Mind States
Wild Seeds, Sacred Meals
by Jesse Wolf Hardin
Within all of us, there exists the residual instincts of our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is an inner self, familiar with the cycles of hunger and fulfillment and alert to every nuance of the world we are a part of. Even the most civilized of human beings remains host to a reservoir of primal knowledge. This knowledge is the certainty and sanctity of “life living on life,” the compulsion to feed. It is also the realization that our bodies too will in time serve the Earth as food. We carry with us a genetic memory of the zen-like carnivore’s stalk as well as the desire to dig for roots and the compelling urge to plant seeds, gather a harvest, and gather together to eat.
Like an enchanted image from our shared tribal past, a half-dozen women gather a wild bounty from the giving ground. They alternately bend and rise, dropping tasty acorns into wicker shoulder-baskets. Strong voices send songs of prayer and gratitude both heavenward and earthward. Our helpers today at the Animá Center include blissed-out workshop students and a couple of resident interns. They gather not only acorns but those other early Fall harvests such as nutritional watercress, wild blackberries and Vitamin C-rich rose hips. Tonight there will be a ceremonial feast consisting of the last of the canyon’s grape leaves and acorn and cornmeal waffles with sweet, watermelon-flavored prickly pear fruit sauce. These dishes will not only fill our bellies and tickle our fancies, but also deepen our relationship to a sensual self, place and purpose. It will be a feast of sustenance and meaning, a means for connection, a reason for gratitude and an opportunity to both celebrate and consecrate.
To “consecrate” means to make sacred through our actions and efforts. Thus, when we reach out and grasp hands before the feast, it’s a moment of deliberate resacrament. A mindful gatherer, gardener or cook turns every aspect of his or her life into a conscious, prayerful practice. For tens of thousands of years all across the globe, food was commonly held to be sacred, not just because it was essential to the continuance of life, but because primal human kind recognized in it an expression and bodily extension of the divine whole. Food appeared as a tangible manifestation of the Animá or World Soul. Through most of our long history, people believed that to consume life of any kind was literally to “eat of God”—to consume and thereby assume the manifest flesh of Spirit. A pantheon on a plate! To the ancestors of every race, a feast was a ritual partaking of what the Greeks called agape, the sacred meal. They likewise affirmed the intrinsic wholeness/holiness in every element of nature and recognized that the most integrative and satisfying truths in life come not as rational conclusions, but as spiritual revelations, true epiphanies. They knew—as we may all be obliged to relearn—the importance of a ritual approach to our food production, procurement and preparation, a conscious interaction that heightens meaning while it deepens a sense of value and place. Every meal can be a magical rite and every ingredient, a source of connection.
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when devotional rosary beads were made out of real rose petals, hand rolled and sealed with lamp-black. Instead of tasteless wafers, the priests served wholesome chunks of bread, broken from a common loaf. It is this depth of authenticity, relevance and nourishment that empowers healthy religiosity. The root meaning of the word “religion” means “to bind together.” By handling, smelling and eating food, we may be bound in exquisite experience as well as corporal purpose. We bond with the earth that supplies the food and with the gentle hands that plant it and transport it. We bond with one another through the experience of shared meals and tastes. And we bond with the food itself. There is certainly something special about healthy, garden-grown ingredients or wild foods collected directly from nature. And there is also something magical about dining outdoors, whether at a riverside setting like our Animá center, around the campfire grill or next to the outdoor ovens of the Hopi and Pueblo reservations. Yet no matter how modern or mundane, and whether indoors or not, every kitchen in the world presents an opportunity for self-knowledge, empowerment, reconnection and re-enchantment! Learning to mindfully prepare and relate to food is no chore, but rather a rite-of-passage. It is a test that no one else can take for us, a sacred quest for the reclamation of our own sentient bodies and souls. Like gardening and wild-food gathering, cooking is a potential avenue for accessing the experience of sacred space. We ideally rise from the amniotic garden, the uterine wildlands or the womb of the kitchen as from a sacred birthing hut.
Perhaps it is only our fears and illusions, hesitations and self-doubts that ever get in the way of our being completely reborn and altered by the classrooms of the living Earth. With each planting and harvest and with every bite, we are remade in the process of conscious reintegration into the cycles of eater and eaten, death and life. Through mindful planting, procurement and preparation of food, we may be revealed as the grateful, responsible celebrants of miraculous creation that we really are. After all, we are the agents of the Gaian process and the playmates and vehicles for omnipresent spirit. Our mouths were meant for new tastes, our minds for new ideas, our hearts to love and our eyes to open wide to the day-to-day miracle of our numinous lives.
Jesse Wolf Hardin is an acclaimed teacher and author of five books including Gaia Eros. He and his partners offer inspiring correspondence courses, as well as host wilderness retreats, personal and couples counsels, Vision Quests, internships and events in their enchanted river canyon and ancient place of power: Animá Wilderness Retreat Center & Medicine Woman Tradition, Box 688, Reserve, NM 87830. www.animacenter.org