke.  All living things have risen from the rotting shell of all dead things.  Any good botanist will tell you that you should include lots of "organic matter" in your compost.  What does that mean, really?  We have explained before that the best compost comes from rotting leaves "cooked" in the coop.

Basically, everything that lived nourishes everything that lives, and everything that lives will die, and someday nourish everything that is going to live.  We are all not so much standing on the shoulders of giants as we are climbing the pile of corpses -- we can either allow ourselves to become maudlin and disturbed by that imagery, or we can honor those who have come before us by continuing to nourish the cycle of life.

Today, we are planting new trees, and painting the chicken coop.  And as we dig in the earth, we will revel in how it smells slightly of the grave, knowing that it is because of this that we shall soon have a fruitful harvest.

Happy farming!