Earthworm Reveries

Greatness had eluded me. There'd been a time when I'd bent to it, bent over backwards for it, wriggled away from my warm home, hopeful and expectant, to reach it. And then there'd been a time when I'd wrestled with its promise, with the jealous fear that someone else might discover and hoard it before me, with the paralyzing thought that I might die before I ever knew it fully. And then finally there'd come the time when I'd writhed in pain, in disappointment, in humiliation, to think that any being as lowly as myself-a worm, a mere worm, without armor to protect, without color to adorn, without voice or beauty or brilliance-could have ever been so foolish as to hope.

But sometimes, amid the wriggling, the wrestling, the writhing, a vision of greatness floated down to me with the rain nonetheless. It was a vague vision then, without specifics or particulars. But it felt like thick weeds parting before me. It showed itself in the pale green roots of the marigolds, and in the sky-bright blues of my imagination. It danced and burrowed inside me, as I danced and burrowed inside my warm brown home. But it never lasted long enough to hold. And always something came between my greatness and my self.

Mud mostly. But also work, friends, progeny, responsibilities. All good things, yes. But small, I thought, compared to greatness. Daily. Common. Earthbound. When would I soar? Where would I find the time?

Then one day I looked more closely at the mud. Mud, everywhere around me. It was something, this mud.

It was rich-deep and dark. It was real. I found that I loved its silky hold on me, the way it resisted and supported my every undulation. I loved the way it shaped my days, as I shaped and reshaped its viscosity. I ate mud, shat mud, slipped and slid and arched and came in its mud-lusciousness, reproduced in the squishy safety of its mud-womb. I lived in mud and it lived in me, and if greatness existed only far away, up there, in that cold and lonely terror above the top-soil, then I would wriggle and frantically flap my way back down into the mud whenever pitch forks overturned my attentions or sunlight stung my surprised and tender back.

But it was a pitchfork that one day prodded me into courage. I found myself topside, vulnerable and exposed. I understood that I didn't have much time and this understanding distilled the time I had into something potent and important. Be brave, I told myself. Be brave enough to consider, deeply, the mud-essence of the mud, and the worm-essence of yourself. We did not exist alone, I saw. No one and no world existed by itself. When I let go of my fear, I saw how the sun warmed the mud. How the rain quenched it and how the marigolds held it and how I, I myself, breathed life into the mud and fed it with my own castings. How the common dance I did, daily, was part of a subterranean greatness, and how the mud I loved was part of other mud, of other earth, that went farther and deeper than I could imagine. It filled up the world and bordered the oceans. And how the earth and the oceans touched the skies and the heavens. And how, when one something touches one something else-and this I know as surely as my clitellum knows joy-how then that first something becomes part of that second. Forever. And how one something cannot be real without that other something beside it. And how music dances in every shadow, and how fragrance reimagines every sound- and how you can feel this in the vibrations of the earth, that are touching the oceans, that are touching the skies.

And how poetry grows from pale green roots, and how marigolds are still and always marigolds, even when they are not in bloom.

So then I stopped waiting for greatness. I stopped trying to create something immortal because I saw that immortal is part of mortal, not the other way around. And because I could leave my castings as my legacy. And because I am perpetually brushing up against greatness and because everything I touch or smell or see, I am. And because in my world there is no here or there, no under or over, no then or later, no males or females, no humans or insects, no deaths or births, no endings or beginnings. Because there is only this one infinite, uncontainable, interdependent circle of greatness filled with mud and heaven. And earthworms and angels. And me.

Melody Mansfield's short work has been published in a variety of venues including Parent's Magazine, Inside English, Thought Magazine, The Rectangle, and others. her first novel, The Life Stone of Singing Bird, was published by Faber and Faber in 1996 and earned favorable reviews from Booklist, The New York Times Book Review, and others. She is currently a full-time high school teacher and part-time writer.

Email: Melody Mansfield

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