Considering the trees on Ash Wednesday
Each tree in my neighborhood is the tree of life.
On Ash Wednesday, we remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return, as God told the first human beings in the garden of Eden. The crosses on our foreheads, the smudged mixture of oil and ashes, are a sign that we are of the ground. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
In Poetics of the Flesh, Mayra Rivera turns to a section of Tertullian’s third-century treatise on the incarnation, De carne Christi. “What is flesh but earth?” Tertullian asks his reader, “muscles as clods . . . bones as stones . . . mammillary glands as pebbles . . . nerves as roots . . . veins as rivulets . . . hair as grass.” As Rivera summarizes, “each body incarnates the world.”
The ashes remind us that we are earth formations, that the material of our bodies is in solidarity with the rest of creation. All of life sprouts from the earth, flora and fauna together, each as part of the other. My mind hasn’t yet recovered from the shock of reading a medical study several years ago which revealed that more than half of my body is not human—that, at a given moment, approximately 57 percent of my cells belong to other species. I contain multitudes: bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, a whole microbiome of life.
