A witch spends much of her spiritual practice in search, celebration and utilization of "in-between" spaces. Between light and shadow. Summer and Winter. This world and another. In a book that is turning out, for me, to be as much a source of delight as it is equal turns enlightenment and outrage, Michael Pollan writes:

... either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands.

Pollan is writing about Polyface Farm, whose owner, Joel Palatin, is practicing a method of farming that is a paradox in today's world of industrial farming and monocultures. It is strikingly modern in its departure from what has become the norm while it operates under the oldest principles of symbiosis.

What struck me was Pollan's observation that the in-betweens are where most of the action is. For a witch, this is not exactly revelatory, but it is it is always amusing, for me anyway, when someone who is not operating from a Pagan point of reference unintentionally hits upon an idea that we would find so familiar. It solidifies a belief in certain truths being universal, regardless of the philosophical or spiritual place from which they come.

Marveling at the aesthetic perfection of this unique farm, Pollan says that he suddenly understands a statement of Palatin's that seemed " an awkward hybrid of the economic and the spiritual" before he had experienced the farm for himself. He quotes Palatin:

One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.

Ecstasy of life indeed. Another tenet of Paganism (Barbara Ehrenreich anyone?).

I'm not sure that Michael Pollan intended An Omnivore's Dilemma to be a philosophical and spiritual treatise, but for an urban witch who sometimes struggles to find the connection to the nature my spirituality is based upon, this book has turned out to be just that.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 2:20 PM