Page 65 - ECOlogic Book

Anima Mundi
(Winter, 1992)

The multiflora roses that grow wild here snag my corduroys and clutch at my
hair so that I cannot go forward. What looked like a clear path has
narrowed to become a dense and treacherous undergrowth. There is only
one way to get disentangled. Go back. Reverse every motion that got you
here, and back up slowly, in a kind of backwards Tai Chi.

Thus I begin to read the scriptures of this place. I clumsily learn the rules.
Rule number 1: Do not charge into underbrush, expecting to plow through
to a clearing. Not in this place. In this place, if the path narrows, back is
the only way you can go.

It’s painful for me to see how slowly I learn. The syntax of south central
New Jersey, while carrying some of the same features as Lower Michigan,
has some surprises that cannot be glossed over. The Queen Anne’s lace and
sumac, so much like Michigan’s, hide the sharp multiflora thorns and deer
ticks, small as sesame seeds, whose choice of you for their host can product
painful symptoms and even result in heart failure from Lyme’s disease.

At first, I thought the local people too cautious, tucking pant legs into sox
before going for a walk. Now, after picking two ticks off my cat, I tuck mine
in too. It’s like learning a second language; deciphering a foreign accent.
There are other grammars here too. Humidity, even on cool days, articulated
by glasses fogging up for no apparent reason, and the distant hazy blue hills
which get clearer as the day ripens; hard red rock barely under the surface
of the soil, making gardening a challenge to muscle as well as heart.

I watch and listen as the things of this place present themselves to me. If I
ignore them, their expression can become quite vivid, as the bleeding thorn
scratch on my hand attests.
Each of these nuances is woven together with the others to create an
expression of being. All of it together, including my own decision to bend a
rose cane forcefully away from my path, are the expression of this bioregion,
and, ultimately, of anima mundi, the World Soul.

Anima mundi is the idea that the world or the earth itself has a vital principle
or soul and that all that animates the earth is an expression of it. During the
Renaissance, artists and philosophers were familiar with the expression.
Much of the art of that period expresses it.

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