Written immediately after attending Mother of Compost by Noémie Huttner-Koroson 4th January 2023.
Review of a previous iteration of this performance: https://www.theatretravels.org/post/review-mother-of-compost-at-blue-room-theatre
I’m currently trying to figure out how to write more freely about queer saints and share these thoughts. So I might start a blog series of free-written offerings/sermons/prayers like these. I’ll go back to edit them after, but I feel like that spontaneous long-form gushing is something BlogSpot allowed millennials to do that we haven’t been able to do since social media in bite-sized posts became our mode of communication.
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A Garbled Offering to the Mother of All Things
I’m standing in your shrine. Not one of the fancy ones with thousands of pilgrims flocking to see you. You usually don’t come to visit smaller shrines like these, and so I feel safer coming here to offer up my prayer.
This is just one of those average neighbourhood ones where you have a devoted mendicant tending to your graven image. This one is kindly to the people who come travel-worn and slightly out of breath. They pulled up an old plastic chair with its legs cut down to stool-height. They put on the old kettle in the pantry and gave me a mug of tea with too much sugar in it. They made me smile for all that’s warm and comforting in this world. I winced when the too-hot-to-drink-yet tea scalded me. You always knew how to make domestic comforts sting and burn.
I almost couldn’t find my way to you this time. I made three wrong turns and got two sets of wrong instructions from the main street to this spot. My GPS wasn’t working right. I was almost about to try and find my way back home when I spotted some signs pointing the way to the shrine. It’s almost as though you wanted me to experience a tiny miracle in way-finding. A way of reintroducing yourself to me I suppose.
It has been years since you told me to get out of your home. I don’t know why I bothered coming back. I’m still angry at you. I think you know that. I don’t think you know how it feels to carry this weight. I’ve let it go so many times in therapy sessions that I have paid more than a year’s rent for. The weight still returns. Sometimes like a ton of bricks. Other times more gradually. So gradually that I don’t realise my back is bent and stooped and straining from the pull of gravity until someone helps me to let it loose.
I wonder about how you look like now. Whether you still wear your long patterned dresses. You used to love the pink one with the floral print. I wanted to wear it but I was never the right size. Too short one moment, too large and ungainly the next. I grew too big for your home, expansively queer before you were ready to learn alongside me. My strange body moved from couch to couch, finding family in ramshackle homes and drag queens’ changing rooms. Oh how I loved them, for the meals eaten ravenously and with heaping bowls of ice-cream for dessert. For the porridge cooked with the last remaining chicken. For the convenience store ready-meals I ate fresh from the microwave as me and my newfound sibling waited out a blizzard outside. For the queer elders, with glitter makeup caked on their fantastically wrinkly faces, they would pinch my cheeks and tell me how helplessly young I was, how the world was all mine to experience.
It would be irreverent to think of you having wrinkles. I think no matter how you change, this fear of aging, of becoming bygone and irrelevant, thing amongst all things will be the one consistent trait that will let me identify you through the ages.
You are the mother of all things. And so it says in the scriptures that because you are all things – within you the binaries do not exist. This lexical mess of good and evil, sanctified and damned, prophecy and heresy, all of this will become whole again in your abundant womb, the cosmic birthplace of all things.
Instead of coming to you and your priests for advice I’ve been listening to some amazing podcasts. I miss you voice but I fear your old ways. I never know when they might creep up on me. In these podcasts I find other people who have gone through the same, similar or far worse hurts than I have. There’s a mutual understanding of all the grief and shame and sorrow that has already been felt, and so having acknowledged that in the first five, ten, fifteen minutes – the rest of the time is devoted to joy.
The words they use are more expansive, more gentle than any of the words you sang to me as lullabies. I know that you loved me once with all the fierceness of an over-protective tiger. Your lullabies were math formulas mixed with rules for how to dress. As I ate my cereal for breakfast, you told me to be cautious about friends and warned me to never trust the neighbours.
I’m relieved that you are better now with your other children. At least they tell me that you are when we meet by chance in the street. You tell my younger siblings that it is alright to be true to themselves, that it is wonderful for them to fearlessly declare themselves to the world. I am glad for them. I am glad for you, that you are now the kind of mother I could have grown up safely with. I’m still angry, but it is soft rather than hard. The elements, the ever-present breaking down of microorganisms, they have done their work on me. I am relieved by how pliable my anger now is.
Did you know that some priests are using books you previously threw into bonfires as scripture? They use books about school children learning witchcraft and pop culture references that spawn off into homoerotic fanfiction. I think your priests learned a bit too much from them. Even just a few years back I could safely assume that anything of the outside world would be sacrilegious to be mentioned in a sermon. If I went to a mass conducted by one of your order I could expect to be lulled by the familiar stories. Now I don’t know when they’ll make a reference to an inter-galactic time lord or misappropriate a tradition for fixing broken things. When I hear the stories that kept me alive being used in your name something in me breaks. I walk as calmly as I can to the exit and leave the congregation in tears.
I know you have changed. Sometime in the last millennia you have decided that it is unhealthy to have a faith that is made of stagnant unmoving waters where no doubts ever make some ripples. You are now the mother of all things. The mother of all classes, for richer or poorer, in sickness or in health. The mother of the world-weary and those driven by a fire in the belly. The mother of all peoples, nations, creeds and orientations. The mother who has gone beyond the human realms to reconnect with the wider existence that has always been waiting for this acknowledgement. The mother of the sky and the galaxies beyond. The mother of tectonic plates that move seemingly of their own whim. The mother of the currents that move everything on the surface of this little world we inhabit. The mother of all creatures great and small. The mother of the giant trees to the grasses that grow in the cracks. The mother of the fungal substrate that holds the forest together in soil. The mother of homes and hearths that will exist long after humankind loses its status as the apex predator. The mother who will nurture and guide us into this existence. The mother who will take us back into the womb to be reborn.
Perhaps that’s what I’m waiting for. Some sign or certainty that yes, a rebirth is possible. But I may be imposing a wish upon you. I hate to think of the chore of cleaning up whatever has been left by your earlier legacy. It won’t be the dream of productive toil through the quiet tending of a garden. It will be sopping up giant spills of chemicals. It will be hauling rubbish out of landfills. It will be painstakingly measuring and recording every property we have stolen in order to make reparations to the land. You, who still own everything in this world, you know what you are owed. You never asked for it back, not really, but a mother knows how to send a message to her children.
You must allow me a little grudge against you. I have only started learning how to love freely in recent years. Away from the anxious fear of my childhood, I embrace, I kiss, I savour shared company. You taught me so much more than what I remember you did – you must have been there when I toddled upwards into a rebellious teenager. I am sorry for only remembering the hurt. I’m hoping someday that I’m not wrong in saying that there was joy even then, even with you back then.
I’m asking today for a little peace. I’m lighting a candle to you in a niche in a shrine where you no longer visit. I am safe here from your nagging voice, but your presence is everywhere.
I’m not asking you to be a home to me again, neither of us want that I’m sure. But tea sometime? Perhaps a meal? Till then, you’ll know where to find me. I’ll be sweeping up all the discards into the compost. I’ll let nature take its course, and I’ll lift my head to sense the wide expanse of the sky. I’ll let myself fall into the soil and be snacks for the worms sometime soon. Perhaps we’ll meet again then.
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