Muddy Mysticism by Natalie Bryant Rizzieri

Author:Natalie Bryant Rizzieri [Bryant Rizzieri, Natalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781910559567
Publisher: Womancraft Publishing
Published: 2021-04-07T23:00:00+00:00

Within the pulse of flesh,

in the dust of being, where we trudge,

turning our hungry gaze this way and that,

the wings of morning

brush through our blood

as cloud-shadows brush the land.

What we desire travels with us.

We must breathe time as fishes breath water.

God’s flight circles us.

— Denise Levertov 45

Very, very slowly over the next few years and decades, I learned to welcome the signs of hunger as a rightful voice and as a voice not disconnected to the divine. Still to this day, hunger is part of my sacred liturgy and my spiritual practice. This is one simple entrance into mysticism. Here I circle back, time and again, to be with the Real. I listen to a voice deep within for signs of hunger and satiation. I get lost sometimes, but I can begin again each morning, each meal. For some people, this might be second nature. Eating when hungry and ceasing when full might be unconscious and if that is the case, I have some envy, if I’m honest. But mostly I marvel (and bless) how those instincts are still intact. I hope those individuals can relish in the wholeness of this dance between body and soul, making it an occasionally conscious prayer. For myself, for whom the wires crossed long ago, I continue to embark on this daily fundamental act of prayer. Every day I seek to recover and unbury the voice within, responding to it. Eating is an embodied act and I seek such an embodied mysticism that I cannot help but explore the ways that eating is a bringing forth, an ushering in of life. Barbara Brown Taylor says that “if all life is holy, then anything that sustains life has holy dimensions too.” 46 I think of my newborns, only minutes old, finding their way through sheer instinct to my breasts. I think of the way mothers wait and worry over their milk coming in. I think of the elation I feel watching my toddler eating a healthy meal. It is holy – all of it.

Intimacy with our food may be a way to be more intimate with the divine given that the spiritual life needs to be rooted in the dirt. Our food and nourishment are most literally rooted in soil. There are so many old practices and contemporary movements that have surfaced in recent years around the sacredness and divinity of food. We hear how, through what we eat, our bodies are tied together with the land and the ever-widening circles that expand from there, due to an ever-more connected world.

Some who have the privilege and the means may try to make those circles smaller so that justice can be advocated on this basic level of sustenance. Eating inevitably steeps us in issues of justice and equality, poverty and waste. Even the fact that only the privileged have the opportunity to eat organically or locally is a huge problem. But this propulsion into the wider world initiated through our need to nourish our bodies also asks the muddy mystic to engage in sacred activism, rather than retreat into a hermitage.

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