Covid: Body and Soul

In the time of Covid, with my body under threat, I've noticed a difference between the faith I think and the faith I feel.  I'm not sure I trust the head faith--the part that counts on a persistence of soul or spirit—to survive an actual threat to my existence.  I do trust my experience of nature: peace, presence, participation, union, order.  I trust the inevitability and rightness of my body dissipating into carbon and water, gases and ions, that will enter the soil and feed the plants.

My grandparents were farmers.  My grandfather grew sweetcorn, asparagus, apples, grapes, peaches, muskmelons.  He seldom spoke, but they say that birds would sit on his shoulder.  I think of him as a “green man,” connected intimately to the soil and the cycle of seasons.  Green things flourished under his care.  My grandmother took over the finances, monitored the stock market, stored up money that would help to support two more generations.  But my grandfather knew how to coax crops from the earth. 

Ironically, it was the pesticides they used that probably killed him—at 65, the age I will be in half a year. He died of leukemia not long after he retired.  He did have a year or two in which he seemed to blossom, having shed the relentless work of farming. He turned social, enjoyed playing pinochle in a crisp white shirt.

Neither of my grandparents had a “happy” life.  They lived through two world wars and a depression.  They didn’t expect happiness so much as a constant struggle against external threats: hailstorms that ruined the grapevines, a barn fire, getting kicked in the head by a horse.  But they did persist, and they brought beauty to the world, a cornucopia of form and color and taste and texture: crisp green apples, the snap of fresh asparagus, sweet cantaloupes, dusky purple grapes.  Their community did not believe in physical sensuality, certainly did not credit sexual desire. I think they funneled it into food: sweet buttery baked squash, the latticed crust of a cherry pie.  

Sex and eating stimulate the same pleasure centers in the brain.  The scientists say that creativity does the same.  And here I sit, with my love of writing and art, form and color, nature and food.  Maybe I’m opening the door for a little more sex too, after the long dearth that parenting imposes.

It’s all about  nature--my singular body at one with the vast created world.