Beloved Friends,
As longtime readers know, the core of my spiritual practice is to walk in the woods, listening with all my senses — above all, with open heart — for whatever wisdom the woods may speak.
I went out a few days ago, and they made it plain they wanted to talk about dropping.
Today, ice has dropped from the sky, dressing everything in solid water. But what first caught my attention was a hefty pile of Moose scat, followed by many clusters of Deer droppings, and more than a few signs from Coyote running up and down the trail. All of these were surrounded by Oak droppings, which we more often refer to as leaves and acorns. Hemlock joined in with extensive dropping of twigs and branches from the wild winds of winter.
The technical word for droppings is scat, from the Greek for dung or excrement. Spiritual scatology is the seeking of insight through our droppings. Big topic.
You may know the wonderful children's’ book, Everyone Poops. All bodies sever those parts of ourselves that we no longer need, then drop them to the ground. In the great compost pile of Earth, these droppings are digested. If there is one class of organisms before whom we all should bow in gratitude, it’s those humble creatures who turn droppings into nutrients and new life. (Can you imagine what the world would be like if they didn’t?)
I propose we add a verse to St. Francis’s Canticle of the Creatures:
Praise be to you, my Lord, through the Humble Decayers, by whom you receive the waste we drop and transform it into life — fresh, rich, and growing.
It sounds so simple, even wholesome— scat as spiritual practice. But it is not. It may be the hardest thing we do.
Letting go is at the heart of any true spiritual growth. Until we make space by emptying ourselves, there is no room for the Divine to reside within. We must clean house.
Jesus is really clear: “None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.” (Luke 14:33) To the rich man who comes to him, with love Jesus says “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.” (Mark 10:21)
“Leave everything and follow me,” he calls to the disciples. When you go out to teach, “take nothing for the journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money…” (Mark 6:8) Depend only on the abundance of God and mother Earth, and the generosity of others. Drop it all, and go.
Moose, Deer, Coyote, Oak, and Hemlock don’t need to think about dropping their stuff. They just do it. But we human beings have to work at it. That is the price of consciousness, and of our extraordinary abilities to manipulate the natural world to make ourselves more comfortable, more powerful. We create an artificial world — that is, a human-made world — around ourselves.
We cease to live as part of the Earth world. We become the center of our own universe. This story never, ever ends well.
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Lord have mercy.
So now, exactly in the middle of the 40 days of Lent, what can the earthy practices of dropping teach us about becoming sacred space?
What can we learn from the woods about spiritual hygiene, decay, and renewal? It is all well and good to strive for enlightenment and being raised to the heavens, but first we have to drop our shit into the Earth. That, sooner or later, is where everything goes — where we all go — back to Earth. There is no other place, there is no home but this.
From dust ye came, and to dust ye shall return.
One could write an entire book about this, and I am not setting out to do that. So I will leave you with a few questions to play with:
Do you know what happens to your shit? Literally. Where does it go?
What are you lugging around — stuff, feelings, ideas, habits — that no longer serve you?
What once-nourishing things, beliefs, practices, labors no longer bear fruit?
What can you give away? What can you not acquire?
What practices or rituals might help you drop shit into the ground (responsibly)?
What do you place at the center of your life? What can be let go?
Do you have a spiritual compost pile?
Where will you be buried?
What space needs to be emptied, in order that Love will fill you? Time is short.
with love in this season of Lent,
Stephen
So well said. One who also extended this invitation is the poet Rumi:
“The ground’s generosity takes in our compost and grows beauty! Try to be more like the ground.” May it be so.
I never reflected on that part of her story. But yes!