Honour the Cycles of Life and Light
Happy Samhain to those celebrating in the North, and Beltane blessings to those in the South. Wherever you and whichever sacred day you are obsering, may it be a joyous celebration of the cycles of life and light.
Holiness in the Soil
There is holiness in the soil beneath our feet.
Do you feel it?
I do each time I plant my body down on the Earth to sit in easy pose for daily meditation. Or when I kneel to I gather herbs and work the garden. I feel the ground beneath me caress my flesh, its wild wisdom seeping into my bones. It pulls a part of my essence deep into the core of the Great Mother so that I know that I am held.
Did you know that warthogs kneel down when they graze the yellow stubble of grass? They must know of this holiness for them to come to their knees as if in honor and gratitude of the sacred meal that the wild Earth offers so freely. They remind me that there is no shame in being brought to your knees because being humbled releases our attachment to what doesn’t serve us. It brings us closer to our inner truth and reminds us of the sacred thread of Spirit woven through all life.
Somehow reflecting on idea of holiness in the earth makes me think of a recent blog post by Sophia Rose at La Abeja Herbs about gathering pine nuts that I stumbled upon. I found my heart inspired by her poetic writing and thinking of how the ordinary ways in which we interact with the Earth can become a meditation when we honor the sanctity of it all. Sophia wrote:
“Harvesting just about anything from nature falls into the category of the unspeakable pleasures of living on Earth. Harvesting tangled roots, windblown seed, fallen nuts…this is another thing entirely. To gather these things we must, first humble ourselves. It is necessary to sit, to crouch, or best of all, to squat as our eyes and fingers search out nuts amongst the duff and aging needles. Squatting constitutes a meditation all its own. It is a stance so native to our human form–the position from which we birth, from which we tend fires, and I’m sure you can conjure a few more, quite obvious, examples on your own.” ~ Sophia Rosa, La Abeja Herbs
Night Time Mysteries – and “the world that could be ours”
This morning I walked out to greet the garden at the mystery hour of dawn. The air was so still, warm and soothing, it was as if I’d stepped into a comforting hug.
As I stood barefoot on the moist grass to ground myself, I was fascinated to discover a sea of wild mushrooms had sprung up overnight. Mushrooms are like magic. There was no sign of them yesterday. Yet today, there they were. I couldn’t help but imagine them being birthed under the midnight sky, only faeries and a thousand twinkling stars there to witness the miracle of their essence coming into being.
What other mysterious things are born in the dark hours of night, I wonder? When I lay my head to slumber and my soul returns to its place in the stars? What unseen things manifest before the sunrise of a new day illuminates the world? And also, who plucks the flowers from my tomato plant at night before they’ve had a chance to bear fruit?
It makes me think of Mary Oliver’s poem, Five AM in the Pinewoods. In the poem she talks about how she gathered from spoor tracks in the pine needles that two deer had visited the woods where she lives at night. So she goes to that spot in the wee hours of the morning to wait for them and quietly watches the pair when they show up. Oliver says that this isn’t a poem about a dream, but rather a poem about ‘the world that could be ours.’
Indeed, the world of Spirit and of Nature is so full of precious and wild mysteries just waiting for us to notice. And when we do notice, when we show up and pay attention, we discover a whole new world. One where Goddess is ever present. Along with this comes a deeper understanding of the inner mysteries of our souls. And perhaps by openning up to that world, we too may come to experience what Mary Oliver discovered when she said:
“so this is how you swim inward,
so this is how you flow outward,
so this is how you pray.”
~ Mary Oliver
Jodi Sky Rogers 