30 minute trance practice as part of a course I’m doing for the next 16 weeks called Practical Animism – today’s exercise was around meeting a person/relative that I consume on a regular basis, and exploring that relationship as one that acknowledges the personhood of the plants and animals that I eat.
I actually had some trouble deciding on a food-source that I wanted to reach out to, not because I wanted to pick the “right” one but because so many came to mind that I wanted to approach. I ultimately ended up settling on Rooster and Hen, because I do eat a lot of chicken, and I was pleased with the interaction. I’ve never been particularly distanced from my food – I was raised to thank the food (despite being Christian!) and to thank the Gods (or God) for my food, and so it felt very natural to enter into a conversation with Rooster and Hen about the fact that they sacrifice their lives for me to continue living. I ended up feeling very much called to raise my own chickens, which is not possible right now (community code violation unfortunately) but I think will be something that I do as soon as I’m in a place to legally do so.
Also, I explored the nature of the relationship of Humanity to Chickens – as the domesticator and domesticated relationship progressed, which I didn’t connect to as strongly as I did just to the animals themselves.
I did go back and repeat the exercise with corn – especially as I’m cooking corn this afternoon (charring it on the cob to make Elotes Pasta Salad for a dinner tomorrow). I eat a lot of corn, and it’s a plant with a long and sacred history that I’ve tried to respect. It was easier to talk to Rooster than it was to talk to Corn, probably because Rooster has body language I understand better than Plant Language. But I did get a sense that Corn was, at least at one point in time, honored by its connection to humans – and is now very troubled by mass monocrop farming. Cornfields used to be sacred places, and now they are sterile, machine-driven ones, and that’s maybe not actually a step in the right direction.
I have attempted (unsuccessfully) to grow corn in the past, and could not grow it now even if I had room for it – my yard is in the shade of three huge pecan trees, and so I cannot grow vegetables here. But I feel like I can honor the spirit of that plant, which is so sacred to the land on which I live, even if I don’t grow it myself.
All in all, a very thought provoking set of trance journeys today, and ones I think I will repeat as I go deeper into my practice of Animism. I’m noticing as I sit with this, and am processing the work I did, that I feel almost unsettled – not because I did something wrong or feel guilty about eating plants and animals, but because I feel like I *should* have strong feelings about the fact that I eat plants and animals. I’ve often grown my own food, though never as my main food source, and as much as those plants were persons that I treasured, they were still there to make sure I continued to exist. I kinda wonder if folks in subsistence farming environments, or in hunter-gatherer ones, feel that way – I know many indigenous groups sacralize the harvest (of both plants and animals) and a great deal of paganism is about the sacredness of the harvest cycle at least as it was celebrated in northwest Europe. It feels as though I’m cheating, I guess, for how easy it is for me to get the food I need, and how disconnected I can be from the process of life-giving that happens for me to go to the grocery store and buy six ears of corn to roast for dinner.
(I do not go into or explain the background of this in my journal, and think that it stands well without a lot of filler. If you are interested in animism as a spiritual practice that complements polytheism, let me know and I’ll speak more to that in a more expository post. This is simply a reflection and a direct excerpt from my journaling.)
Little Druid on the Prairie 