blue mud overflows, sticking me to Earth and at the edge of knowing
“You’re full of blue mud,” my grandpa used to say to me. i learned to say it too. “Emily, what are you full of?”
“Boo mud!” i’d exclaim all giggles imagining the gooey substance mushing around in my insides.
Until recently researching this phrase prompted by a practice of re-membering my own roots in a tree meditation, i had thought my grandpa had made up “blue mud.” Turns out, it means to be full of it. Maybe i was full of it, silly, foolish… i was, afterall, an opinionated three-year-old.
Or maybe, because the warmth that comes from a good grandpa hug could not possibly exist simultaneously with telling a three-year-old they are full of it, maybe being full of blue mud meant i was visionary, creative, insightful.
Maybe i am full of blue mud, the stuff that defies understanding, just wondrously childlike enough to stick me to the earth but envision beyond the edge of knowing. Or maybe, my grandpa did just make up “blue mud.”
In this time of endless ecological desecration, devastation caused by the pandemic, pervasive systemic racism revealed (though always here and deeply entrenched in every facet of life) through recorded murder… it is hard to imagine beyond any of this. It is all too easy to fall into the seemingly comfortable group that says, “Nothing will ever change…”
And that is the false narrative we tell ourselves when it gets to be too much, enabling white supremacy to keep on killing, perpetuating human domination of Earth, sanctioning the myth of separation and an economy of scarcity.
But what if we all got a small handful of that magical blue mud…
the stuff that defies all imagination…
scooped it out of the sky…
out of the earth…
out of our own wild imaginings…
… and gobbled it up so it mushed around in our insides.
What if we dared to imagine beyond the edge of knowing while sticking firmly to the Earth? What if we dared to be… “full of it?” To be full of it only means that the person accusing you cannot see what you can see at the edge of knowing, does it not?
fellow earthen wanderer, may you be full of blue mud
fellow earthen wanderer
who is in your own wondrously wild way
full of blue mud
may you have the courage
to imagine beyond the edge of knowing
may you have the daring to live
with and through the courageous hope
that arises from
your beautiful
blue mud insides
