I need to talk about this corn

Originally published in 2025 here.

I need to talk about this corn.

It is growing in the field next to my own. The land is owned by one neighbor and farmed by another. Has been for years.

And it upsets me in a way I have never experienced before.

It looks healthy, right? Pretty good considering how very hot and very dry it has been here in downstate Illinois.

And considering the soil. Look at it. I don’t know if you can really tell in the photo, but it is grey. It is grey and nothing grows in it but corn. Not any corn, but this particular brand of corn developed to survive the “applications” (pesticide sprays) that kill everything else.

In her own piece on corn, biologist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that

Conceiving of plants and land as objects, not subjects—as things instead of beings—provides the moral distance that enables exploitation….(it) is slavery. Standing alone in straight lines in poisoned fields, forced to carry genes not their own, today sacred maize is enslaved to an industrial purpose: feeding cars and factories.

Agreed. Yes. YES!

And!

Death!

All I see is death. Death is, of course, a consequence of objectification and enslavement. It is a given.
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But this is like a living death. It is watching a forced laugh, feigned hilarity, that high nervous energy when punishment is possible. It is like the White supremacy of our nation: Some will be allowed to grow at the expense of all others. ALL others.

I recently took a class on healing spiritual hurt. I can pretty easily name the ways my spirit has been hurt by religion: Lon Mabon, Fred Phelps, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America before it decided queer people are equal people, the United Church of Christ as it nationally professes affirmation but locally falls far short. And then there are the spiritual injuries related to being a female pastor: lesser compensation, discussion of my voice, dick jokes from a male clergy supervisor.

But this corn is next-level injury. It is existential. As poet Wendell Berry wrote,

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

And it makes me weep with a powerlessness I never felt from the threats and wounds of church.

As a spiritual director/companion, part of my work is to bear witness to whatever my clients present. I need to talk about this corn not because I think it will heal my spiritual hurt but because I need witness to that hurt. And not mine only, but that of the corn itself, all of the creatures of the soil that, themselves, have been lost but that I have not forgotten.
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In this dying light of humanity—so bright today in the unending heat we could have prevented—may we finally learn to see and speak the languages of the beings that have until now sustained us.