The Nobility of Poop

02 09, 2021

A new (to me) quote I’m pondering: “It is the time to leave the Flatland of conscienceless and unconscious pursuits.  It is time to move on to something greater and more noble.”  David G. Yurth

When I first read this quote, I heard the emphasis on the quality or character of the pursuits, conscienceless and unconscious. I heard the imperative, as if we could or should leave the pursuits themselves behind.  I’ve held it in my mind now while moving through my pursuits during the days and it occurrs to me that I could think of it as not simply what we pursue, but who we are when we pursue our pursuits and how we are pursuing them.

Saturday, I had a day of ‘ranch work’, which included hauling horse poop out to the back pasture to be spread.  My wheelbarrow had had a blow out, the rains came, and the best I could do to keep up with the ongoing accumulation was to create ‘staging piles’, 3 of them, away from the area where the boys eat. So every morning instead of loading my wheel barrow, I carried the droppings over to the closest staging pile.  The replacement tire had to be ordered so this newly arranged “system” got protracted and now removal was a major project.  The silver side to this dark cloud is that in the meantime I learned of a fellow who refurbishes ‘yard tractors’ and resells them for a song.  NO more hauling with the wheelbarrow!  But still it took 6 loads in my new yard tractor wagon to get it all redistributed to the back.  The piles still had to be shoveled into the wagon, of course.  Here’s where I’m going with this story.  While heaving each loaded manure fork into the wagon I heard, ‘what quality could I bring to this pursuit, not only physically but also energetically, such that it would be ‘greater and more noble’.  It was about more than just the specific cause being served, the stewardship of my horses, although there is a nobility in that for sure.  It was, “who am I, how do I show up for this task, is ease and grace possible here, what elegance is there in fluid repetitive motion, what lightness of being is available just in feeling the aliveness of my body and the devotion of my attention.”  Attention is Life Energy; to what am I devoted while shoveling this poop? My ponderings crossed over into the ‘Divine Feminine meets Divine Masculine’ conversation.  I won’t go through all the angles I played with in that part of the inquiry.  But eventually I got beyond the mental concept of ‘no separation’ and into the sensation of energy moving through energy, energy exchanging information with energy, breath, exertion, trees, mother earth, father sky….and poop (the great recycling of life energy!  😊)

This and the other fractured musings have opened up a kind of portal of perception; things are played out on the stage in my days, memories come back to mind in a new frame, insights about my mother and my ancestors (in the context of the Divine Feminine)… more to be continued.