Stirrings In The Belly
Integrity is an embodiment practice
Back in the day, my ex-husband and I owned an organic farm. We raised sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, and ducks at various points. Our first animals were sheep, and I find myself drawn back to memories of them this time of year. One of the things I did not know, city-girl that I was before moving to the farm, was that lambing actually starts, at least in Upstate NY, when there is often still snow heavy on the ground and the wind blows fiercely.
Why?!? I would wonder as I carted water in five-gallon buckets from the house to the barn through snowdrifts, would any animal be designed to birth into this frigid misery? Despite knowing that the timing of births was entirely decided by when we chose to breed the herd so that we could have meat ready for market at the right season, I would grumble as I stumbled along that it must be because sheep are dumb. (They are not, as any shepherd will tell you, the sharpest tools in the shed. Those are pigs. Pigs are dangerously smart.)
Entering the barn I’d be shocked every time by how cozy it was. Even with the back door wide open to give those ewes not yet confined to lambing pens the freedom to come and go, all those bodies and all that hay made for a surprisingly warm, almost womb-like atmosphere. The ewes were eating and nursing. The newborn lambs were soft and stumbling and curious. Every step was cushioned and muted by the hay strewn thickly underfoot. Having slogged out filled with crankiness, I then resented the necessity to go back to the house. Why not climb into one of the pens, let a lamb curl up in my lap, and just stay?
Integrity is an embodiment practice. It is an exercise in living out our beliefs in the manifest world— in the concrete bodies, lives, and communities we actually have, not the ideal realities we might wish for. I have never had any patience for any philosophy that is not grounded by application, what Quakers call the necessity of faith and practice. Philosophies must be concretely applicable. If you can’t tell me how a particular belief actually works on a daily basis in your relationships and community, what world it creates, then what use is it?
Still, I have no problem admitting that embodiment is difficult. The rarified air inside my own head is a much more comfortable place to spend my time, even if I know that bringing what I believe out into the world is necessary. When I struggle to sink into manifest reality in order to choose where and how to apply myself, I turn to the pagan calendar. It grounds me in the now and reminds me there is an energy to each particular point in the year, a wisdom that I can place myself inside of.
In the Wheel of the Year, as the pagan calendar is also known, tomorrow begins the festival of Imbolc. It lasts from sundown on February 1st until sundown on February 2nd. Imbolc is said to derive from the old Celtic word Im-bolg, meaning “in the belly”. At the midway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, Imbolc is a fire festival honoring the Goddess Brigid. Brigid, it turns out, was associated with sheep and ewe’s milk. No wonder, in the barn arranged for lambing, I felt I was entering a holy space, a pole barn transformed into Brigid’s womb.
The significance of Imbolc lies in its in-betweenness. It’s not the deep dark of the Winter Solstice, nor the full emergence of life at the Spring Equinox. At Imbolc, the roots and bulbs and seeds are stirring underground, out of sight. We only know because we recall the inevitability of the coming spring. We believe that vibrant life is working its way back to the surface because we witness the lambs. They help us remember and hope.
All of life follows this same pattern no matter the season. An idea, a seed, a plan, a life is planted in the literal or metaphorical dark, where the thing that will eventually emerge did not previously exist. So much happens under the surface, away from the naked eye, as this new thing gestates. So much faith is required to wait and trust and guard in anticipation of the emergence.
We resist this seasonal knowing in the modern world. It’s dark when we say it will be dark, we insist. We don’t need faith! If we want to see what’s happening underneath, penetrate the mystery, technology is available to reassure our eyes that what we want is on its way.
But, of course, we can’t witness the deep stirrings of everything. Neither those comparatively short-lived things that are seeded and growing deep within our hearts nor those epic things seeded and growing deep within cultures. Individually, this is why we need honest self-reflection, in order to remember what we have seeded and birthed before. If we refuse to analyze any dissonance between what we believe we are seeding and what we are actually creating we aren’t honoring mystery. We’re being willfully ignorant of our responsibility for what we bring into the world.
Collectively, this is why we need to embrace accurate history, so we can remember what has grown and emerged in our culture previously. The recent banning by a Tennessee school board of the Holocaust-focused book Maus is a willful attempt to thwart memory and reject history as if hiding from children the reality of the world will somehow protect them from it. Might as well set up lambing pens outside in the middle of a blizzard, or keep the sheep inside the house and never let their feet touch the grass. Both are unnatural and don’t make for safe, healthy animals or children.
I am feeling this in-betweenness keenly, and the challenges of faith it entails. Nothing is as it was, but what it will be is completely unclear. Attending to the Wheel of the Year helps me to trust the process, to remember what is and is not in my control. My integrity is one of the only things on the latter list.
If you’re not a regular listener to the Unlocking Us podcast you may have missed the latest episode, which is right up our alley. It was called Living Into Our Values. You’d think someone on their staff was a subscriber to this newsletter!
They provided a tool for thinking critically about what your values are and how well you’re bringing them into your life. Check it out and see if it’s helpful for your integrity practice. I’d be curious to hear.