The oldest trick in the world is to be swallowed.
We don't have enough ways to talk about love.
My nephew, two years old, follows me outside. He brings me yogurt in a leaf. A blade of grass is a sandwich. I “eat” each one, toss it behind my back; he doubles over laughing. He hands me a stone. “What is it?” I ask. “A stone,” he says. I eat the stone. Sometimes, truth is stranger then make-belief.
“Look how small God has become,” the priest says, bread in her hands. She tears it. “Look how small God has become for you.”
“Is this a thing,” my friend asks, when I say I took communion before going to see a man who I maybe am admitting that I like – “a ritual?”
Love, bell hooks says, is a word we use obsessively in North America, but few of us can define it.
Let me begin again. I do not love the ocean but there are days I need to see it; Canada is not a religious country, communion could be an alienating language, but we have so few rituals left to teach us the frightening power we hold in love, the calming presence of it. I’m beginning to think resilience starts in this paradox. Think ocean. Think mountain. Think feet to earth. Think wind tearing clothes.
If I’m honest, communion scares me. When we swallow, what happens to our earth?
What happens to us? There are folk stories, world over, of magicians transforming themselves: a gnat a bat a bird a lion a blade of grass. This is how they escape their enemies. The oldest trick in the book is to let yourself be swallowed. You know what happens next – the swallowed gnat becomes a mountain, ruptures the other body, ends the story.
Love is, maybe, being rightly related to the enormity of another person’s life. The mystery of it. Holy ground, bare feet. And still, cupping a given life in the hands and accepting it into your own – becoming someone’s home, asking the same in return, risking rupture. Sustained for one more day of story.
It is our peculiar grief, that God becomes small. It is a salvation that God stays small. It is grief that we consume what we love. It is salvation every day we wake up hungry.
It is vulnerable to swallow. Over and over. And yes, it is problematic to eat the earth, piece by piece, and yes, we are problematic and still the ocean goes on, and the wind, and we are here and we are carried and we swallow, every day we swallow something, and we have so many specificities to describe monsters with, but barely know how to talk about love. So we talk about bread. What other way is there, to make art out of a life? We talk about stones. Every week, we break what is big, we feed each other.
My nephew hands me the mushroom that’s been lying on cement for days. “It’s so wet!” It’s a shelf mushroom that comes with tree attached – it crumbles apart in his hands and he labours to pick up each piece. Then decides to just take what his hands can hold.
In class, Danusha Laméris read “Urban Coyote” by Joseph Millar and I don’t want to ruin the ending but the ending is, “I steal whatever can fit in my mouth / under the fat April moon.”
There’s a humility to steal, in a poem or a day, only what can fit in your mouth. These teeth. This God. Half a rain-soaked mushroom. Does love fit? Or is love in the taking. Whatever it is, have you memorized the path of return?
This life is made of so many moments that are a world within a world within a world. The priest rings a silver bell. Yogurt in a leaf in a mouth tossed behind a back picked up by a toddler repeat. Repeat. Repeat. •
P.S. Unsurprisingly, many other artists and writers reach for rituals that tie them into something bigger than themselves. Here’s Christian Wiman: “I think it’s dangerous to think of art—or anything, actually—as a personally redemptive activity, at least in any ultimate sense. For one thing, it leads to overproduction: if it’s art that’s saving you, you damn sure better keep producing it, even if the well seems to have run dry. But that’s almost beside the point. The real issue, for anyone who suffers the silences of God and seeks real redemption, is that art is not enough. Those spots of time are not enough to hang a life on. At some point you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with our own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make.”
What’s your ritual?
This was so achingly beautiful Maaike. I have been recently thinking about my own relationship to ritual since I've put some distance between myself and the religion of my upbringing, but have such a longing for it. Your meditation on swallowing and love and God and ritual really made me feel - thank you. (Also, I love Christian Wiman! My Bright Abyss is one of my favorite essay collections)
There’s something so intimate and universal about this painting, the oceanic flux of it. I read this whole thing slack-jawed. You are magic.