In Praise of Mold

Rejecting shortcuts to Christian maturity

One writes [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Gather round, children. It’s time Ol’ Uncle Donkey talked to you about something near and dear to his heart. No, not pickleball. Nay, not even pickles. Today, I want to talk about leaf mold.

Leaf mold is the crumbly black substance you typically find on forest floors, on gardens, and in the python enclosure at the zoo. Packed with nutrients, the accumulation of said mold over time eventually produces the kind of velvety soil every gardener dreams of being buried in one day.

If you’re not into leaf mold, try the following experiment.

First, if you don’t already live in one, drive to a suburb and take a walk through it. As you do, note the pathological tidiness of everything. There’s Mr. Morris, carefully edging his lawn with the edger he spent most of yesterday sharpening. There’s Janice, planting the exact same five red geraniums she plants every year. There’s Dan, directing a stream of PMRA-banned pesticide on the one weed that survived the initial assault. The lawns, the landscaping, the trees — for all it’s neatness and convenience, the suburban neighborhood is a two-dimensional entity. If it was a drink, it would be a lemon-water daiquiri. And easy on the lemon, please.

Now, drive to some old-growth forest and walk through it. Note the 80-foot high trees you could drive a Honda N-One through. Note the million varieties of alien-looking mushrooms bubbling up out of stumps and holes in the ground. Note the thick, loamy air that feels as though it’s actively recalcifying your bones whenever you take a breath. And, oh look!, there goes one of those Venezuelan Ostriches we all thought died out forty years ago.

Here you have a truly vital environment. It’s the kind of place a sickly little kid like Colin Craven could recover in — unlike suburbia, which would likely finish him off in two days. Big, old, weighty things live there. Things that existed before you were born and that will continue to exist after you’re gone.

There are many reasons for the different environments, but a big one comes down to leaf mold. Now, leaf mold isn’t sexy. You won’t see a pile of it featured on the cover of Fine Gardening. There are no boutique A La Mold gastropubs popping up on Young and Bloor. But if you want the elephantine specimens that will eventually be capable of forming their own weather systems, you need that mold stat, son. 

Now, stay with me as we try to land all this metaphorical hoopla — you didn’t think all of this was just about dirt, did you?

Amending the mind

Tolkien, in the above quote, uses the analogy of leaf mold to illustrate a truth. He states that the event of The Lord of the Rings didn’t come from nothing. Rather, it grew from “the leaf mold of the mind,” which he describes as “All that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps.” In other words, LOTR was a direct result of the (largely linguistic) leaf brain mold Tolkien had been laying up for years.

In other words, the content we ingest isn’t doing nothing. It is creating an ecosystem of a mind and heart which will eventually produce comensurate thoughts and actions. If the only content we ingest throughout the day are memes, X posts, Instagram reels, and Mcdonald’s menus, our mind will eventually degrade to the point where it’s ecosystem resembles a neglected litter box. The aspirations and virtues that grow up from such soil will be of the sad, strangled variety that your neighbor Dan ends up annihilating with his illegal weed potion.

There are many people who would like to have written The Lord of the Rings. There are many who have tried. Most, if not all, have failed. Why? Because the glittering spectacle that is Middle Earth grew out of the forty metric tons of leaf mold in Tolkein’s mind. Which, admittedly, may have been moldier than was good for him. This isn’t about abandoning our trades to memorize The Kalevala or learn Icelandic. It’s about cultivating the mental and spiritual disciplines that eventually result in deep soil.

By way of confession, and illustration, I’ve checked my phone half a dozen times while writing this article. This lack of impulse control has no doubt impacted the quality of this article while at the same time demonstrating why it needed to be written. Now that you know that, can you, in good conscience, keep reading?

Hopefully. Because I’m pretty sure I’m not alone here. And if there’s one thing misery appreciates, it’s Big Macs . . .

Company. I meant company.

Towards a meaningful strategy

When everyone in a community struggles with the same problem, it’s easy for that mutual dysfunction to permit a certain level of complacency. If everyone forgets to wear deodorant, and smells equally as bad, there’s no real incentive — not to smell bad, right? I mean, what’s the point? Why not just all smell like boiled cabbage together?

The answer, of course, is that anyone with their head screwed on straight shouldn’t want to smell like boiled cabbage. A standard of hygiene exists outside the status quo of any one community. As it concerns behavior, and as it concerns Christians, this standard is Christ. Not whatever temperature our community has allowed itself to adjust to.

And here, we need to talk about phones. I don’t think we realize just how much the ubiquity of smartphones has changed us. Neil Postman predicted, “People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” The smartphone is such a perfect fulfillment of this prophecy, you couldn’t do better if you tried.

The problem, of course, isn’t the phone itself. The problem is the mental inebriation that results from being able to access anything, anywhere, at anytime. Back to our analogy, if the goal is to be daily amending our minds with fresh leaf clippings, smartphones are like the retired neighbor who charges out with a leaf blower everytime the smallest twig blows on his lawn. Nothing can accumulate in such an environment; nothing can settle; nothing can mature. Such minds start to resemble Cirque du Soleil in a typhoon — with bears, clowns, and popcorn just blowing around everywhere in a jumbled mess.

Smartphones allow us the illusion of illimitability — we can, seemingly, be everywhere at once. But God has not so made our lives. Rather, they’re to be lived out in a sequence of moments. The challenge, of course, is that moments are inherently limiting. You can’t be present in a moment and also be present in an online controversy, a meme, or a message exchange. We like to think we can, but we can’t. Just ask your family how great a multitasker you are after being glued to your phone for the entirety of a family event.

Limitations are an offense to our pride. They are also an interruption in the constant supply of dopamine that our smartphones provide. They are the “cure” for that most deathly of conditions: boredom. In our day, we’ve become almost allergic to understimulation. This might seem like a small thing, but boredom is actually where the magic happens. Anyone out there think that a pile of leaves is exciting? If so, sorry to break it to you. And yet underneath the seemingly dull pile of leaves, chemical changes are taking place. Heat. Transformation. There’s no other path to leaf mold than a static pile of leaves. And no other path to old growth forests. And no other path to The Lord of the Rings. Or a deep relationship. Or a needed conversation. Or a new endeavor . . . like a Mcdonalds franchise.

I may have been hungry when I wrote this.

The point is that for all the efficiency of the smartphone generation, I’m not seeing results. I’m seeing a bunch of anxious, distracted, undisciplined people who are unable to concentrate on anything for more than five minutes. We adore the technologies that are undoing our capacity for thought.

Still worse than this

But the biggest threat of smartphones isn’t the damage to our relationships or endeavors. The true death of our enslavement to impulse will be realized in broken fellowship with God. If we can barely stand to spend ten minutes conversing with someone in person, how will we spend extended time conversing with Someone by faith. If we can’t sit down to read a book, how will we sit down to read the Word. If we’ve trained our mind to always be hopping around like caffiene-fueled rabbits, how will we know the Lord?

Why should we expect to make an impact on our world when we’re so little acquainted with it’s Creator. What help will we be? King David was a powerful man in his own right, and yet even he knew the source of his wisdom — “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation.” And what about the undeniable power of Jesus’ disciples, who were “unschooled, ordinary men.” A good portion of the leaf mold in the Christian’s mind, therefore, should surely be the Scriptures.

As Christians, we need to stop endlessly capitulating to the ever-changing moods, trends, and devolutions of a godless culture, and we need to resist them for the long haul. Taking dominion isn’t finding the shortest route through hard work. It is plodding through the hard work in front of us — through the boredom and FOMO withdrawal tremors — trusting that God is doing something in the midst of it.