The Soul in Grief
Excerpt from the chapter Grief and Mourning: The Greening of the Soul:
"The morning process is a greening process, and green consciousness, that force which drives the flower and runs deeply and silently in our veins, plunges into the dark soil of the earth, where all is night. In these vegetable veins "circulate the juices drawn up from the rocks and realms of the mole, the worm and the microorganisms of the soil..." Now I was there, in that night below the earth, where I felt the greening of my soul begin. In these dank, dark green depths of the soul in mourning, I heard only the sound of myself being enwrapped within a vegetable cocoon. The sound, like green leaves being torn from a ripened ear of corn, filled my ears, flooded the house, and echoed in the world. I could not escape it, even in sleep. It was a mournful dirge, a death song being sung for me, the threnody or funeral hymn of my transformation into vegetable life, the sound of my own soul becoming green. Do you believe me when I tell you that I could tell no one of this because I was struck down by it, like Dylan Thomas says with respect to the crooked rose? That elemental force which blasts the roots of trees and is our destroyer is not some thing with which we have a conversation. I was beyond language as this green vegetable force in the dark night of the earth worked itself into my flesh, pierced my skin, cracked my bones, and soaked up the blood in my veins. In the elemental world of the morning soul, time moves very slowly. Measured by the clock, I was gone perhaps for a day or two at different moments. But measured by the rhythms of the soul, I lay in my vegetable cocoon for an eternity. Eons had passed, and in the space my thoughts evaporated, my mind stopped and only a sensuous awareness remained. There were sounds, smells, tastes, textures, but it was not me or my personal mind which experienced them. Instead, there was a kind of identification with them, so that in these moments the boundary between myself in the world disappeared. 'I' was the warmth that only barely penetrated the depths of 'my' vegetable tomb...
"Light, darkness, warmth, cold— in these moments only these cycles of hours and seasons mattered. But they mattered in their fullness, so that within the cycles each ray of morning light was exuberance, a moment when tomb seems like womb. That first moment of warmth, of low heat after the cold darkness of the night, and every first moment of morning, was always a primal beginning. Each morning moment was all of creation in that one moment. My green soul-raw, new-was singular and complete in this way, without the horizons of memory or desire. Tucked within the rhythms of the world's green being, woven into the vegetable fabric of creation, the 'I' who was the weaver disappeared. Mourning bathes the soul in the ancient, slow rhythms and the deep wisdom of the green world. Heinrich Heine spoke of this wisdom in imagining the dream of a tree. Imagining "an isolated spruce slumbering under the ice and snow, lost in solitude upon an errid northern plane," he wondered if this "spruce dreams of a palm tree which, way off in the distance Orient, grieves, solitary and taciturn up on the slope of a burning rock. "Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Reverie, reminds us that in Heine's native german the spruce is masculine and the palm feminine. Bachelard wonders: "what a lot of dreams are directed toward the feminine tree, open in every one of its palms, attentive to every breeze. "That feminine tree, that palm of the orient, that exuberance of green toward which the winter spruce directs it's dreaming, Bachelard rightly calls a "vegetable siren." In the mourning, my soul was called by this vegetable siren, by the green of the world, lured by it's wet, pungent odors. Penetrated below my mind by it's damp, moist morning mists, my mourning soul was wrapped within its odorous embrace. But the soul in mourning has its own wisdom, and again the 'I', that small piece of me which still remained, was further undone toward the next stage, that of Earth's surrender to rot and decay, to something older than itself. Mourning is a descent into the unconscious, that murky domain of experience which has been the province of psychology. But, what does psychology know of the green world of the soul?"
Books mentioned:
The Soul in Grief by Robert Romanyshyn
