Dirt Heart Witch
The other day I posted an article which was a rewrite of a piece that I wrote about 10 years ago. I was in the thick of my Wiccan days1 and you can really see that. There is a great focus on the relationship between the God and the Goddess. I wrote on that story for years.
It’s a love story.
It’s about how the rain loves the earth so much that he falls from the sky to touch her face. Or how the heat of the volcano’s passion rises up and spills new earth into the sea. It’s about the wheat in the fields falling to the scythe. It’s about closeness and separation and an eternity of life and death. It’s a tragedy and a comedy. Everyone falls in love and everyone dies.
And there is huge sacrifice. The selfless offering of one’s whole being to the cycle of here and not-here, togetherness and missing-you-ness on the most epic scale. The tree begins in the dark seed, grows for years, finally makes love/flowers, gives life/fruit, later dies/falls, becomes food for the next thing, returns to the darkness. Like we do. Like everything does.
Truth: it is a wild and brilliant scheme to put two things together to make another thing. The world as we know it works because things come together, each contributing their part, and cubs/babies/kits/hatchlings/sprouts come into being. It’s a miracle, this making of new life. We sort of understand it. A part + B part = new one of those two.
But this is not the only miracle. The ability to make new ones of ourselves is crucial, of course. But part of our gift as human beings is that we don’t have to wait for the rules of Nature to teach us when it’s appropriate to not make more of us. We can look into the future and see that we will outstrip our resource supply at some point and maybe we should do less more-human-making.
There are miracles of two (or more) sides of an argument sitting together and resolving issues. There are miracles of taking something very broken (tools, systems) and fixing them. There are miracles, simply, of dancing together, laughing, crying; being strong and sensitive and compassionate all at once. Many miracles. Many stories.
The love story between God and Goddess, Lord and Lady, Him and Her, Her and Her and Him and Him, and Earth and Seed and Rain and Sky and smell of salt and flowers and hurricanes and earthquakes and forests and birds is important. And so are the love stories between opposing viewpoints, different needs, contrasting positions. These are perhaps even more essential to the future of humanity.
I still love the story of how one offers oneself to the good of the whole; how the apple doesn’t cry out as it eaten by the deer but instead moves with grace into that oneness. And I love how the tree forms a thicker skin to protect its own life from intruders. I especially love how, when the predator misses the prey, they move on to the next opportunity.
It seems to me that, in any given situation, if we can describe our experience in a love story so true that it makes us cry, then we are rising into our greatest gift as humans: compassion. Whether the narrative stars a big God and Goddess or many Gods/Goddesses or none of the above is really not crucial. Write it how ya want. Just make it beautiful. And thoughtful. And kind.
1 “Wiccan days” feels a bit flippant to me, but I didn’t want this post to be about my relationship with Wicca. Suffice it to say that I see great value in that path as in many others.
Photo of leaf/rain/sun courtesy of Shutterstock.com
Photo of storefront courtesy of Jenya and the beautiful Santa Cruz Community
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