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“All flesh is grass,” declares Isaiah, suggesting in poetic brevity the interconnectedness of ecosystems, the indwelling of creatures in each other as life moves from one body to the next. Grass is an appropriate image for this mutual dependence: The vegetal forms the foundation of all later growth, and grass in particular plays a vital part in the food chain. Wherever a creature stands in that chain, its body is constructed to the last of fruits and herbs; even the carnivore gets its meat from the flesh built of grass and its cousins. At least on the level of sensory observation, grass is one of the first obviously living creatures to emerge from the mixing of elements on the land, and so establishes a first rung for later development. It is perhaps for this reason that grass appears first in Genesis 1 after the waters recede to show dry land where only chaos had been. What was purely elemental begins with the advent of grass to become organic, living; the material from which higher lifeforms emerge is provided.
In the human sphere, too, grass is a central pillar, feeding our herds and contributing to the surplus from which civilization can eventually emerge. Many of the most vital crops that have formed the bedrock of higher social institutions have been grasses. From sorghum to maize to rice, grasses bred to produce cereal crops have been an essential component of many of the world’s largest and most successful civilizations. As Richard Pohl states, for luxuries such as government, philosophy, and culture to arise, “the first essential is a stable crop or crops, and the most productive of these are grasses.” In the Maya civilization, for instance, corn was of such importance that it resulted in a cult of the corn god and the development of astronomy for the purposes of determining appropriate planting times. Corn was so central that the collapse of Mayan cities may have been hastened by the incursion of aggressive grasses into cropland meant for corn.
Grass further acts as a vital ingredient to one of our most basic and important agricultural products: fodder, the most ubiquitous of which is hay. With the capacity to store livestock feed that would otherwise melt in the blasts of winter, animals and the production dependent on them were no longer strictly bound to grazing land, the seasonal variability of which frequently required a nomadic lifestyle. Their food now capable of being stored and carried, animals could be kept in colder climates, housed on smaller properties, and taken on military expeditions without the strict necessity of grazing land. As the viable living space of domesticated animals grew, so too did that of the agricultural practices dependent on their labour, firming the foundation on which large-scale civilizations could be built. And so, hay became a necessity. By the time Rome had climbed to dominance, hay and haymaking were a common sight, as they must be, to some extent, for so vast a power to exist.
It is best, moreover, that hay be cut before it begins to wither, as a greater quantity of it is harvested and it affords a more agreeable food for cattle. But a middle course should be followed in the curing, that it be gathered neither when very dry nor, on the other hand, while still green—in the one case because it is no better than straw if it has lost all its sap, and in the other because, if it has kept too much of it, it rots in the loft and often, when it becomes heated, it breeds fire and starts a blaze.
So says Columella, writing in the first century BC and addressing concerns still uppermost in the mind of the careful hay farmer.
Down the centuries, hay has held a place of dignity, frequently appearing in the literature of the nations as a symbol of civilization’s connection to, and dependence on, the vegetal world and natural processes.
Down the centuries, hay has held a place of dignity, frequently appearing in the literature of the nations as a symbol of civilization’s connection to, and dependence on, the vegetal world and natural processes. For the great British poet Edward Thomas, for instance, haymaking represented the immortality of nature’s rhythms and humanity’s participation in those older, undying cycles on which society is built—but compared to which it is but transitory. In his poem “Haymaking,” Thomas introduces us to a bucolic scene in which time appears to stop:
And in the little thickets where a sleeper
For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper
And garden warbler sang unceasingly.
Through these woods drift “only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown,” and in the field rest the haymakers, their tools thrown aside in a moment of stillness before the resumption of work. “All was old,” says Thomas, old beyond speaking, for in such fields and thickets is made one of the most primordial movements out of the strictures of survival toward culture. It is a step we must always, continuously make.
The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements
Uttered even what they will in times far hence—
All of us gone out of the reach of change—
Immortal in a picture of an old grange.
This scene is always happening, must always be happening, for the human world we know to be at all.
Even in our modern, technologized society, hay’s importance has not diminished despite great changes in agriculture. Statistics from the USDA show the United States producing over 118 million tons of hay in 2023, most of which is used as livestock fodder. Given that producing such quantities required almost 53 million acres of land, it is no surprise that a drive through many rural areas of America grant ample views of hayfields, many run by smaller farmers. These fields stand by orchards and highways, great metal wheels rolling day by day with long rooster tails of water pirouetting side by side. Later in the year one sees the bales laid out like rows of bricks or stacked like small buildings, or else rolled up in cylinders often taller than a man. This sight gives way again to empty fields as the compacted hay is gathered up and stored in barns and haylofts.
Those of us lucky enough to have grown up in rural settings where such haylofts are still found keep strong memories of those dusty barns, memories perhaps not so different from Thomas’s or even Columella’s time. The smell of one such loft is with me still. I can picture clearly the creased wood of the barn where it was kept, filled with a dry, earthy air blended with the smell of the horses for which the hay served as food. I climbed up into those towers and look warily down into the chasms formed in the gaps between the rows. Some were shallow and made good hiding places when not already occupied by the rats, mice, or barn cats; others seemed bottomless, like the death traps formed in glaciers, and if I was too large to fall in, it did not lessen my fear of them. Later, working at such barns brought me close to the rough texture of the hay, which I found I had become allergic to; it left rashes on my arms and made me sneeze and sniffle. But still I liked the stuff and relished the nostalgic smell and the delight it produced in horses. I have seen horses eat their hay like a delicacy, while others grab clumps with gusto and dump them violently in their water troughs even as they chew it down. They recognize it as their own just as they recognize their caretakers and their stalls. It has, they might think, always been this way.
And yet much has changed. Though hay is a lasting feature of civilization, the forms of its production are not immortal. Even if Columella’s descriptions of haymaking resemble the processes suggested in Thomas’s poem, the hay on which I was wont to climb was made very differently. Gone are the horses and the carts, the tosser, the ricks, the haystacks of Monet, and a whole way of life connected to agricultural communities. What one sees now are the tractors and sprinklers and mechanically compressed bales made possible by the technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Fertilizers and pesticides are now frequently employed in hay production, and vast mechanization is the norm, even on smaller farms. Though we still live and work against the background of nature—and still depend on it—our relationship to the natural world has changed drastically. Monocrops loom large on the landscape, small-scale farms have become rare, and the proportion of the population familiar with this ancient crop is vastly smaller than it once was.
To contemplate agriculture today is not, as it was for so long, to see almost directly into the past, but to see an almost entirely new world compared to that known by our ancestors, for better and for worse. Thomas seemed aware of this, despite the apparent timelessness in “Haymaking,” and it is significant that the poem was written in the early twentieth century, when the Industrial Revolution had already changed much in hay production. The final lines suggest this impermanence, that though haymaking might be immortal, the vision he has offered is in some sense already gone, or going: “All of us gone out of the reach of change— / Immortal in a picture of an old grange.” With this closing image of a photograph, the haymakers and their world have changed into an old picture, the stillness of which retroactively frames the poem as a whole. They become immortal only as memory, perhaps already cracked and faded, for only death removes us from the “reach of change.” If the cycles of growth and labour continue, it is not in the same form.
There is, moreover, an irony in ascribing to hay qualities of immortality, for it is perpetually useful only in the recurrence of its death, each new generation dying to feed the flesh of cows and horses. The grass, which is forever with us, is always on the point of withering, and all our efforts to preserve it as hay or cereals only give it life enough to be the feed of equally transient creatures. That agricultural production has changed so much in form only intensifies this fact; the effervescent grass is cut and dies to keep at bay the death that always comes, scythe raised, to take its rightful harvest.
Isaiah speaks of grass primarily for its ephemerality, and despite all the ecological significance of the words quoted above, it is the withering of the fields that the image primarily evokes: “All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:6–8). All flesh is grass, for all flesh is dying. To meditate on hay is to meditate on death, on the decay of all things and their insignificance in the face of the Most High, which alone endures forever.
To meditate on hay is to meditate on death, on the decay of all things and their insignificance in the face of the Most High, which alone endures forever.
And yet there is a common thread between these themes—a golden link connecting ecological interdependence and the withering blasts of time—and that is sacrifice. Though the grass may die in summer heat or from tractors making hay, its death need not be in vain. For it gives of its own substance to the creatures that require it for life. Though the Spirit of the Lord blows over it (Isaiah seems to mean) to take back the life it gave, in dying for another that life goes on, blowing through all things, transforming and resurrecting but not truly dying. We cannot keep our life, the grass whispers; it is not ours but God’s and comes to us from everything but ourselves.
This sacrifice of grass for fodder is an image of divine kenosis, the self-emptying love of God in giving himself to others. Such voluntary limiting of self is seen particularly in Christ’s incarnation, and this is its first referent in Christian tradition, when Paul speaks of Christ emptying himself and taking the form of a slave (Philippians 2:7). But, as pointed out by theologians such as Sergius Bulgakov, kenosis, as a revelation inherent in the incarnation of the Logos, is equally applicable to the immanent life of the Trinity, especially in the act of creation. Bulgakov writes in The Lamb of God that in creating, God “makes room” for the world, gives himself to that which is not himself, thereby allowing his being to be united to the finite and temporal, limited in its reception by creatures and even warred against and resisted. In creating, God dwells in time, in becoming, even while he remains in eternity, both transcendent and immanent: “Proceeding out of God in the creation of the world, His love in its kenosis establishes time for Him as well and makes Him live in time.” The incarnation is a continuation of this emptying, which in its self-giving love proceeds all the way to the cross, to the very edge of nothingness in death. To be a reflection of the trifold light of God, a creature must also be capable of self-emptying, of a miniature, iconic act of kenosis in the giving of self for other.
While articulated with particular clarity by Christians like Bulgakov, this understanding of creation as kenosis can be found outside the Christian tradition. One finds parallels in the tzimtzum of Kabbalah—the “contraction” of God to make room for the creation—or in the identification of the goddess Mahadevi with both the infinite act of Brahman and the material potency of the creation in Śākta theology.
If we see the creation as an act of divine self-emptying, we ought also to see the sustenance of created beings as dependent on a finite repetition of this theme, as a mutual giving of all to each so that the whole may exist, and each moment of a being’s existence is carried by the whole, by the context of every breath and act. Even in a world marked by exploitation and violence, this fact of our mutual need for each other cannot be escaped. Even the reaped grass becomes a re-enactment of that first movement toward emptiness in giving its life for another.
We are all constructed from this vast process of emptying, from the gift of life given by or taken from the creatures around us. We may hope that the death and oppression frequently inherent in this state of affairs is temporary, that an eschaton will come beyond the need of life to sustain itself by destroying life. But for now this fact is a sign of our dependence on the other beings of this world and, yet more fundamentally, on the divine life that is poured out so there might be a world at all. And no matter what may come, there can be no self without the other, no creature without creation.
Only in the mutual giving of all things to all others can the world go on, and destruction threatens when one creature seeks only to take and never to give. For even the grass is dependent on others, and all dependence devolves in the last on that greater act of sacrifice—a sacrifice seen most completely in the cross—of which each local act is but an image: “He watereth the hills from his chambers: the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man” (Psalm 104:13–14). We are, like all flesh, passing away, ephemeral and even now ready to wither in the field. But like the grass we may become an icon of the eternal gift, like corn and hay give rise to nations, breathe life to worlds otherwise impossible, in acts of love transform the most fleeting life into an image of eternity.