Ukemochi, the Origin of Food
Unspooling the mind through the very silk inside us- we cast our spell
Dear Readers,
I’m going to take a break with the Thumb Out and Bound for the Underworld series this Thanksgiving week and offer you some reflections through story, Vedic scripture, and Mū Hawaiian culture on food and sacrifice. Obviously, my inspiration is that I have eaten a lot of food of this week!
First, a story from my birthplace, Japan:
Ukemochi
At the beginning of time, Amaterasu gave life to the world. She was a sun goddess and ruled over the sky with her brother, the moon god Tsukuyomi.
From her perch in the sky, Amaterasu heard of another goddess who lived down below on Earth named Ukemochi, and decided she wanted to send her a greeting from the sky. She asked her brother, Ashihara-no-Nakatsukuni, to make the journey down to the Central Land of Reed-Plains, for that is what they called the blue planet spinning in their orbit, and bring Ukemochi her celestial greetings. Tsukuyomi was happy to oblige and descended to Earth.
Ukemochi, a humble goddess, maybe a little shy, was thrilled to have such a noble visitor. In most stories, gods and goddesses have servants to prepare their elaborate banquets. I’m sure you’ve heard of many, like the fateful feast held by Dermot and Grainne for Finn MacCool and The Fianna. The servants prepared for months. A feast is hard, hot work, not something fit for a goddess.
When Ukemochi invited Tsukuyomi to a feast, he said yes, but looking around her hall, was a bit dubious. Where were the servants? Surely, she wasn't going to cook herself? He was even more confused when he showed up at the banquet table and found it empty.
Wanting to be polite, he smiled and said nothing. Ukemochi gave him a slight bow. The moon god was at her table! The honor was almost too much. She returned his smile, excited to present him with a feast to honor his greatness.
You can imagine Tsukuyomi’s shock when Ukemochi faced a rice field outside the hall and turned toward him vomiting boiled rice!
It got worse. Next, she faced the sea and disgorged fish of all kinds from her gullet. Tsukuyomi was trying to maintain a polite facade, but he was starting to gag. He was expected to eat this? When next she she turned to a forest and expelled all kinds of game from her gorge—deer and rabbits, his eyes almost popped out of his head. The game was cooked and ready to eat. It was too much. He looked at Amaterasu and could see she was very pleased with herself. He drew his sword-and killed her.
When he returned to the sky and told Amaterasu what he’d done he didn’t expect her to be angry, so angry in fact she told him she would never again meet him face to face. That is why, all the way to this day, the Sun and Moon are never seen together.
Amaterasu sent another messenger down to the terrestrial world to check on Ukemochi’s people. It was her fault Amaterasu had died, she would take care of her sister goddesses’ people if she had to.
When the messenger came back, she carried a surprising story.
The people on Earth didn’t need her help, for Ukemochi’s body, all on its own, had sprouted all kinds of food for them to eat. From her head came the ox and horse; from her forehead, millet; from her eyebrows, silkworms; from her eyes, cereal grass; from her belly, rice; and from her genitals, wheat and beans. The grains were sown so people could have plenty to feed themselves.
They still needed Amaterasu, of course, all crops need sun to flourish, but from then on the people began to remember the power of their own choices. Amaterasu admired their resilience and decided to give them a gift herself.
From the cocoons of the silkworms Ukemochi had disgorged from her eyebrows, Amaterasu spun silk thread. The crafty humans spun this thread into diaphanous cloth that rippled in the sun’s light. It looked fragile, but was very strong. People on Earth still weave the silkworm’s cocoons into this beautiful fabric. When they dye it, it becomes a vessel for all the colors of the sun. People on Earth still eat the food Ukemochi created from her own dead body. Some people may have forgotten this, but whenever someone remembers, flute song drifts up toward the moon. Some say the song is sad, a mournful dirge, but others know it is the sound of contentment, of a life filled with purpose.
What do you think of this story? I’m curious if you were repulsed, like Tsukuyomi, at how Amaterasu expelled food. In this time where most people in industrialized civilizations get their food from supermarkets, it’s easy to forget the food we consume actually grew in the ground, was swimming in the ocean, or walked on feet like ours.
Food, although something tangible we eat, separated from its source, is an abstraction. It’s something we consume without acknowledging where it came from, let alone revering the plant or animal that sacrificed its existence so that we may go on living.
I am food, I am food, I am food! I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food! I am the poet, I am the poet, I am the poet! … Before the Devas I was in the centre of all that is immortal. He who gives me away, he alone preserves me: him who eats food, I eat as food.
-the Upanishads
“We humans have forgotten we are part of the food chain.”
I’ve heard medicine man Miguel Rivera say this many times at a yearly conference I attend. He always goes on to say, “We need to put ourselves back into the food chain.”
What Miguel is getting at, is that we’ve forgotten that the continuation of life requires sacrifice. Our bodies are sustained by food, and when we die, in the proper manner of things, should be given back to the Earth as food for other forms of life. With our discomfort with death, this rarely happens anymore. Instead we have acres of cemeteries with stone memorials to humans sealed in caskets. What should be composted into soil, is preserved and the Earth starves.
Of course this is also a metaphor.
And of course we all miss the people we love when they die and find comfort in being able to visit them. I, personally, find graveyards very moving, and reassuring in a strange way. Those heavy, engraved stones are an anchor to what’s lost, a place to go when the world is spinning too fast and I feel terribly alone. They are a witness to existence itself and a testimony to love, but they deny the truth-we are food, and in sealing ourselves off we refuse the sacrifice required of us in being given the gift of a body. When it’s time to let the body drop, we are supposed to become food for something else. Instead, we horde our dead. At what price?
This is also a metaphor for every aspect of life. Sacrifice is at the heart of every action on Earth, but because of our negative interpretation of death and an over-identification with the material, we reject sacrifice as weak, leave it to the mothers and martyrs, not to the heroes who are the ones really getting shit done in the world.
Of course this is a generalization, there are many examples of acts of sacrifice, physical and immaterial, enacted by every kind of person on Earth, but in general, at least in American culture of which I am a product, this is so.
But I am not ultimately a product and neither are you. I am a work in progress creating myself by my choices like the people who received the gifts of Ukemochi’s body way back at the beginning of the human experiment.1
experiment (n.)
mid-14c., "action of observing or testing; an observation, test, or trial;" also "piece of evidence or empirical proof; feat of magic or sorcery," from Old French esperment "practical knowledge, cunning; enchantment, magic spell; trial, proof, example; lesson, sign, indication," from Latin experimentum "a trial, test, proof, experiment," noun of action from experiri "to try, test," from ex "out of" (see ex-) + peritus "experienced, tested," from PIE *per-yo-, suffixed form of root *per- (3) "to try, risk."
experiment (v.)
"make trial, operate (on something) so as to discover some unknown fact or to establish it when known," late 15c., from experiment.
I emphasized the original Old French meaning with bold type because I want you to really take that in-an experiment, an esperment, was originally both something enacted to provide empirical proof and an act of magic, a spell.
How can those two be the same? An experiment, as we know it, is something done to establish proof in the material world. A spell, which most in American culture dismiss as fantasy or superstition, is meant to conjure a desired result in the material world. Most of us don't believe in them. They are dismissed as whimsy or fantasy, but even if you believe in spells, the two concepts seem to be at odds, opposing forces.
I’d like to introduce a third branch onto this rather barren tree, a fork in the road that only proposes two paths. Let’s leap off and wander into the forests above my house here on the slopes of Hualālai on Moku o Keawe.
Since I’ve been living on this island, I have been remembering my Mū origins. The genesis of this remembrance has been my introduction to Mū Hawaiian culture through collaboration with Ke’oni Hanalei of Pohala Hawaiian Botanicals. In a different paradigm I would say that I am Keoni’s student and studying Mū Hawaiian culture, and while I do listen and read and absorb information from Ke’oni, because that’s the way I’ve been trained to learn and I enjoy it, I’m more interested in conveying a more subtle way of learning that’s been occurring through our mentorship, one that’s occurring beneath my studious application.
The best word in English to describe that is remembering. I hear this word a lot in the spiritual community, and frankly, a lot of times have thought it was bullshit. Repeat something long enough and it becomes a good marketing tool. It’s easy to say one has authority because one remembered it to the gullible in order to get them to buy your product or sign up for your class, as I witness over and over again. I, myself, have succumbed to this marketing, signing up for classes because someone was so convincing, only to find they weren’t any more special than I was. The voices they claim to hear as outside themselves, nothing more than the same voice that runs inside my head, but sounds like me and not some impressive being from another dimension.
Note-I have compassion for those people, because I am also a seeker. I have also, at times, longed to hear voices because I thought it would make me special and give me the authority I lacked. However, I am not so gullible anymore. I have a lot of thoughts on how gullibility stems from trauma gathered from examining my personal journey and observing others’, but in short I’ll just say that I believe trauma is so destabilizing, the individuals who experience it are willing to believe anything that gives them an authoritative, comprehensive view of existence.
Since everyone on Earth has the ancestral memory of being traumatized by catastrophic earth changes embedded in our DNA, we are all open to giving our authority and agency over to those who assure us they have the one answer to explain all our suffering. How do I know this? Not from watching Graham Hancock on Netflix or reading Barbara Hand Clow. I know this because I’ve re-membered it.
Remember. Re-member. Member:
c. 1300, "body part or organ, an integral part of an animal body having a distinct function" (in plural, "the body"), from Old French membre "part, portion; topic, subject; limb, member of the body; member" (of a group, etc.)," 11c., from Latin membrum "limb, member of the body, part," probably from PIE *mems-ro, from root *mems- "flesh, meat" (source also of Sanskrit mamsam"flesh;" Greek meninx "membrane," mēros "thigh" (the "fleshy part"); Gothic mimz "flesh").
Remembering happens first in the body, the mind when used properly, follows the instructions coded in bones, blood and flesh; blood, bone and flesh are bound by the rules of not just the human experiment, but all of life: to exist is to consume and be consumed, to be a sacrifice.
This may sound like everything is fated, but within this world of polarities there are always choices to be made, and every choice holds the potential to create and uncreate an infinite number of outcomes reaching from here on Earth, across the Universe and beyond.
I told you earlier that I sometimes doubt people in the spiritual community who make claims about their knowledge without physical proof to back it up. I also told you that I didn’t use to be a doubter. As I healed and integrated layers of trauma, I became less gullible and was, in my view, able to “see through” the new age hucksters. I was quick to judge.
However, after listening, just two days ago, to Ke’oni’s interview with Ian Mackenzie on The Mythic Masculine Podcast, I realized I did have experience of the kind of remembering I was dismissing, a knowing in the bones that transcended logic. I couldn’t see it because I had been expecting a bolt of lightning or God in a Burning Bush talking to Moses, instead of me just going about my normal day hearing only my own voice in my head. In other words, my remembrance was so subtle I didn’t experience it outside the limits of my body. It is embodied.
This realization came listening to Ian question Ke’oni. As someone trying to to have journalistic integrity, I understood what Ian was doing, but all his questions were a little exhausting. Why was he asking all these things I just knew? Didn't he get it?
But that’s not the point of an interview! And in classic interview style, Ian was asking Ke’oni to define his terms, to clarify and break down his sophisticated concepts into easily understood ideas. Ke’oni did this brilliantly, and I suggest listening to the podcast, linked above, for a generous example of how a leader responds to what people need, rather than being condescending when they need extra help getting it. “Getting it” isn’t even the point. Everyone hears what they need in the moment to evolve. Stories spiral in through our ears and back out to be reabsorbed in waves and silence.
Ian was using the tools of logic to attempt to define ideas generated and expressed through the poetic. Ke’oni responded in kind, breaking down his ike2 into easily digestible, well-defined bytes. Will people who listen to the interview who haven’t already reached a certain level of consciousness understand the depth of Ke’oni’s teachings from this interview? I don’t know and it isn’t my business. My business is my kiakahi3-to be a wave of change, a poem in motion, a beam of light touching the earth in a forest clearing.
My remembrance was random and unplanned, and may continue to unfold in the dark, but I don’t think I can return to a blind journey. With conscious cultivation, my journey of remembrance, my reconnection to bone memory, has begun to unfurl with more ease, less struggle. More and more of the time, I’m not in resistance-to myself or my fellow humans. No more tearing my brothers and sisters down because they are asking too many questions or proclaiming something I don't believe they actually understand or embody.
We are made of spirals. This is something scientists and mystics both know, a shared memory we can bring into awareness together, healing the rift between imagination and logic (the tagline of this newsletter) and evolving to the next stage of the human experiment.
Why do we have two brain hemispheres? Popular culture tells us that the left (logical) and right (metaphorical) hemispheres have distinct functions, when actually science has shown that all the functions of the left are contained within the right.4 Metaphor, knowing the world through connection, has primacy. Logic, which breaks everything down into sequences in order to make sense of something, is actually enveloped by connection. It’s like the right brain is playing a game to see how far the into amnesia the left can go. Will the left brain cultures that now dominate our planet destroy all life? The data certainly seems to be pointing that way.
I do believe in science. I do believe, that, for the most part, the data gathered by the scientific method, is a true reflection of the material world.
I also believe in the quantum leap. One way for this to occur is through the restoration of the right brain hemisphere as our primary navigator.
As a left brain dominated culture, we have separated ourselves to the extent from the rest of life that we have forgotten we are also Nature. As we face the destruction of our biosphere due to what could be seen as a lack of empathy, a quality governed by the right hemisphere that values connection over categorization, it is clear we have reached the limits of the left hemisphere. Logic is not going to save us. Nor will faith, Jesus, or aliens. Only imagination will.
What would our planet look like if we surrendered logic to its forgotten mother, imagination? Even better, if we kept the powers of discernment and expression we’ve earned through developing the left brain (language is a left hemisphere function), but realized the left brain’s limitations? Right now, we are the products of a culture that dismisses anything that can’t be proven by science as fantasy. This is a symptom of right hemisphere damage. We are not products. We are organic humans, scarred and scared, but no scar is permanent. They all fade in time. We can heal. Poetry can help us rebuild the bridge, the corpus callossum, what divides the hemispheres can also reunite.
Shelley famously said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. He also said that, “to be a poet is to represent a spirit of change, both within the world of letters and beyond it.” What if this this were actually the case? And with all due respect for all creative humans, I don’t mean popular public poets like Amanda Gorman or Maya Angelou, or most poets on Instagram. I’m talking poets who are deeply steeped in negative capability, the term Keats used to describe the ability to avoid equating meaning with facts.
He wrote:
“Several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”
Of course facts are also important. We can see in recent times how easy it is to distort or deny them altogether. I am not advocating throwing facts to the dogs like so many recent politicians, but I am advocating for a dual consciousness. How can we hold space for facts-the world outside our minds exists and has its own agency-while also holding space for the imagination to dream of ways to transcend the limitations of our current way of thinking? Remember, most brain functions occur in both hemispheres, but only the right brain is aware of the left. The left hemisphere has forgotten the right exists. It believes logic alone rules the world.
I’ve heard Ke’oni say many times that growing up his kupuna5 told him, “Boy, before you speak, you must first become a poet.”
I interpret this as his kupuna giving him instructions on how to use language to capture the full spectrum of existence, not just the narrow vision granted to us by literal definitions that act like nails in a coffin, killing our awareness of ourselves as infinite beings granted a body to experience the glory of physical life. This is why poetry is essential right now as we deal with the results of centuries of over-identification with the material and the calcification of our consciousness through the tone deaf thud of literal meaning that fails to understand the nuanced nature of existence, let alone convey it.
The Hawaiian language presents a much different way of perceiving through words. Although not many people today speak Hawaiian, the way of seeing the world as a multiverse can be accessed by studying the Hawaiian language. In ‘Olelo Hawai’i, words and phrases contains hidden meanings, called kaona. The meanings reveal themselves through context and level of awareness. The listener’s ability to comprehend is based on what they are ready and able to hear. To me there is a form of initiation implied. As you expand and grow through life’s challenges, you are able to perceive more meanings.
Language gives shape to our consciousness. Just by speaking ‘Olelo Hawai’i, where poetry is used to give instructions in how to proceed in the mundane, a person’s consciousness will be shaped by kaona, coming into contact with wider circles of beings that extend through large physical objects in the world like koa trees and whales, down to the molecular, as can be experienced in the Hawaiian genealogical creation chant, the Kumulipo. Eventually, a language where meanings open infinitely into other meanings, will surpass the physical and the speaker will no longer exist. But the listener will.
There will always be a listener. How do I know that? A story told me. Eventually, when we’ve said all we need to say, we all become the listener. Ka-mea-i-na-hani, Creator.
At that point we won’t need words anymore because we won’t need metaphors. We won’t need pronouns to assert who we are, or verbs to say what we’re doing. Adverbs-certainly not. Adjectives will probably be the last to go-blissful, unified, holy.
I believe in the quantum leap. I believe that Hamlet was onto something when he told Horatio, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
And something else Hamlet said is coming to mind right now. “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space-were it not that I have bad dreams.”
What if those bad dreams were everything science can’t prove or measure because it doesn’t have the tools yet? What is beyond the tools of sciences’ range?
It’s comfy inside the nut, but let’s crack it. Let’s do it ourselves before the world does it for us, because the quantum leap is already happening, and I, for one, would rather ride the flaming tail of its comet, than be dragged like a bellowing donkey into the next paradigm.
When I say leap, it sounds like something instantaneous, but the leap could also be a long, slow stride over the abyss of ecological disaster and war. That sounds a little friendlier, right? Feel into that, that massive change can be friendly. Not everything has to be a catastrophe.
By this I mean we could be carried over, not by spiritually bypassing our current ecological and cultural crises, but by making the choice to be available to the kaona, the hidden meanings. When we are able to perceive the meanings beneath the meanings, we will return where we started. Our homecoming will be a death and birth happening at the same time, just like every single “normal” day on earth, like the day on which you read this on your laptop slouched on the couch when an underground river opens up in your mind that carries you into terra incognita. We create the world we see every moment through our choices.
When there are no more choices presenting themselves to us, we’ll know the experiment-the spell-is over. We are one with Ka-mea-i-na-hani, with Creator, Great Spirit, God, whatever you want to call she/he/they/it/we, I’m pretty sure any pronoun will do. When that happens we’ll be a poem rolling down a riverbank like an otter, and the sound of laughing water, and a memory waiting to be forgotten so the cycle can begin again in a wider spiral. Wilder, wider, we open-hearted warriors will offer our wounds as the required sacrifice, the price for being given a body to inhabit this beautiful Earth.
According to the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred), a sacrifice creates a hole in space that will be filled. Since it’s inevitable, why not consciously choose what’s going to occupy that space? This process of sacrifing and invoking is the definition of a spell according to the Mū Hawaiians. There is also a third component that’s often neglected these days-administration. A spell must be tended, cared for, in whatever terms are negotiated between the invisible realms and the voice crying out in the wilderness. Too many of abandon our creations before they reach completion. I get it. The evidence of neglect and abuse is all around us. Landmines in holes underground. Hearts “attacked” because arteries are clogged, but as Robert Bly said in his poem, “Keeping Our Small Boat Afloat:”
So many blessings have been given to us
During the first distribution of light, that we are
Admired in a thousand galaxies for our grief.
Don’t expect us to appreciate creation or to
Avoid mistakes. Each of us is a latecomer
To the earth, picking up wood for the fire.
Every night another beam of light slips out
From the oyster’s closed eye. So don’t give up hope
that the door of mercy may still be open.
Seth and Shem, tell me, are you still grieving
Over the spark of light that descended with no
Defender near into the Egypt of Mary’s womb?
It’s hard to grasp how much generosity
Is involved in letting us go on breathing,
When we contribute nothing valuable but our grief.
Each of us deserves to be forgiven, if only for
Our persistence in keeping our small boat afloat
When so many have gone down in the storm.
My Uncle Herman used to say, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” When I was a kid I took this literally and didn't get it. Seemed like plenty of people were eating for free. Later, I saw this phrase as cynical, but now I hear it through ears open to kaona.
Uncle Herman was right, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Matter cannot be destroyed or created, only transferred. Anything given away, creates a space that must be filled.
We’ve come along way from Thanksgiving dinner and I bet ready to go off and digest this word feast on your own, but before we part I have some questions for you-what do you truly want? What must you sacrifice in order to invoke it?
Courage, my friends. Don’t abandon the ship. It might seem like we’re going down, but your choices matter more than you know right now. Do you want peace? Are you willing to sacrifice war? War? Remember, the spell must be tended. Administering is simple: do no harm. Begin with yourself.
courage (n.)
c. 1300, corage, "heart (as the seat of emotions)," hence "spirit, temperament, state or frame of mind,"from Old French corage "heart, innermost feelings; temper" (12c., Modern French courage), from Vulgar Latin *coraticum (source of Italian coraggio, Spanish coraje), from Latin cor "heart"
Poets, join me. Let’s bring Shelley’s vision down to Earth. If you think you’re not a poet, you’re wrong. Within your skull a whale is waiting for your permission to swallow Jonah. Say Amen. So be it. Sacrifice your doubt. Prepare to become the acknowledged legislators of the world.
Kõ aloha la ea,
Concentrate on love by way of the light,
Jen
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I first heard Ke’oni Hanalei use this term in reference to the purpose of human life on Earth.
wisdom
purpose
For an epic, highly detailed study of how the brain’s hemispheres have shaped the world through history, I recommend reading The Master and His Emissary, by Iain Macgilchrist.
elders