Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, Ace of Cups by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot, in front of a ledge of plants next to a window with lots of light and early summer greens coming in. In the card, a disembodied hand is coming out of a cloud holding a golden cup with water spilling over its edges. A dove is descending on the cup with the eucharist in the dove’s mouth.
I have no idea what I'll write about when I open my laptop this morning. I type out how the glorious magic of early summer is here: A tight and then relaxing sherbet-colored zucchini blossom; pea pods with snow-colored petals still dangling from their ends helpless to their own becoming; purple sage flowers.
Because I’m still reading this book Becoming Divine by Grace Jantzen, I start thinking about a garden as a teacher of becoming. Of the ways in which meaning unfurls and insists on change. Of the inadequacy in the idea of “being,” with its fixedness. Of the fruitfulness that is available when natality is the indisputable starting point; a seed, a start, a well-tended patch of soil.
After a couple hours of writing, I come back to these early words and realize, I wrote an Offering about tending well and being well-tended. I hope you like it.
The grounds are changing again as they promise to do and I am paying attention as well as I know how. I didn't read much this week. Instead I used my morning hours in bodily ways; I wrote and stretched and walked Mango early, to beat the immanent heat of a new June in Pennsylvania. Because reading is such an integral part of the Offerings, I wasn't sure what would be here for me to put on the page this morning.
I had a meeting a few days ago with someone whose ideas I respect. I’d requested the time to talk and ask questions about post-structuralism and deconstruction and then I cried the whole time. Don't worry for me, I needed the cry. I’m tender about these things, and protective of my troubles. Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble is peeking at me over my laptop screen as I type this.
Donna Haraway, who introduced me to the word bumptious. Though I’m becoming increasingly aware of the inherent instability of language (thanks, Jacques Derrida) I can work with the consensus meaning of this word bumptious which is “self-assertive or proud to an irritating degree.”
In a brazen moment of her own Haraway names “the task” in times of trouble, which is "to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response.”
Self-interested as we are, much as we insist upon ourselves and our desires, Haraway is saying that it is our work to become capable of responsiveness.
This task is entangled with other tasks including "to make kin” and “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” This requires “learning to be truly present as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters and meanings.”
Re-reading this passage from Haraway's introduction to her iconic book, I push past the judgments I have when someone tells me to be truly present. And I think about why I cried in my meeting.
I cried not only because the path is beautiful but because the person I met there paid the realest attention to what I came with that I have been paid in a long time. I’m a lucky one. I know people—many, actually—who haven't been paid that sort of attention their whole lives, and maybe never will. That sort of attention is exceedingly rare, difficult to pay, and maybe harder yet to find when you most need it.
I cried in the meeting because everything in that space made way for a sword and this person held out a cup to me, instead. After all, I deliberately came to talk about philosophy. I named that in my email, and again at the top of the hour.
But there was something to my fixation with understanding. With the needing to get it right. Safeguarding, wanting purity. Needing to know, or to be validated, or to be told I got it. There was a desperation, a grab for something so human to want. For closure, one might say.
Something else was waiting to be seen. And something had brought me to the door of a person who knows how to look for water.
I welled up.
“What's that about?”