A skeletal figure, bones bleached white with time, garbed in the frayed remnants of a hooded brown cloak, walks the land just beyond the veil of our five senses. Her regard is evident as she carefully cradles a rotten apple or newly dead mouse in the bones of her hand. You will not meet her until it’s your time, but when you do you will wonder why you ever feared her, or her children. Deep in her shadowed eye sockets, you will feel her soft gaze full of gratitude and acceptance. You will realize no one has ever cherished your body the way she does. It will calm you even as your consciousness retreats and the part of you that is your body will relinquish yourself to her. You will understand the true nature of immortality as she claims you. Your flesh and bones know how to welcome this, they’ve already called in her children to assist. This is Our Lady of Decay.
She goes by other names and wears other faces. Believe in her or not as you are so inclined, her work is not diminished should you witness her only as metaphor. Like any god, her power isn’t found in taking corporeal form but in the stories—the meaning—you choose to receive in her name.
Hers is a story about cherishing that which renews life. In this contemporary world, the primary feeling with which many greet her work is disgust. We will readily reap her gifts of transformation and rebirth, but we do not want to witness the process: the putrid scent, the disintegration, the consumption. Her children are often reviled – bacteria, fungus, maggot, beetle, millipede, the carrion hunters: vulture, coyote, crow. I cannot deny a certain revulsion plucking a soupy, rotten vegetable from the drawer of the fridge, and I know this is in part normal – the wisdom of my body saying, this is no longer food for you. Yet even as this limp and liquid stalk of celery may be disdained as food, it is also glorious winter occurring deep in the produce drawer as bacteria ensured what the worms could not: a return of this dying plant to the earth.
Jay Griffith in Why Rebel writes of the worms who eat dead plant material to make the soil. She says, “They are the quiet ones, quietly making life possible, the ones who shun the spotlights, the unstarry ones on whose lovely liquid glistening – true brilliance – the world turns.” If every year’s dying plants were not consumed by bacteria and worms, we would suffocate in drifts of leaves, our homes buried within a human generation. Rather, the worm, an unassuming child of Our Lady toils in the dark, eating the faded blooms to make soil that will grow more food.
Andreas Weber in his book Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology reminds us, “A carbon atom in the calm grasses of the meadow was once a part of the air, and before that an insect, fruit, perhaps a human body, its breath, perhaps me…The functioning of the circle of life on Earth depends solely on the fact that we all share in the great body of matter and pass through one another reciprocally.” We would have run out of matter millions of years ago, the planet a heap of dead bodies, following a few cycles of life. But that is not how life works. Even the dying stars of the earliest universe knew to create immortality in their death. With their last breath they exhaled their ashes into space, yielding the complex molecules of carbon and metal and more that would later coalesce into planets, and into life.
Even before our death, we are complicit in the work of Our Lady of Decay. Perdita Finn in episode #353, “The Long Story of our Souls,” of For the Wild podcast, says, “Every animal knows that we all feed each other with our bodies and we used to know this as human beings.” She speaks of a deer dying on her property and how the deer’s body was gone within a day and a half. “The vultures came, the coyotes came, the beetles came, the mice came, and she was gone. And she’d fed everybody.” Finn explains, “Our ancient ancestors knew that when they were eating, they were eating their kin…Every plant and animal offering its body to us was feeding us just as the way a mother feeds her child with her body…What if we knew with every mouthful we ate that we were eating the bodies of our mothers who had been offered up to us lovingly? How would we treat the food that we grow, the food that we eat?” Indeed. How do we treat the creatures who tend this process? How have we built a society that praises only the bright light, the flowering, the fruiting and reviles the aged, wilted, rotten, and decayed? Where is our praise of the rejuvenating darkness where all life is born, of the recyclers of matter, the processors of stardust, the eaters of the dead who ensure our future?
We can trace through different cultures long histories that elevate the spirit and the mind above our bodies. The Christian story gives immortality to the soul and sin to the flesh—when arguably it is the other way around. In this world-view, bodies can be a commodity, something to enslave or subjugate. The body becomes something to punish and control rather than something to cherish. Rather than fecund examples of earth’s ongoing bounty, bodies capable of bearing children can be seen as harboring dark, untrustworthy places. These dangerous bodies become something to tame, diminish, and shame.
We may choose to value our spirit, our soul, our consciousness, and that is beautiful and powerful in its own way, but it is our body which can go on to feed and become other life, the molecules continually reworking and reconvening. This is the wisdom of Our Lady of Decay.
Many humans have tried to remove ourselves from the cycle of life, the cycle of flesh. Embalmed bodies ensure they cannot easily return to the earth, the chemicals poisoning the body and the ground in which they reside. Most now wish to create a home which is uninhabited by any but us and our few desired plants and pets; it’s acceptable to poison the creatures who live in our yard. In our desire to be rid of so-called weeds we poison the worms, the beetles and those who feed on them. House cleaning has become a war against microscopic life. Food is something to buy at a store, not cherished lives we raise beside us and claim with gratitude.
Many of us may have forgotten our place in the world, but she has not forgotten us. From the perspective of Our Lady of Decay, each and every body is an equal treasure: riddled with disease, disabled, thin, fat, youthful, bent with age—they all have equal value and ability to sustain life on earth. She loves and welcomes us all. Could we turn that same welcoming love upon all bodies? Could we respect and honor those creatures who remake the world, rather than reviling them? It is our gift in life to know that we are immortal. It is our duty in death to fall into the mouths of Our Lady’s children and be remade. Will you remember yourself into the loving embrace of the embodied world? She is waiting for you.