Hoe to Harvest

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I am thrilled to have my essay “Hoe to Harvest: Connecting Soil, Soul and Society” be selected as a one of the winners of the WATER Essay Contest. The task was to write a 650-word essay on a topic related to feminist work for social change that springs from spiritual commitments. The contest was in honor of Rosemary Ganley, a Peterborough, Ontario feminist activist and writer whose weekly columns in The Peterborough Examiner reach a wide audience.

I hope you enjoy reading my essay below and perhaps be inspired to plant a few spring seeds!

Catherine in her garden in Germany in 2014. These sunflowers planted themselves!

Hoe to Harvest: Connecting Soil, Soul and Society

It took me a long time and a good deal of sweat to understand it — just how much growing food extends beyond the garden. Not only does a garden feed us, but it also forms us – as persons and as a community. My husband and I have been growing much of what we eat for the past twenty-five years. We started out with a small plot and a few lettuce and tomato plants, but we now have enough land to keep us busy and well-fed.

Once you work in tandem with the soil and seasons, you learn to appreciate the spiritual lessons they hold. How fundamentally attached we are to this place called Earth. How much working the land can actually help us to become fully human. As Gandhi once said, “To forget how to dig the earth and tend the soil is to forget ourselves.”

While a garden provides us with fruits and vegetables, it also acts as a mirror for the soul. As we interact with hoe, shovel and watering can upon our Earth, the Earth is ready to teach us about ourselves.

There are days when I find myself tearing at weeds, only moments later to feel the fierce roots of long-buried anger and resentment clinging to my heart. Other days I am filled with joy, longing to spill seeds upon every patch of bare soil. By gardening we create a place where our inner and outer worlds can meet. And in this space, with time and nourishment, we are encouraged to move closer to ourselves and each other.

My neighbor once explained why gardening was the humblest of tasks. “Your head is always bowed and sometimes you have to go down on your knees.” Growing food is also a revolutionary act. Physically, the small farmer spends time hoeing, seeding, planting, composting, weeding, watering, and finally harvesting – not only produce, but also the seeds for next year’s crop. Meanwhile, spiritually the farmer is creating a new way of being. As Vandana Shiva said, “The power to feed ourselves is the power to free ourselves.”

Gardening also brings us in communion with our Earth and the universe. From the millions of microorganisms alive in the soil to the moon’s phases telling us what to plant and when. The German mystic and saint Hildegard von Bingen wrote: “Humankind is called to co-create. With nature’s help, humankind can set into creation all that is necessary and life-sustaining.” What better way to co-create alongside Nature’s diversity than to bite down on a cherry tomato or munch snap green peas grown with our own two hands?

Sharing a bountiful harvest is also a way to shift the economic paradigm from exploiting the Earth to sharing her abundance. Many times I have given away (and received in return) crates of plump tomatoes, fava beans, juicy apples and plums. Sharing harvested food cultivates friendship, gratitude, and peace.

Even without much land to sow, everyone can find a way to grow something to eat. Try planting herbs in flowerpots on the windowsill or grace your terrace or balcony with larger pots full of salads, beans, and tomatoes. Otherwise, commit to buy produce from local farmers, contribute time or energy to community gardens, or plant some perennial flowers (preferably edible!) somewhere … anywhere in your neighborhood.

Recently I planted a seed-thought that has bared fruit. At the charity where I volunteer, I suggested that we start growing food in the small plot next to where we distribute food and clothes. Together with a local cooperative that grows biological grains and legumes, charity volunteers and recipients have planted fruit trees this autumn and tilled the soil for spring planting.

The lessons gardening offers are simple. Every seed we plant holds a fruitful past and a tender promise. All we give to the soil feeds our future. And the small farmer is a humble, radical peacemaker.

Carducci’s ‘Il poeta’ : The Poet as Blacksmith

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For those of you who attended my webinar “Forging and Arrow of Gold’ last year, I am happy to announce the publication of my article in the Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature along with my translation of Carducci’s poem ‘Il poeta’.

Below, you can download the article “Forging an Arrow of Gold: Translation and Analysis of Carducci’s ‘Il poeta’ from a Psychosynthesis Perspective”:

calombard-forging-and-arrow-of-gold Download

To remind everyone, in Creating Harmony in Life, Assagioli invites us to:

“Reread Giosuè Carducci’s poem ‘Il poeta’ (‘The Poet’) as it expresses in a wonderful way … through which the psychic elements are fused and shaped in an inner fire, producing works of beauty.”

Inspired by Assagioli’s suggestion, I searched the internet for the poem and found it in Italian along with a translation by G. L. Bickersteth published in 1913.[1] While Bickersteth’s translation is true to the meter and rhyme of Carducci’s poem, the language itself felt antiquated – for example, his use of ‘merry-andrew’ in the third line. So, I decided to attempt to translate Carducci’s poem myself from a more literal perspective.

In the article above, I show how psychosynthesis provides an additional approach to literary criticism beyond what psychoanalytical criticism and Jungian literary criticism can offer. Then I briefly describe my translation process of Carducci’s poem “Il poeta”. Finally, as both reader and translator, I examine the archetype of the blacksmith in “Il poeta” and then analyze the poem from a psychosynthesis literary perspective.

Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907) was a poet, writer, literary critic and teacher. During his lifetime, Carducci was regarded as the official national poet of modern Italy, and today he is studied by nearly all Italian students during high school. In 1906 he became the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature “not only in consideration of his deep learning and critical research, but above all as a tribute to the creative energy, freshness of style, and lyrical force which characterize his poetic masterpieces.”[2]

References

[1] Bickersteth, Geoffrey Langdale (1913). Carducci. London: Longmans, Green.

[2] “Vita, opere e poetica di Giosuè Carducci” (in Italian). 13 June 2014. Retrieved 5 January 2022.

Joyfully Suffering the News

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Yesterday I met Lucia for the first time. She is a 7-month old solid soul who has nothing but gurgling smiles for the world. Between bites of chocolate ice cream, her mother became quietly despondent. “Hasn’t the news been terrible lately?” she asked.

Yes, the news has been terrible. The news is always terrible. That’s what news is. Terrible. It is either full of suffering or full of rich, happy, famous people. Sometimes it is full of rich, unhappy, famous people suffering. But usually it consists of poor, unhappy, non-famous people suffering. In fact, Assagioli once told a student of his that, while it was important to read the news, one should only do so in homeopathic doses!

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A Good Bad Example

The Potential Dangers of Hero-Worship

Perhaps you can see where all this is taking us – right back to those 74 million Trump voters… Hero-Worship can easily slide down the slippery slope and become ‘idol-worship.’ Assagioli refers to such idols as inferior models who include: “some movie stars, sports and TV prize winners, successful businessmen irrespective of their character or moral stature, etc.” The problem is nearly everyone who voted for Trump, unconsciously or consciously, wants to be like him. Many have become mechanical imitations of him. Others frightening exaggerations. Trump, as an inferior model and master of the dynamic power of visual images, has been incredibly successful in getting people to be their worst selves.

“To annihilate the self-hood of deceit & false forgiveness” (Milton). Painting by William Blake.

Assagioli suggests that one way to debunk unworthy models is to uncover their biographic narrative to reveal all their human frailties, unhappiness, and frustration. But Trump has shown his instinct for survival by crying ‘fake news,’ dismissing his failures in delusional denials, and tweeting his kudos. It might actually be too late. After all, the mental and emotional images of the Golden Hero he pretends to be seem firmly introjected in the minds of his followers.

So how do we get out of this? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “The world is upheld by the veracity of good men; they make the earth wholesome.” We must turn our gaze, media obsession, and internet clicks away from idols and instead honor the true heroes in our midst. Not only those heroes and heroines around us but those inside us. Emerson also said, “Other men are lenses though which we read our own minds.”

Seek those men and women who express the best inside you. Touch their cloak of wisdom and be healed. Celebrate them. Make them known. Let their light radiate your virtuous seeds of love and will. Then grow – no thrive! – and learn how to become the Great Being you are meant to be.

Rabindranath Tagore
Compassion and The Buddha The Christ (from Assagioli’s Archives).

Home in the Midst of War

Spring and Lent Promise Joyous Renewal

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DSC01928 Burn — In the Umbrian countryside, it is time to burn old growth.

We are in the middle of Lent – a time before Easter when Christians seek purification through fasting, prayer, and charitable acts. The forty days of Lent are, in many ways, similar to the Islamic time of Ramadan, which I was fortunate enough to experience while living in Egypt. During Ramadan, Moslems are expected to fast as well as give alms and read the Qur’an.

Assagioli wrote extensively on what he called “the science of applied purification”, insisting that this work must be undertaken in order to transform the lower characteristics of our personality and bring unity to our soul. He described purification of the personality as a process of re-orientation and elevation of the higher mind. Using our will, we burn the dross of our affective and instinctual energies, habits, tendencies and passions. Once clear of the obstacles that prevent us from receiving our higher intuitions, we are free to receive wisdom from the Higher Self. In other words, purification is a necessary process that we all must endure along the journey towards personal psychosynthesis before we are adequately equipped to seek spiritual psychosynthesis.

Dante-Divine Comedy Mountain of Purgatory — Dante’s Mountain of Purgatory

Assagioli often referred to Dante’s Divine Comedy as a “wonderful guide and description” for our personal and spiritual development. He wrote:

“The first part of Dante’s pilgrimage is a long difficult path of purification and expiation across the kingdoms of his lower nature. Divine wisdom is not revealed to him directly: in his impure, unregenerated state, still surrounded by the impenetrable veil of matter, man is unable to directly contemplate the supreme truth.”

Similarly, Evelyn Underhill, in her classic book Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness, wrote that Dante’s Purgatorio was a period of “self-stripping, which no mystic system omits.”

I find it interesting that Lent – this period of purification and expiation – always coincides with the time before and after the spring equinox. In the Italian countryside, now is the time to prune the olive and fruit trees, prepare the land for spring planting, clean the manure out of donkey stables, and clip back the vines. At the same time, as I walk through the open fields, rabbits and hares flash by, pheasants in their brilliant plumage call out, and deer start to appear at dusk. My neighbors’ chickens and geese are all suddenly busy laying. Often I am graced with a dozen fresh eggs.

DSC04110 eggs — What to do when your neighbor gives you so many fresh chicken and geese eggs? Make ravioli of course!

For the Italian contadini, early spring (like Lent) is a time of clearing away dead wood, burning unnecessary growth, and discarding all that is old and no longer serves. And while this process of pruning and clearing and cleaning takes place, we are simultaneously able to enjoy the beginnings of new life.

Levels of Purification

Body. Assagioli calls on us to purify ourselves on many different levels. The first step is purification of the body. This means a healthy diet; avoidance of alcohol, tobacco, drugs; and plenty of exercise, fresh air and water. However, he does warn that when we become too fixated on physical purification, we can actually hinder other more important practices.

Emotions. Assagioli insists that what is most urgently needed is purification of our emotions. We start with identifying our feelings, sensations, thoughts and desires and then disidentifying from them. He wrote:

“What is the significance of ‘purity of heart’?

Complete absence of personal desires – absence of every thought for oneself – the abandonment of every idea or desire for compensation or benefit – full disinterest – self-giving – the renouncement of every pleasure, of every personal satisfaction.”

Imagination. Perhaps even more vital today, given all the images available to us through social media, is our need to purify our imagination. More than 50 years ago, Assagioli named these images that exploited “man’s morbid fascination for violence, horror, cruelty, and perverted sex.” He called them “collective poison, a psychological smog”. We all know how viral these images are today (along with tweets, which are simply verbal images as opposed to true discourse) and how harmful they have become to society as a whole.

To clear such psychological smog, Assagioli calls us to practice reflective meditation, mental silence, and the self-identification exercise. The goal is to eliminate all impurities from the personality that are preventing us from being receptive to the energies from the Higher Self or God. Assagioli wrote:

“Joy is one achievement that follows purification and the active practice of virtue. Joy is a result of a state of purity, of the absence of egoism, of harmony with God and with humankind.”

Purification for the Planet

Our personal act of purification is not just for ourselves alone. It also desperately needs to be carried out because, when we do this work, we are also participating in the great work of planetary purification.

DSC01957 Bruno — Bruno (76 years old) becomes one with the tree he is pruning.

At the physical level, when we purify our bodies, we also are helping to raise consciousness at a higher, collective level. We bring energy to matter in its entirety – animal, vegetable, and mineral – helping to purify it from contamination and exploitation, a result of humankind’s selfish purposes. Assagioli even suggests that we can symbolically purify and bless matter by spraying our cash with perfumed holy water!

At an emotional level, our purification helps to energize the dispersion of negative emotions in the world. Purification at our mental level helps to melt down and destroy old concepts, dogma, fanaticism and ideologies that produce fears and have hypnotized many people. We turn to Assagioli again:

“A nation is an entity, a soul analogous to a human soul: it can be noble and high or selfish, proud, overbearing. It is about educating, raising, purifying the soul of one’s nation, of which each of us is a part.”

In the end, purification brings redemption. Our souls, through suffering and sacrifice, are renewed. Like the olive tree and the grapevines whose branches are cut bare, promising new fruit, we too are reduced to our true selves, ready for new, fresh growth.

Love and Will

A psychosynthesis approach to living