Bodies

Issue 27 of the Dark Mountain Project

Gina, George, Amaryllis. The smell of Grass on the wind. Thank you JaeCub for the photo.

Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

Warm rain tugs gently on last summer’s sunlight, stored through a long winter in the soil-dark. Grass roots respond, trustingly, releasing their final reserves. Fields green through the day. The saturation of color is the talk of the town. Someone at the hardware store has noticed on her way by the Farm. Well-drained fields green early, as do those well-loved by sheep and cattle.

Our generosity may leave us empty, but it is then our emptiness that tugs gently at the whole until the thing in motion returns to replenish us.¹

I don’t know that I’ll ever tire of the mystery contained in these words from Lewis Hyde. If there is to be a ‘gift economy’ it will begin with emptying. Fullness exerts little gravitational force. A full people don’t gather toward one another or the greening land. They clutch their reserves with a clenched fist. If hunger attracts, fullness repels, defends, excludes. If hunger invites relationship, fullness lives fearfully, forgets. Every time I fast, I have an easier time remembering.

Can you imagine a quality of faith that holds nothing back when the time comes—when it becomes clear that the Life contained in one’s body is essential to the Big Story?

Ruminants can smell grass growing this time of year, their bodies built from a cycle of seasonally-obedient self-emptying. When you live alongside sheep and cattle, the ebb and flow of grasses can appear almost tidal. Rising and receding, the green Life they carry must pass into other bodies before returning as food at their feet—with a plop.

Sheep and cow bodies are simply above-ground winter storehouses, sunlight-become-sugar-become-flesh and fat, bones and blood. I say ‘simply’ with a degree of awe that borders on envy. I have a hunch that our centuries-long pursuit of perpetual fullness has diminished our ability to imagine these human bodies in the same way—as above-ground storehouses of light. As lighthouses. As beings who grant Life to others.

If there is to be a ‘gift economy’, it will begin by loosening our grasp on what we thought was ours, by figuring out how we were meant to be food for others. It sounds scary, no? From the standpoint of fullness, self-emptying can sound like dying. Perhaps the ‘gift economy’ begins by remembering how to die into one another. But such a quality of generosity doesn’t originate in humans. We learn it through careful observation of the greening land—where wealth is stored in the ground. And then released again each spring as food for those who walk in the light.

Last summer I learned that The Dark Mountain Project had issued a ‘call for submissions’ for their 2025 spring issue with a focus on BODIES. Dark Mountain began more than a dozen years ago with a manifesto, written by

Dougald Hine

and

Paul Kingsnorth

, called Uncivilization, a call to writers and artists to respond to the compounding ecological and social crises of our time. Ever since, a group of committed hearth tenders have been collecting responses from all over the world and binding them into gorgeous, hard-cover books each spring and fall. I came across the project nearly seven years ago, and the conversation I found in those books generously fed a hungry imagination.

‘What does the work of food gifting have to say about bodies?’ I thought as I read the call for submissions. Then I remembered another image from Lewis Hyde:

Perfect gift is like the blood pumped through its vessels by the heart. Our blood is a thing that distributes the breath throughout the body, a liquid that flows when it carries the inner air and hardens when it meets the outer air, a substance that moves freely to every part but is nonetheless contained, a healer that goes without restraint to every needy place in the body. It moves under pressure….and inside its vessels the blood, the gift, is neither bought nor sold and it comes back forever.

If the gift flows like blood, “without restraint to every needy place in the body”, could I imagine this human life as an organ with the larger body of the place I call home? That question proved a fertile starting point for a piece of writing called The Gift Flock, which the Dark Mountain editors have included in the forthcoming issue. It’s a huge honor to contribute, in a small way, to an effort that has meant so much to me for so long.

The Dark Mountain Project functions as a cultural act of self-emptying. The artists contribute work as a gift. The Dark Mountain editors labor to curate and hone the offerings and then hand pack and ship many hundreds of books out into the world. The book price tag pays the printers and a portion of the monthly living expenses of the core team, including the remarkable

Charlotte Du Cann

.

You can support the Dark Mountain Project by purchasing a copy of BODIES, or attending an online launch of the book this Wednesday at 2:30pm EDT. They’ve asked me to read a bit from The Gift Flock at the LAUNCH, including the following lines:

With some regularity, I knock on the door of a person who lives nearby with a box of grass-fed lamb or beef in my hands. I introduce myself and invite them to receive the meat as a gift. Without fail, the consumer/stranger in the doorway transforms into a sustainer/neighbor before my eyes. “But surely someone needs this more than I do,” they say. Can you imagine hearing that statement in the aisles of the grocery store—the butcher pleading with shoppers to please take home some of the darn meat before it spoils?

In the presence of food that is for sale, we tend to ask, “What do I want?” and “Can I afford it?” The locus of consideration is the self, the same one doing both the asking and the answering. The same one we disparagingly call a consumer.

In the presence of food that is a gift, we ask, “Am I worthy, or could I imagine myself so?” We ask “What is the appropriate portion size?” and, “Are all the other neighbors being sustained?”

With love and thanks to the hearth tenders,

Adam

1. The Gift, by Lewis Hyde.