Reflections on Filth
Laudate Si and Me
Last week I was thinking about food, where it comes from, what its carbon footprint is. This week, the week that follows Black Friday, three weeks before Christmas, food has taken a back seat to STUFF, to what Pope Francis, in his magnificent encyclical Laudate Si, calls filth.
Laudate Si and Me
“Filth”, Pope Francis said, using the word
Father Murphy used to describe what went on
in the back seat of fifties Chevies,
“we’ve filled the world with filth,”
greed’s unholy offspring.
All day I’ve wondered about that word.
What counts as filth,
what doesn’t.
The Fulfillment Center at Amazon is so speedy,
the box from Heels.com
arrived in 2 days. Inside, black sandals with the cutest
silver buckle and a blue sole. It’s
all the rage, different colors on the sole!
& cheap! A triumph of free trade, say the economists!
I am an old woman, like the ones Francis
tells us are able to remember
how beautiful the world was
before we filled it with rubble,
an old woman with no more backseats
to climb into.
But I am an old woman still in love
with shoes, one click, buy now, shoes.
Francis said the rich person who puts on a sweater
when she’s cold demonstrates her love
of mankind and the earth.
I could write a note:
Dear Fulfillment
Center, I love
Earth more than
these shoes.
I’ve come to see
they aren’t so cute
after all. The price
is too high.
Please refund
my account.
Or I could try them on,
promise Francis this will be
the last time.
It is hard enough, this task of trying to peek around the corner of my brain and discover how a mind focused on Paul Hawken’s principles of regeneration works, without, at the same time, being chased by red-cheeked Santas luring me with soft mauve and green alpaca toppers and velveteen dusters in fragmented florals designed after old Chinese tapestries. Then there is the grandson, pitching for an advanced all-in-one optical reality headset, which, he reminds me, he has already placed in my Amazon Cart but which his wise mother has declared a no starter. But maybe I should buy him, piano deprived as he is, a colorful keyboard with lights and apps and games which will teach him how to play in no time at all.
Mushrooms, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I need some mushrooms to transport myself from my anachronistic mind state to another more in synch with the needs of life on this planet now. In his book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan summarizes the brain science that underlies the current scientific efforts to reevaluate the benefits of ingesting psilocybin and LSD. The brain, it turns out, holds on for dear life to early beliefs and myths. Not wanting to take risks or waste energy, the brain arms itself against new ideas, and, in the process, rigidifies thinking and behavior. Hallucinogens, taken under the right conditions, open the brain to new ways of seeing in relationship to old experiences, to nature, death.
Perhaps this is how we will avoid an ecological catastrophe! A guided hallucinogenic trip!!
But I don’t have any mushrooms and I don’t think Freeport Climate Action Now could get the grant for Mushroom Climate Action. So, it’s back to paying attention to the gaps in the fold of my reality.
I was thinking about this today while I stood beside my bed, a threaded needle in my hand, examining the long gash in the fabric of the brightly patterned quilt which covers it. I’ve had the quilt for only ten years, but the thin cotton top layer has split in five or six places, revealing the torn white batting underneath. Until I determined last week to think outside my rollicking consumer mindset, I’d been scanning for a new quilt in the Pottery Barn, LLBean, Parachute catalogues that fill my mailbox and my mind with desire.
But this morning the verb darn came to mind. I could darn the quilt! And with the word darn came images of sewing baskets: my grandmother’s pink ribboned brown woven basket, my mother’s round white basket filled with mismatched buttons. Instead of throwing worn things out, both women darned things: socks and torn pockets and hems of pants and skirts when we grew too tall. They darned things not with machines but with their hands. Hands—my mother’s young hands sewing buttons on my blue St. Barnabas’ uniform or darning the holes in our wool socks in the rare times that she sat down by the window in the front room; my grandmother’s hands, threads of yarn running through her twisted fingers with their swollen joints: hands that look like mine do now.
My grandmother darned, but mostly she crotched. She was a quiet woman, prone to caution. Her crochet pieces were her poetry, her way of transcending not only her caution but the pain of the rheumatoid arthritis that made walking so difficult for her. I have one of her pieces, a white, elaborately woven bedspread, draped over the couch in my front room—the careful song of herself embodied in the intricate design, the perfectly formed stitches. The creation is sixty years old now, but her spirit lives on in the threads.
As I painstakingly and ineptly pulled the edges of the torn quilt fabric together and ran a stitch between them, I felt connected to these women, to the small acts of care they performed over the things they tended. I could feel my body calm and my mind slow as my attention shifted from thinking about all I needed to get done to these tiny stitches.
This is how I start to see the world differently I thought: I pay attention to the tiny stitches of repair that the things I care about are calling me to mend. You start with one stitch and one quilt. And then you see everything anew: there are so many beautiful but torn things in the world that need repair. I don’t have to start with a dying ocean or a too warm atmosphere.
Instead of the click on the velveteen duster, I can shop for new clothes at the thrift store at our Community Center, or the two stores in town that sell pre-owned clothes, orphaned now, waiting for someone to notice them, see them as useful, as something that came from the earth’s bounty, as something other than filth.