Let There Be Earth
As a man I’ve only been able to know the experience of creating a world from a distance. Our children were conceived on the same day, the night of our wedding six years apart, the eve after the full moon of March, the Worm Moon for the worm trails appearing in the thawing earth, or the Sap Moon for the invisible waters shooting up against gravity from roots to branches to bring the frozen trees back to life. In the nine or ten months that follow, forty three and a half weeks (Zivar carries her children a few weeks longer than everyone else), she gives the substance of her body over to the creature she is forming. The child communicates to her in yearnings for sustenance. Make me out of roast chicken and popsicles cucumbers and almonds. Make me out of squash and coconut ice cream, out of ten thousand gallons of lemon water and fruit, bananas apples pears peaches nectarines. I am insatiable for flesh make me from the oozing liquid pink flesh of watermelons.
They commune in the material of dreams. Not two, but three dreamers sleep in the bed now. And the dreams of the forming child who still belongs partly to another world, the great pool of soul which is the body of God, her dreams penetrate the permeable bounds of the dreams of the mother and she wakes in the morning with dreams that are not her own. We lay in bed in the light of the morning, her belly plump and alive carrying a planet. She says: she was in my dream last night, she said my name is Ara. And we basked together in the magical revelation of the name. Who could say a word before the child who brings forth her own name without lips to speak? Ara, Aramaic for light, Latin for altar, a constellation of stars in that form, also a parrot, the colorful Macaws you’d picture red, blue, yellow, genus the Ara Macaw.
And birth itself ineffable. No drugs no numbing. Hours of screams and blood the visitation of a spirit part demon part goddess in that strange hospital room at Maimonides. She is untouchable and then she drops into the arms and whispers of our doula who is beside around her pain with the peace of the Venus of Willendorf. When the child is safe outside the womb, gratitude floods me, not for the baby but for the mother, who has crossed the threshold of death returning not with one life but two, she is multiplied.
Jealous, as an artisan I manipulate the substances of the earth and formless melodies into works of art and music that are the closest I will come to creation. I spend the evenings approaching the birth in our car parked on 12th street hammering bronze sheets connected spheres, a pair of qarqabab, originally iron percussion clackers born of the metals and songs of the slave trade in West Africa and the south of Morocco. When she is conceived, the early days of the pandemic, Sap Moon, the only sounds in the air are the rush in the trees when the wind blows through the towering trunks behind our place on Prospect and the sirens of ambulances unceasing. While I write a melody for a 13th century prayer of the dawn “What are the heart and tongue capable of making, and what is the strength of the spirit in my depths,” she is tying soul to flesh, fashioning a spine and limbs. I make a bird, a condor, a mobile after Calder formed of copper and wire that changes color with touches from the oil of my fingerprints. With a wingspan of eight feet it flies in the cage of a living room. She paints a face, makes a being that will breathe and crawl, love and walk the corners of the earth.
The more malevolent men of the species make creations that steal from women the power and magic of their unequaled divine capacity for creation. In a bid to substantiate the patriarchal politics of kings and overlords, the authors of the Torah wrote a creation story of patriarchal propaganda. Woman is born from the rib of a man. In other mythologies of the world, Earth is formed, humanity is formed from the body of the Great Mother goddess. Creation stories are not insignificant. The world we inhabit is a reflection of the creation stories we tell. The wounds of the perverse patriarchal narrative are threatening to destroy all of life on earth. The rains of the great flood are here. But the wisdom of repair is here too. We are awakening to new forms of community, culture and identity beyond the disembodied ego dreams of the capitalist machine. The creation of the new world will begin with new stories, repairing the broken stories of the ancestors. Cosmogonies are not histories, they are a catalog of the values and teachings of those who tell them. They are manuals for how to pray.
Stories are born of the elements at the site of their inspiration – the architecture of the hills, the caress of the stones and the weight of the dust, the tempo at which the rivers flow and the stillness at which waters congregate, the direction from which the wind enters dwelling places at midnight, the colors of the light touching the world in a place. Adam and Eve are not native to the soil of the earth on which we pray tonight, in which we go about our lives. They are native to the soil of Canaan, Israel, Palestine, the wilderness of the sinai. Should we not be knowledgeable in the cosmogonies of the soil in our place of dwelling? As New Yorkers we should know the myths of the Munsee, the Lenape, the Mohican, the Hodenosaunee peoples. This is the Hodenosaunee story of creation …
Long before the creation of the world there was an island in the sky inhabited by sky people. In the center of their world was a great tree which gave them their light. The tree was filled with many species of herbs and plants and fruit, and from the fruit of the tree light came forth to illuminate the homes of the sky people. A sky woman pregnant with twins craved a taste of tea steeped in the roots of the Tree of Life, but when she dug for the roots a hole opened in the sky beneath the tree. And the sky woman fell or she jumped or she was pushed from her home in the sky, falling between worlds to the realm below which was composed entirely of water. In her hand a bundle of roots from the Tree of Life. Seeing a woman falling from the sky, a lamentation of swans welcomes her into the pillow of their feathers and brings her to rest on the back of the Great Turtle. There is no earth for Skywoman to walk upon only water. But the deep diving creatures Otter and Beaver have seen the mud at the bottom of the deep. They bring wet clay from the water’s floor and place it on Turtle's back until solid earth begins to form. In her gratitude Skywoman begins to sing and the earth stretches out and expands. From the roots in her hand Skywoman creates the world, she plants sweetgrass, strawberries, maple, cedar, tobacco, food and medicine and sweetness. She is the mother of all life and Turtle Island is the Hodenosaunee name for the world.
What’s the meaning of the story? Reading as I can’t help but read, against the creation story of my ancestors, here a woman makes the world, a woman with accomplices in plants and animals. And is she divine or human? I can’t really say. Isn’t that wondrous, the creatrix and the first creature are one and the same, lost somewhere on the spectrum that spans god and human being, born of sky resident of earth. In the Skywoman’s fall I see the fall of the soul – the divine seed within us that is cutoff from the place of its birth, uprooted from the Tree of Life. This exile, the source of our insatiable longing for a home for the soul.
But after a summer of Bachelard, who shares in Water & Dreams, An Essay on the Imagination of Matter his philosophy which sees the materiality of the elements as the preeminent influence in the workings of the psyche in reveries and dreams, I cannot help but interpret the myth with an eye toward the elemental. Where the myth of my ancestors begins “Let there be light,” the substantial focus of this story has entirely to do with the element of earth. The Tree of Life is itself the source of light in the upper world, light from the fruit of the tree, light from earth. The mud drawn up from the deep exists as dry land through the act of a gift, and the songs and tending of Skywoman. Life takes place between earth above and earth below. The plants, trees, all the species of vegetation are created from the replanted roots broken off from the Tree of Life, they are all kin of substance, and they precede the creation of human beings. We are the youngest creatures of the world, our well being entirely dependent on our ability to listen and heed the teachings of the plants, animals and elements. As she replanted the roots torn from the Tree of Life into the soil of the world below, Skywoman may have sung a song whose lyric cried, “Let There Be Earth.”
Some of the wisdoms of the Hodenosaunee mythology are buried within Jewish sources. In the 15th century when mysticism was having a coming out party amongst the monotheistic cultures, Isaac Luria wrote a new Jewish creation story.
Before the creation of the world, there was only God and she filled every corner and cavity of the universe. She wished for a child, but there was nowhere for the world to be born. So she breathed, inhale exhale, contraction expansion, a convulsing not unlike the contractions of birth Tzimtzum, to create an opening inside herself, a womb within which the world could exist. She diminished the light of her being in stages of emanation, that the world to take place within her would not be blinded by her radiance. She formed a creature, androgynous, from what had become of the materiality of her light, the matter was called adamah earth. She blew a soul into its nose and named the creature Adam after the adamah, the earth from which it came.
Luria thus returns creation to the intendance of the feminine. And hidden in the name of the first human, is a memory of the bond we share with the Earth. But patriarchy instituted a hierarchy of souls above bodies and light above earth. The healing of stories which the creation of the world in the year 5783 calls for must include a reprioritization of the hierarchy of elements which compose our imagination. For no longer are we a sky people who live on light and air, we are dwellers of earth, inhabitants of a world which lives by water. Our creation stories begin, “Let there be earth, let there be water.”
The past few years have been filled with hardships and suffering. We are watching the destruction of the planet in real time. Plague has taken many lives, cut us off from community and how we used to be with one another. Political evil, fear, hatred and violence everywhere. School shootings daily. Racist shootings, Antisemetic violence. And the traumas of history, slavery, genocide of those indigenous to this land, capitalism colonialism misogyny, we are attending slowly to the sins of the past, but the work is difficult and vast.
Skywoman, Mother Earth is speaking to us, and we must heed her voice. In the disease of the pandemic she is singing to her children, quit your worship of money and fossil fuels. In the violent rains of the floods destroying villages, cities and islands she is shouting, you are cutting holes into my body, I am at the verge of death. Remember the story of creation when we replanted the roots of the Tree of Life. We are all formed of the same stuff, different iterations of cell, nuclei, cytoplasm and membrane, carbon, mineral, dust. Quit your concern with your individualistic selves, with identity, becoming, with self care, with soul – the project of repair is Earth. My repair is your self discovery.
Where is prayer in these cosmogonies? Earth is the humble element, conversant in all the postures of lowliness, the gestures of facing reaching yearning upward. If earth is the primary matter, the substance of our creation, every exchange with the Earth is an act of communion. Prayer is the movement into the consciousness of animism and gift, the living beings of Turtle Island actively gifting each other their lifeforce. The first taste of strawberries in June, the wood of the fire beneath the stars of night, the tea from the roots of the tree, the healing of the natural medicines in the plants, food and spice, psychedelic brews and fungi that carry us to meetings with the goddess who made the world, bodies without souls buried in the ground no different than seeds. Every moment of the day can be prayer unceasing. We could not have arrived at this hour of history, the defilement of the Earth, with the lessons of Skywoman’s story over our hearts.
Who am I? I am an earthling, an earth creature, a mud animal, a compostoid, flesh formed of pomegranates apples meaty pink watermelon. I am from the Earth, Adam, Adamah, just like everyone else. What is my purpose? I am here to affect repair, to join letters in prayer, fill them with the light of my being. I am here to purify the waters of my dwelling place, pour the earth of my deep into all of my works. I am here to listen to all the creatures whose creation precedes my own, water, wind, plants and animals, creepy crawlers, dwellers of sky and sea. I am here to sing songs of gratitude. “Let there be water, let there be earth.”