The Sexiness of Ostara

I would like to stop using
These words:
Spiritual practice and spiritual discipline.

Practice gives the impression
That if you do it enough,
You will no longer have to
Draw water daily.
Discipline makes me think of
Corners made for time-out,
Of abrupt endings,
Of narrow spaces where you
Have to squeeze your exuberance in to fit.

What are the words that say instead
That each day,
The Love that Always-Is and Could Be
Comes to you
To dissolve what is false,
To listen to the story that only you can tell?
To ask you to go on telling it
Out loud,
To risk all?
How could you not be
So taken?

This poem, by my dear friend and colleague, Laura Martin, was written during the liturgical season she celebrates as Lent. It seems to me, though, that it is perfect, just perfect for the season of Equinox-tide, if you will. The time leading up to the celestial balancing-and-blending holiday and the time just after.

I am profoundly committed both to “practice” and to “discipline.” And yet, I find the following line just breath-stealing:

“How could you not be / So taken?”

Taken by the Great Love—yes, oh yes. Perhaps a line for Beltaine?

Nonetheless, in the places I have lived—central Pennsylvania, northern West Virginia, the District of Columbia, and northern Oregon—now is the time, the time around the Vernal Equinox, when I see horn-iness everywhere, if you’ll forgive the Pagan pun.

The birds are mad for each other.

The daffydowndillies have opened in their glorious, golden display.

The grape hyacinths with their humble, small flowers, like the snowdrops before them, are sneaking up behind the daffodils.

The fruit trees are crazy with their gorgeous, demanding sexiness.

The sap is rising, or has risen, depending on the tree, the temperature, the location. And that sap rising is something we all can feel if we put out our own buds out, stretch our branch-arms, feel our switchblade-leaves pushing up through earth to become irises soon enough.

Maybe it’s climate change. Maybe it’s the crazy combinations of rain and sun that are here, in a place still new to me. Maybe it’s just the way of things I have not attended to before. But Ostara is just sexier than I used to give it credit for.

Ostara is the second of the fertility holidays. Brigid’s holiday has lambing and dairy, light-but-not-heat. Beltaine has sex, straight up, no chaser. More flowers. More love. Lying on the land in a lover’s arms. Ostara, though, seems to me to be its own sexy holiday.

Where do all those babies come from anyway? Those tiny plants. Those little chickens. The bunnies hopping all over my yard?

The vernal equinox is also the season when I have often started flower seeds. When the earth outside is still too muddy to work with—a legacy of Imbolc! —but soil and its amendments come together—blend, not balance—to make a happy little bed for someone new.

Notice the difference between blend and balance. Perhaps we might think of the equinox, and all its sexy, flowers-and-pollinators goodness, a blend, a union, a communion.

So then let us commune, smell the flowers, bring in bouquets, and wait (im)patiently for the Queen of Summer’s Opening, Beltaine.

And as we live and love in this season of spring, I invite you to share with me, staring April 12, in a class of blending and balancing. This four-week course and month of support, Digging Sacred Wells, is designed to reach into the living waters of our own deepest Selves, to find the deep water that flows beneath the everyday of our lives. Digging Sacred Wells takes from the metaphor of the holy wells of the Gaelic lands and also the lands of the Bible.

Be welcome in tasting the sweet water of your own Spirit and the Spirit of Life. The Spirit of SPRING!