mud

Before I set out to drive, I take Milo to get gas and a bath. I vacuum the trunk, seats, and floor mats. Then we ride through the car wash together. Milo doesn’t get that dirty on the inside. Most passengers are careful not to leave trash in the car. But they can’t help what they track in on the bottom of their shoes. So, there is always some dust or tiny bits of gravel to vacuum. And in late winter, when the ice and snow have turned gray and begun to sink into the earth, a day of driving will leave the floormats in the backseat smeared with a drying paste of water and earth, which is to say, mud.

There are so many myths in which mud is used to create human beings or other living creatures. Why? What does it mean to have created stories in which we imagine ourselves to have been made of mud? Mythologists observe that all such myths fall somewhere along a continuum between earth brought to life by water and water polluted by earth. If you start with generative earth, water is the activating addition promoting growth and development. But if you start with pure, unsullied water, then earth is contamination and degradation.

Buddhists say, “No mud, no lotus.” That’s meant to correct our tendencies to dichotomize and ignore interconnection and disavow the muddy aspects of ourselves out of shame. But even though, in this symbolism, mud has a generative aspect, its role in the story remains confined and implicitly negatively moralized. It is the unavoidable shitty thing from which something beautiful and pure can emerge. 

People have told me they admire my resilience and capacity for self-reinvention. It’s not that I don’t know what they mean. I do. I know they are sincere. I’m grateful for that. But where they see resilience, I’m more likely to see self-inflicted wounds and collateral damage, and where they see self-reinvention, I see distractibility and dreamy laziness. Does that mean I see my muddy human self as contaminated or degraded? Filthy earth added to once pure water? Maybe, at least some of the time. 

But maybe that’s not the best way to shape the story of mud. Why resolve mud into its constitutive ingredients: water and earth? Why can’t mud just be itself? Or, if we must break it down, why stop at water and earth? Why not hydrogen, oxygen, and the myriad elements we might find in any handful of earth? Why not quarks or leptons? Finally, especially, why moralize mud? Let’s observe how mud behaves instead of fantasizing about mud’s moral qualities or charging it with imaginary meaning.

Mud is soft and malleable. Mud flows, but steadily and with force. It’s hard to hold onto, easy to play with, and difficult on its own to build with, depending on how attached you are to building something durable. I like the parameters that sets for me as a muddy being: move with purpose, emphasize play, don’t over invest in any particular fixed form—they’re all temporary.

I think of my passengers: each a different glob of human mud. Different from each other, of course, but also perhaps different in the car than out. I, too, morph and shift with every ride, at least in some ways. Hell, we are different at the end of the ride than at the beginning. That’s how it is with mud. But also: we become different because of the ride, because we flow into one another in conversation, we become con-fused, mixed up, we shape and hopefully augment and enrich each other. And in thus sculpting one another, we invite a fresh round of self-sculpting.

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