Spirituality and Metaphysics

Jeremy Ingalls’ spiritual roots began in the First Baptist Church of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where her parents, Charles Augustine Ingalls and May Estelle Dodge, were married by the Reverend Gibb Braislin on April 8, 1909. This was the church Jeremy’s mother attended as a child, and actively remained as a Member of the Martha Washington chapter of the Order of the Eastern Star. News clippings from 1916 to 1918, saved by Jeremy’s mother when her daughter was a member of the Primary Sunday School, list Jeremy regularly in the Sunday Program, performing hymns and songs, (“What the Bird Sang,” “The Bird and the Rose,” and "Jesus’s Little Flowers,”) as well as reciting poems and aphorisms (“God’s Care,” and “Helping Mother”) from as young as 5 years old.

Much of Jeremy’s spiritual upbringing was also influenced by her extended family, many of whom also lived in Gloucester. Jeremy’s maternal great grandmother, Maria Jane Hinckley Dodge [Ober], was one of the founding mothers of the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church—more than likely after being widowed for years, remarrying when her children were grown. Jeremy’s father, who Jeremy described a “forward-thinking Humanist,” had family members who attended Saint John’s Episcopal Church, which is the denomination Jeremy chose to attend during her adult years (with aunts, uncles, and cousins) when she returned to Gloucester. She and Mary Dearing Lewis then joined the congregation of Saint Philips Episcopal Church after moving to Tucson, Arizona.

But there was also a larger, more metaphysical interest in spirituality, which was informed by Jeremy Ingalls’ Waubanaki Native American ancestry, as well as her college and university studies. Her scholarly knowledge of Buddhist and Tibetan philosophy and practice, along with her continued explorations of indigenous cultures—Native American, as well as tribal cultures of other lands—and even her ongoing interest in science and physics, continued to influence her poetry, writing, translation and thinking for her entire life.

In a review published in Studio Mystica (1983), Kathryn Holwein writes:

Jeremy Ingalls has given us a startling, striking book in her This Stubborn Quantum. These sixty poems leave little doubt that there is a residual mystery which remains despite all scientific postulates or proofs, which cannot be explained any more than it can be explained away. It is in fact a highly “stubborn quantum,” examined in an amazing vocabulary of machines and physical laws, of mathematical theorems and stunning astronomical distances—a unique…beautiful language. She [has]… a mind that is… comfortable with the tensions of modern thought. Of all the many poems I read for his review I would have to say that Jeremy Ingalls’ are the most brilliant and the most unrelenting. They speak and sing out of conviction, of rock hard love of God, of an immutable faith that can examine the quirks and torques and suspensions and flukes of all our knowledges. The result is stunning praise.

All souls past, present, coming, and to come
Can scar themselves but not the prime intention,
Logos of Great Spirit, named, renamed,
Dreamed of in every nation, dreaded, oved,
Denied, but not destroyable. Poiein,
To make: the Great Creator’s poem,
Great Spirit’s law, is love that bred us free
To love or to make a mock of that most real
Potential that love gave for our surviving,
Our share in the Creator’s energy:
Each soul, eternal nucleole from birth,
None alike, each recognizable,
Terror or joy, but indestructible.
Energy, though changed, is never lost.

— from “Law of the Prime Dynamic”