From spiritual ecology to spirituals ecology
A manifesto for thinking global, but writing local on the trail of Sherman's March
I just received word that my application for a fellowship—one which I had coveted and whose every word I’d labored over—got rejected. And once again on a green day in spring-come-too-soon, I was blue and second-guessing myself.
The nice note I received from the competition sponsor generously pointed out that mine was one of 1800+ applications for 24 slots—which should not have surprised, given the fellowship covered months of coaching and culminated in a weeklong retreat at a monastery in Devonshire. As in England. Sadly, the winners have yet to be announced so it’s impossible to brood over what manner of mega-star eclipsed the feeble flicker of my own little narrative candle. And hilariously—I still don’t know what spiritual ecology is.
Are you surprised to find me so focused on a question so abstract 10 days into what appears to be World War III? I say, why shouldn’t I be? If the apocalypse is indeed hurtling toward us, there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Plus, if the collapse of all systems created to advance the project of colonialism is indeed at hand, then someone needs to be thinking of what comes next, what foundation it’s going to stand on. And a whole ‘nother approach to our relations with the physical world and each other—the literal meaning of the word ecology—is certainly overdue.
But having swung for the fences with this application and failed, I’m struggling. How did I screw it up? And what is this SE thing anyway? How does one write within its framework? Should one approach it as if it were a religion? (And I mean by that any religion, whether that of the Bible or the Upanishads). Can religion, so often conceived as exclusive, even work as a vocabulary for sharing SE? And if we make the attempt, then how to reconcile that vocabulary with other ways of apprehending our fates on this blue Earth?
If a spiritual ecology cannot conjure with … spirits,
what claim does it have to spirituality at all?
For example, the view, anathema to the average religionist but common to the mystic and the quantum scientist, that all matter is energy—agitant, undulating, and interconnected; the appearance of solid substance is itself just an illusion. So … does that then mean that what we perceive dimly behind that veil, how we explain it to ourselves, is that the spiritual ecology which the sponsors seek to nurture?
It matters to me not just because I’m competitive, and want to win next time, not just because I’m a critic, constantly parsing words—but because I had a shattering experience of spirit evoked by the ecotone of western South Carolina and middle Georgia last weekend and I’m struggling for a language to describe it. This, in fact, has been my dilemma from the start of this blog. I wanted it to be a garden diary—framed it as a refuge from all that ugliness out in the world. But my work and the world keep poking through.
I thought, hoped a spiritual ecology approach might help me bridge my conflicting impulses… but when I read the journals where writing from this perspective is to be found, well, I find very high mountains and very deep lakes; I find species whose fates hang by gossamer threads; most of all I find writing that moves sometimes at the cellular level, sometimes at the height of clouds—infinitesimal and grand, beautiful and important and meaningful—but so very very far away.
Have I read too shallowly, not read enough, or is it simply that I find too little connection between these dispatches from, say, the Amazon, and the world I move through? I mean, the cut-up and commodotized, used-up and abandoned landscape of the back country South, which I love and whose sufferings torment me.
The shudder that ripples through my awareness when the high breaks 80° before the 1st of March, the pang that wrings my heart every time I head out for a pleasant country drive only to find miles more pine forest decimated by loggers’ trucks—these perhaps are too commonplace for luminous, high-minded prose. But in so often privileging the distant and exotic over the landscapes through which most of us move, with their bloody and haunted pasts, does spiritual ecology at times risk becoming, in practice, a tool for spiritual bypassing.
That insight came forcefully home to me the last weekend of Black History Month, as I drove to Milledgeville, Georgia, for a talk at the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities. I was there for the Southern Gothic Lecture Series and whipped up a talk on ”vodun/voodoo,” “hoodoo,” and the hit film Sinners for the community. I planned to position myself as the debunker-in-chief of silly ghost stories; ironically, I was the one who ended up bludgeoned by conjured spirits.
It’s amusing to me now that I had no idea, when I set out, as to where I was headed: that the route would take me through Saluda (which I’ve written of before as the town where my great-great grandmother fled slavery) deep into middle Georgia, the imaginative landscape of three chapters in the book I published summer before last, Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess.
The first inkling came when I crossed the storied Ogeechee River and found it wild and apparently undammed. Just moments later, I registered with shock signs for Hancock County and the city of Sparta, inspiration for Cane, a book that was the sensation of the Harlem Renaissance and whose author, Jean Toomer, has been beloved of every generation of Black poets since. The next few days would give me a new appreciation of the bitter irony of his “Portrait in Georgia,” which I’ll quote here.
Portrait in Georgia
Hair—braided chestnut,
coiled like a lyncher’s rope,
Eyes—fagots,
Lips—old scars, or the first red blisters,
Breath—the last sweet scent of cane,
And her slim body, white as the ash
Of black flesh after flame.By the time I fetched up two days later in Eatonton, at the Georgia Writers Museum, I was so overwhelmed by messages from ancestors and spirits that I simply broke down. Finding two barrel chairs facing the Joel Chandler Harris exhibit, I wrenched one around so that it faced Alice Walker instead and sobbed until I had no more tears to give.
It may take weeks, it may take a lifetime, to process everything I saw or heard on that trip. For example, that beautiful, historic inn so drenched in antebellum atmosphere that I found myself burning sage and praying to the spirits of the enslaved for protection from those racist Confederate ghosts whose images were plastered all over the walls. (I slept better that night than I have in years).
Neither will I ever forget the Gothic nightmare landscape of Milledgeville’s Central State, formerly the largest “Lunatick, Idiot and Epileptic Asylum” in the world (headcount: 12,000); or the horrific snippets of oral history my hosts shared—medical experiments at the asylum, murders and lynchings occurring as late as the 1960s. Those will ever haunt my waking moments.
Not to mention the weird juxtaposition of the Remus Museum and the Alice Walker homesite in Eatonton…
Driving home by way of an Augusta rendered nearly unrecognizable by Hurricane Helene, my body thrummed with the knowledge that I had been traveling the route of Sherman’s March, that the fires of Reconstruction and Redemption had blazed through every small town with a Confederate heroes statue through which I’d passed, and that every mile my gas-guzzling SUV traveled had been watered with blood.
It’s a violent, complicated history whose pitiless gaze our craven generation dares not meet—for some reason, I’ve been chosen to look it in the face.
And here’s what I now think, having confronted this haunted past whose depredations reverberate at the soul level, even today, having confronted the ancestral curses whose time tickets are coming due and our ancestors’ voices, clamoring to be heard:
If a spiritual ecology cannot conjure with these spirits, what claim does it have to spirituality at all?
So I’m closing the door, at least for the time being, on spiritual ecology—and opening the door to the notion of a spirituals ecology.
It’s a distinction with a difference, similar to the way Alice Walker among others chose to call herself a “womanist” in the 1970s rather than embrace a “feminism” that had way too much unfinished business around the issue of race.
I like the sound of it: spirituals ecology conjures my Gullah Geechee ancestors and their great contribution to American culture through spirituality and song. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote of us in The Souls of Black Folk, “they that walked in darkness sang songs in the olden days… for they were heavy of heart.” And those songs were a seed of Africa that took root in the New World and spread wherever people of the Senegambia-Kongo complex were planted—whether that was Lowcountry South Carolina, middle Georgia, the Caribbean … or all the way west to Mexico.1
That’s not to say that spirituals ecology doesn’t have a lot in common with the other kind. It does. Both, for example, consider all creation possessed of the spark of divinity. But spirituals ecology is distinguished by its determination to decolonize the spiritual, embrace the wisdom of Kongo, indigenous, Euro-pagan peoples and more, while specifically dedicating itself to healing “the hidden wounds” of the Columbian Encounter and all the crimes of invasion, conquest, and extraction that followed in its wake.
So… I didn’t start out to write a manifesto. But it looks like that’s just what I’ve done. And now I have a direction, I think, for the writing I really want to do at the threshold of the end of the world.
Here I’m referring to musicologist Eric Sean Crawford’s ground-breaking research tracing spirituals sung in Gullah to Black Seminole communities, called “Mascogos,” in Coahuila, Mexico. Though these are Spanish-speaking communities, they still carry traces of their cultural inheritance from Gullah-speaking slaves who escaped 17th and 18th century South Carolina and Georgia to flee to Florida.
I enjoyed your article very much!! Black history is always very moving. Thank you for sharing!
Beautiful writing, Kendra.