Give it to Gaia

When I was younger and still today I would cringe when I would hear the phrase “Give it to God”.  I used to hate this because to me it suggests give up personal responsibility in life. Now you may be wondering what this blog is going to be about since I am clearly saying that you need to be responsible for your actions and the path you walk. So why Give It To Gaia?

A few days ago I was working in the garden. I have had such limited mobility due to an injury at the beginning of the year but it was a particularly good day, I was feeling the strongest I had in weeks and I was out there digging in the dirt, pulling weeds, examining rose canes, and working on planting smaller plants that I could handle. As the time went on I began thinking of Gaia. Yes, I am a water witch but it was Gaia who, while living in Japan, called out to me; pulled me to my path and when I questioned if it was her, she smacked me upside the head with a spiritual 2×4. For this reason, Gaia always has an altar/shrine in my home. She is honored by how I work the land and my caretaking of the earth, growing and ethically harvesting plants and in turn nourishing my body and family.

Years ago I had a student that was in personal crisis. She was on the phone very upset and wanted me to give her answers to her problem. I try not to give advice about personal problems when I feel the person can find the answer themselves through meditation, counseling or just conscious contemplation.  As a sacred dancer I know how movement can help to ground and I knew that being so connected to the Earth, some angry gardening would give her much clarity. So I got her to calm down enough to tell her to go outside and pull all the weeds she could find in her garden. Sure enough a few hours later she called to say that she was doing better and had found the answer. It became a small joke with the witches in my coven at the time to “Go garden angry”.  It is amazing how Gaia takes that anger, fear and frustration and turns it into a constructive act that benefits the garden and the body.

So as I was there in the garden exchanging energy with Gaia and holding tight to my thoughts, fears, pain and hurt, she began to just take it. It wasn’t necessarily something I asked for, though healing is constantly on my mind lately and so perhaps she knew or heard and begin to help. The Earth, our planet; it is a magical beast! She is one and everything on a spinning ball in the eternity of the cosmos. But she is invested in us, invested in our wellbeing especially for those that choose to try to work magic and mundane work to heal and save her.

So as I was working and these things were happening it popped in to my head “Just give it to Gaia”. At first I chuckled at my own disgust about the phrase but then reminded myself that it was much different. I wasn’t giving up my autonomy to a deity to do as they chose with me, rather I was giving Gaia my unusable energy, or in this case she was taking it and reusing it for her good, and in turn helping me find balance and grounding. It was strange for such a beautiful entity to want the worst parts of me and my energy at the time. It’s not something we modern humans are use to, I know I am not. There are very few who want us at our worst and even fewer that can take the worst of us and turn it to gold… or in this case sparkling emerald green earth.

Spiritual Compost

Giving it to Gaia is about grounding in a mutual way with Gaia. Several weeks ago a friend of mine did a presentation on Magical Gardening and a good portion of it was about composting. I actually hadn’t thought of composting as a magical act until then. I started to think about this and realized, before I had wondered if Gaia was being poisoned with all of our collective grounding and shedding of bad energy. Now of course we all know the grounding exercise where we send our energy to the earth through our roots, and bring up better and lighter clean energy to rejuvenate and connect us with the earth. It hit me! This is spiritual composting!

When we compost in the mundane world, we take our left over natural foods and mix them together, and over time they decompose, taking the left over nutrients that we aren’t using and then turning them in to solid nutritious food for our garden beds. That in turn soaks up all our scraps and feed the new life that then feeds us. When we ground and connect with Gaia we are spiritually composting, the energy is not lost, it is just unusable for us, but the earth can use what we can’t and it is actually very nutritious for it. So I began to reframe my previous thoughts about how sending Gaia our negative energy might be harming her and came to an understanding that while we may consider this energy negative and unusable, Gaia has the power and understanding how to use this to benefit her and so now I think of grounding as spiritual composting and I enjoy giving it all to Gaia!

More about Annwyn Avalon here