What I'll Be Presenting at the ASWM Conference in Tucson March 27 - 29th

 

I'll be presenting this short paper (or something very like it) at the upcoming Association for the Study of Women and Mythology Conference (ASWM) which will be taking place the last weekend of March, 2025 here in Tucson, Arizona.  It's based on my own mythic experiences and ponderings about the importance of Pilgrimage to the formation of mythology.  I was thinking that pilgrimage - going to a special place with receptivity and spiritual intention -  may have much to do with the actual interaction between place and society throughout human history.   Paul Devereaux, an important Earth Mysteries explorer, called that "geomantic reciprocity", a relationship that develops between an individual, or a society, and the land itself, imbuing Place with transformative and intrinsic power and sanctity.  

To think of ourselves as in Relationship with place, with the land, with the creatures that inhabit it, with the "Numina" is to re-awaken to the understanding that everything is alive and intelligent within Gaia, our "Mother Earth", alive and environmentally interdependant.  This is, I believe, something, a kind of "mythic consciousness" we have lost in modernism and post modernism, and need very much to reclaim and re-invent in order to re-harmonize our relationship to the Earth. 

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                         Numina: Spirit of Place, Myth and Pilgrimage

“To the native Irish, the literal representation of the country was less important than its poetic dimension. In traditional Bardic culture, the terrain was studied, discussed, and referenced: every place had its legend and its own identity….what endured was the mythic landscape.”

R.F. Foster, (2001, p. 130)

 The Romans believed that special places were inhabited by intelligences they called Numina, the “genius loci” of a particular place. I personally believe many mythologies may be rooted in the experience of “spirit of place”, the numinous, felt presence within a sacred landscape. 

To early and indigenous peoples, nature includes a “mythic conversation”, a conversation within which human beings participate in various ways. Myth is, and always has been, a way for human beings to become intimate and conversant with what is vast, deep, and ultimately mysterious.  By Mything place  humans have created a language  wherein the “conversation” can be spoken and interpreted, and thus personified. Our experience changes when Place becomes “you” or “Thou” instead of “it”. 

In the past, “Nature” was not just a “resource”; the natural world was a relationship within which human cultures were profoundly embedded. The gods and goddesses arose from the powers of place, from the powers of wind, earth, fire and water, as well as the mysteries of birth and death. In India, virtually all rivers bear the name of a Goddess. In southwestern U.S., the “mountain gods” dwell at the tops of mountains like, near Tucson, Arizona, Baboquivari, sacred mountain to the Tohono O’odam, who still make pilgrimages there and will not allow visitors without tribal permission. This has been a universal human quest, whether we speak of the Celtic peoples with their legends of the Fey, ubiquitous mythologies of the Americas, or the agrarian roots of Rome: the landscape was once populated with intelligences that became personified through the evolution of local mythologies.

 The early agrarian Romans called these forces “Numina”. Every river, cave or mountain had its unique quality and force –its inherent Numen. Cooperation and respect for the Numina was essential for well-being. And some places were places of special potency, such as a healing spring or a sacred grove.

As monotheistic religions developed, divinity was increasingly removed from nature, and the natural world lost its “personae”. In the wake of renunciate religions that de-sacralized nature and the body, and then the rapid rise of industrialization, nature has become viewed as something to use or exploit, rather than a relationship with powers that require both communion and reciprocity. Yet early cultures throughout the world believed that nature is alive, intelligent, and responsive, and they symbolized this through local mythologies. From Hopi Katchinas to the Orisha of Western Africa, from the Undines of the Danube to the Songlines of the native Australians, from Alchemy’s Anima Mundi, every local myth reflects what the Romans knew as the resident “spirit of place”, the Genius Loci. 

Contemporary Gaia Theory revolutionized earth science in the 1970’s by proposing that the Earth is a living, self-regulating organism, interdependent and continually evolving in its diversity.  The Gaia Hypothesis, which is named after the Greek Goddess Gaia, was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science, of which are integral and interdependant.   In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all life forms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia.  In this view, the atmosphere, the seas and the terrestrial crust would be the results of interventions carried out by Gaia through the co-evolving diversity of living organisms.

If one is sympathetic to Gaia Theory, it might follow that everything has the potential to be responsive in some way, because we inhabit and interact with a vast living ecological system, whether visible to us or not. Sacred places may be quite literally places where the potential for “interaction” is more potent. There is evidence that Delphi was a sacred site to prehistoric peoples prior to the evolution of Greece. Ancient Greeks built their Temple at Delphi because it was a site felt to be particularly auspicious for communion with the Goddess Gaia. Later Gaia was displaced by Apollo, who also became the patron of Delphi and the prophetic Oracle. Mecca was a pilgrimage site long before the evolution of Islam, and it is well known that early Christians built churches on existing pagan sacred sites.

There is a geo-magnetic energy felt at special places that can change consciousness. Before they became contained by churches, standing stones, or religious symbolism, these “vortexes” were intrinsically places of numinous power and presence in their own right.

Roman philosopher Annaeus Seneca junior commented that:

 "If you have come upon a grove that is thick with ancient trees which rise far above their usual height and block the view of the sky with their cover of intertwining branches, then the loftiness of the forest and the seclusion of the place and the wonder of the unbroken shade in the midst of open space will create in you a feeling of a divine presence, a Numen."

Personal Encounters

Many years ago I lived in Vermont, and one morning I went down to the local Inn for a cup of coffee to discover a group of people about to visit one of Vermont’s mysterious stone cairns on Putney Mountain, the subject of a popular book by Barry Fell, a Harvard researcher, and under continual exploration by the New England Archeological Research Association (NEARA). I had stumbled upon their yearly Conference. Among them was Sig Lonegren , a well-known dowser and researcher of earth mysteries who now lives in Glastonbury, England and was then teaching at Goddard College in Vermont. Through his spontaneous generosity, I found myself on a bus that took us to a chamber constructed of huge stones, hidden among brilliant foliage, with an entrance way perfectly framing the Summer Solstice.

Fell and others suggest that Celtic colonists built these structures, which are very similar to cairns and Calendar sites found in Britain and Ireland; others maintain they were created by a prehistoric Native American civilization, but no one knows for sure who built them. They occur by the hundreds up and down the Connecticut River. Approaching the site on the side of Putney Mountain, I felt such a rush of vitality it took my breath away. I was stunned when Sig placed divining rods in my hands, and I watched them open as we traced the “ley lines” that ran into this site. Standing on the huge top stone of that submerged chamber, my divining rod “helicoptered”, letting me know, according to Sig, that this was the “crossing of two leys”; a potent place geomantically.

According to many contemporary dowsers, telluric energy moves through stone and soil, strongest where water flows beneath the earth, such as in springs, and also where there is dense green life, such as an old growth forest. Telluric force is affected by planetary cycles, season, the moon, the sun, and the underground landscape of water, soil and stone. Symbolically this “serpentine energy” has often been represented by snakes or dragons. “Leys” are believed to be lines of energy, not unlike Terrestrial acupuncture lines and nodes, that are especially potent where they intersect, hence dowsers in Southern England, for example, talk about the “Michael Line” and the “Mary Line”, which intersect at the sites of many prehistoric megaliths, as well as where a number of Cathedrals were built.

At the time I knew little about dowsing, but I was so impressed with my experience that months later I gathered with friends to sit in the dark in that chamber, while we watched the summer Solstice sun rise through its entrance. We all felt the deep, vibrant energy there, and awe as the sun rose to illuminate the chamber, we all left in a heightened state of awareness and empathy.

 Earth mysteries researcher John Steele wrote in EARTHMIND, a 1989 book written in collaboration with Paul Deveraux and David Kubrin, that we suffer from what he called “geomantic amnesia”. We have forgotten how to “listen to the Earth”, lost the capacity to engage in what he termed “geomantic reciprocity”. Instinctively, mythically, and practically, we have lost the sensory and imaginative communion with place and nature that informed our ancestors spiritual and practical lives, to our great loss. 

We diminish or destroy, for money, places of power long revered by generations past, oblivious to the unique properties it may have, and conversely, build homes, even hospitals, on places that are geomagnetically toxic instead of intrinsically auspicious. Our culture, versed in a “dominator” and economic value system, is utterly ignorant of the significance of place that was of vital importance to peoples of the past. Re-discovering what it was that inspired traditional peoples to decide on a particular place for healing or worship may be important not only to contemporary pilgrims, but to a way of seeing the world we need to regain if we are to continue into the future as human culture at all. 

Making a pilgrimage to commune in some way with a sacred place is a something human beings have been doing since the most primal times. Recently unearthed temples in Turkey’s Gobekli Tepe reveal a vast ceremonial pilgrimage site that may be 12,000 years old. The Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece combined spirit of place and mythic enactment to transform pilgrims for over two millennia. 

One of the most famous contemporary pilgrimages is the “Camino” throughout Spain, which concludes at the Cathedral of Santiago at Compostella. Compostella comes from the same linguistic root as “compost”, the fertile soil created from rotting organic matter – the “dark matter” to which everything living returns, and is continually resurrected by the processes of nature into new life, new form. Pilgrims arriving after their long journey are being metaphorically ‘composted’, made new again. When they emerge from the darkness of the medieval cathedral in Compostella, and from the mythos of their journey, they were ready to return home with their spirits reborn.

In 2011 I visited the ancient pilgrimage site of Glastonbury, England. Glastonbury’s ruined Cathedral once drew thousands of Catholic pilgrims, and Glastonbury is also Avalon, the origin of the Arthurian legends, the Lady of the Lake and King Arthur - a prehistoric pilgrimage site with origins that go back to unknown beginnings.


To this day thousands, like myself,  still travel to Glastonbury for the festivals held there, and for numerous metaphysical conferences, including the Goddess Conference I attended. The sacred springs of the Chalice Well and the White Spring have been drawing pilgrims since long before recorded history, and many people, like myself,  come still to drink their waters. 

Making this intentional Pilgrimage left me with a profound, very personal sense of the “Spirit of Place”, what some call the “Lady of Avalon” and taking some of the waters from the Holy Springs back with me  is ever a reminder of the dreams, synchronicities and insights I had there.  A trip to the Chalice Well in the winter of 2018 resulted in a profound experience of syncronicity and communion I can only call magical.

 

Sacred Sites are able to raise energy because they are geomantically potent, and they also become potent because of human interaction. “Mythic mind”, the capacity to interpret and interact with self, others and place in symbolic terms (as, for example, the way the Lakota interpret “vision quest” experiences) further facilitates the communion. 

Sig Lonegren, who is one of the Trustees of the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, and a famous dowser, has speculated that as human culture and language became increasingly complex, verbal, and abstract, we began to lose mediumistic, empathic consciousness, a daily intuitive gnosis with the “subtle realms” that was further facilitated by ritual. Dowsing is a good example of daily gnosis. “Knowing” where water is something many people can do without having any idea of how they do it. Sometimes, beginning dowsers don’t even need to “believe” in dowsing in order to, nevertheless, locate water with a divining rod.

With the gradual ascendancy of left-brained reasoning, and with the development of patriarchal religions, he suggests that tribal and individual gnosis was gradually replaced by complex institutions that rendered spiritual authority to priests who were viewed as the sole representatives of God. The “conversation” stopped, and the language to continue became obscured or lost.

Perhaps this empathic, symbolic, mediumistic capacity is returning to us now as a new evolutionary balance, facilitated by re-inventing and re-discovering mythic pathways to the Numina.

References:

Foster, R.F.(2001) , The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane/Penguin Press), page 130.

Lovelock, J. and Margulis, L., (1970) The Gaia Hypothesis, quote is from Wikipedia
Retrieved on: May 11, 2014 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis

Seneca, L. Annaeus junior (65 A.D.) Epistulae Morales at Lucilium, 41.3.
Retrieved on: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistulae_morales_ad_Lucilium

Fell, B. (1976, 2013). America B.C.: Ancient Settlers in the New World, 
Artisan Publishers, N.Y.

Raine, L. , EARTHSPEAK:  Envisioning a Conversant World, Presentation Conference on Current Pagan Studies, Claremont, CA. 2018.   https://threadsofspiderwoman.blogspot.com/2020/03/earth-speak-envisioning-conversant-world.html

Lonegren, S. (2013) Mid Atlantic Geomancy, Blog. Retrieved on: http://www.geomancy.org/

Steele, J. (1989). Earthmind: Communicating with the living world of Gaia, with Paul Devereaux and David Kubrin. Harper & Row: N.Y. Page 157.

We Are Becoming an Authoritarian Oligarchy: an Urgent Message from Bernie Sanders & Lawrence O'Donnell

This is a historical and crucial moment for our nation, and for the world, as we are all interdependent in a changing planet.  

I know that I have not been posting much about the Goddess, or Earth Spirituality, or feminism, or art, as I usually do.  Yet all these important subjects are endangered as we lose our democracy, our right to free speech, and the tyranny of the oligarchy, and their front man, Trump. We live now in a global society, and what is happening affects not just Americans, but many other countries, and indeed, our planet itself.  

I feel so strongly that I have to be informed, and to that end I've been listening to the clear and truthful voice of Bernie Sanders, who says it out loud and what it is that we are very close to losing.  It is beyond shameful that people with unfathomable wealth are smugly supporting Trump and Musk's agenda.  So very much is to be lost as this country becomes sucked dry by the very wealthy, and a regressive, authoritarian, Christo-fascist regime.   Bernie Sanders summarizes where we are with a powerful and very clear statement.  Had me in tears. 

 https://www.youtube.com/live/QWf_b-_4uXg?si=fucmJT1a09UJEtMO

https://youtu.be/BIOaxR_UHIQ?si=QdCX3e0zLac8xeYd

A New Green Man sculpture

 The Green Man 

I walked among the trees

I wore the mask of the deer 

remember me, try to remember

I am that laughing man

with eyes like dappled leaves.

 

When you think 

that winter will never end

I will come. 

 

You will feel my breath, warm at your neck.

I will rise in the grass, a vine caressing your foot.

I am the blue eye of a crocus opening in the snow

  a trickle of water, a calling bird,

  a shaft of light among the trees.

 

You will hear me singing

among the green groves of memory,

the shining leaves of tomorrow.

 

I'll come

with daisies in my hands,

we'll dance among the sycamores

once more

(1997)

Los Angeles is Burning - a Climate Scientist's Important Words

 

I mostly grew up in Los Angeles, and certainly was shaped by California culture there and in Northern California as well.  I celebrated my birthday on Malibu beach,  went dancing up in Topanga at the Topanga Corral, hung out at Alice's Restaurant on Malibu pier, skated on the Santa Monica boardwalk.  My mother grew up in Pasadena, and always talked about the Rose Parade there.  My grandmother on my mother's side grew up in what is now MacArthur Park in downtown L.A., a very fashionable neighborhood at the turn of the Century.  Her mother lived there too.  

I sit here in a state of shock, to see Los Angeles burning.  So much suffering, so many people who have lost their homes, so many animals and wildlife suffering also, such devastation. I don't know what to do.  What can I do?  

It seems like things are falling apart rapidly.  In my previous post I shared Laurie Anderson's powerful "The Barbarians Are Coming" because, well, they are here.  The American experiment in democracy, from my point of view, is being deconstructed into an authoritarian oligarchy right before our eyes, televised.  Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and Trump rants and blames from his golf resort  while Los Angeles burns.  It seems the omens are not good as this reality star "leader" prepares to be inaugurated.  Catastrophic fires in L.A.  Monster hurricanes in the South.  Mass killing in New Orleans.  Hard times, and right now, many of us stand in shock, unable to go forward.  The Barbarians are in Washington, blindly chanting "drill, baby, drill", and Mother Gaia is raging because the planet is changing.  

I've tried to mostly make this Blog about Art and Women's Spirituality, but I find political and environmental realities overwhelm my thoughts these days. Art, and the Return of the Divine Feminine are not apart from those realities, indeed, Patriarchy has something to do with it.  But today, as L.A. burns, I am deeply saddened, and deeply frightened, and mostly incoherant.

Here is a passionate voice from a man who knows what he's talking about.  I want to share it, because it's not only important what he has to say, but it's the truth.  America, wake up.  Please, wake up. 

https://youtu.be/mMYvuY_MLMQ?si=ISlvOv5TJyP6dciI

The Barbarians Are Coming...................

Laurie Anderson

"In every creative life, in every life of passion and purpose, there comes a time when the animating spark grows dim and the muscle of motivation slackens, when you come to feel benumbed to beauty and abandoned by your numen, suffocating in the exhaust fume of your own exertion, ossified with the tedium of being yourself."

Ah, yes.  Here I am in my personal  horse latitudes.  4 am (the so-called witching hour, although I sense not one molecule of magic at the moment).  The above currently perfect quote by Maria Popova, from her marvelous Blog The Marginalian, is, currently, perfect.  I feel "ossified with the tedium of being myself".  It seems rather hard to move when in that Nigredo, ossification mode. 

I may not be alone in this.

                             "so what's the point?  The Barbarians are coming". 

When I was a child of about 11 my family lived for a while in Italy.  My mother was fascinated with ancient Rome, and we went to many ruins and museums of that great Empire that featured what seemed to me as endless statues of Generals, Gods, and Orators.  Each and every one of them had no nose.  I used to wonder about that, until I thought about the Barbarians, riding into Rome as it fell to loot, rape the Vestal Virgins,  destroy the culture created by Patricians, artists, orators and philosophers,  set fire to the Senate.......... and knock the noses off of every statue they encountered.  I used to imagine that, horse riding  men with bronze swords, joyfully banging off marble noses in an orgy of desecration as Rome fell at last.  And, following in the footsteps of Ceasar years before,  the Barbarians also finally crossed the Rubicon. 

                                                 "The Barbarians are coming."

Very soon, the Whitehouse will belong, again, to Trump and his wife (who still hasn't learned much English). They are crossing the Rubicon.  Is it, like Ceasar's march, a point of no return?  

And our centers of government are in soon to be in the hands of, well,  Elon Musk, seen dancing around in glee as they make a whole new Department, just for him.  He might as well have a tee shirt that says "We own you".  Meaning the Oligarchy.  And, presumably at the helm, Trump, ever ready to turn the U.S.A. into his own private reality TV show.  Soon to be our President, the very same guy who tried to start an insurrection 4 years ago, one in which several people died, our elected officials had their lives threatened, and violent, gun toting "Trumpsters" stormed the capital, screaming "hang the Vice President" when they weren't waving Trump flags.  And here we are again:  Almost Inauguration Day.  Trump and Company utterly triumphant, and proving once and forever that now days you can get away with anything.  Because he has. Now what? 

                                                   "The Barbarians are coming".  

I think this brilliant performance by the amazing Laurie Anderson is going to resonate in my mind for quite a while.  It seems so very true to the moment.  And I am very pleased, thanks to UTube, to share it here.  

 https://youtu.be/rI15W-BBhrw?si=lrYA3E7L3LN3gQV8

New Year 2025: Poems and Remembering Source

 

This is an image I have made over and over and over since, I guess, 2007.  The "rooted hand", woven into a great Fabric of nature, reaching up to flower and leaf and create.  This "rooted hand" is my personal Icon to remind me of belonging, and to invite the spirit of nature to express through me, my art, through what I create and imagine.  

It's almost New Year 2025.  And I've been struggling with grief about the prospects for this year.  No, it's not the future we imagined, my friends and I as young idealists at Berkeley in say, 1975.  We grew out of the idealism and optimism of the Kennedy years, and for all our activism, that was the Matrix we believed we could continually change, make better.  Most of those friends are gone now, and here I am, still here, and it is 2025. 

It's not the America we imagined, this cynical and corrupt Oligarchy that cares nothing for democracy, or for that matter the future of life on this planet.   All they care about is an unquenchable lust for power. 

Even so, this is the image that is arising in my mind, and I want to post it here again, as an Affirmation, indeed, as an Invocation of Gaia, of Nature, of the Soul of the Earth.  The profound Ecosystem we are a part of, indivisibly, interdependent, woven.  That we are all, past, present, future, human, animal, fungi, tree-root, sky, sun, snow and leaf....... that we are each a part of it all.  That's what I want to hold to as this New Year begins.

I guess I'll begin with a poem I wrote in October, 2001, shortly after the fall of the twin towers in New York, while I was on the beach in Mendocino.  I made an affirmation then, as my own girlhood memories flowed past me on that long ago beach, an affirmation that still rings true for me now.  Oh.......... and I want to share some of the beautiful poetry of Nancy Wood too.  That's my Affirmation for the New Year 2025.  What I don't want to forget, what I want to hold to.  

         ON THE BEACH 

One month after the world ended

The little island world we,

the privileged few, could pretend

was safe, forever, and righteous -

The fallen towers, fiery messengers

of unfathomable destruction yet to come.

Tourists walk barefoot on the familiar beach.

They came here, I imagine,

as I have, not to forget, but to remember.

To remember driftwood and high tide 

a red dog and a yellow-haired child

as they enter the water -

their cries of goodly shock and honest forever's

always new, always cold, always blue.

A white heron,

balanced in perfect equanimity on one leg.

Wave forms overlay my feet......

transparent hieroglyphs of infinity.

Her way of speaking.

Gaia.  Her manifest, unspoken words.

A brown man lies beside the mossy cliff,

spread-eagled between sky and sea and land.

Sand sunk, leaf-molten,

blackberry thorn,

into the green:  

toes, fingers, flesh

reaching into the green

redeeming Earth.

He is rooting himself.

He is taking himself back.

I lie down in grateful imitation,

a stranger in companionable human proximity

sharing this rite of remembering.

I  see her now,  I see a girl

walking on this very beach.

Yesterday, and 40 years ago.

Sourcing, she is 

sourcing the one who lives here

a river Goddess with no name.

She has made a mermaid offering

of sticks and sand and seaweed.

Companions arrive, offer shells,

and return to Berkeley.

To Vietnam, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall,

the war, the wall,

the war, the walls.

The war,

and the summer of love.

("the revolution will not be televised")

A generation to end war, raise hell,

raise consciousness,

raise Atlantis,

and raise the new and Golden Age

("the revolution will not be televised")

How did we get here from there?

I call you back, girl,

I call you back.

I am at the other end of this life now

yet your footprints 

touch mine beneath the sand,

I follow them.

On the beach

your sand prayers

ring here still,

The Earth

is my witness.

Lauren Raine, Oct. 11, 2001 

Nancy Wood, who passed away in 2013,  found a deep sense of spiritual  belonging in nature among the natives peoples of New Mexico, and much of her poetry was a celebration of that belonging.  Her poetry is about listening, listening to the voices that become One voice of the Earth.   I've always found renewed Balance when I return to her poems. 

Hold on to what is good

even if it is 
a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.
Hold on to life even when
it is easier letting go.
Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.

From Hollering Sun (1972)

Blue lake of life from which flows everything good

We rejoice with the spirits beneath your waters.
The lake and the earth and the sky
Are all around us.
The voices of many gods
Are all within us.
We are now as one with rock and tree
As one with eagle and crow
As one with deer and coyote
As one with all things
That have been placed here by the Great Spirit.
The sun that shines upon us
The wind that wipes our faces clean of fear
The stars that guide us on this journey
To our blue lake of life
We rejoice with you.

In beauty it is begun.
In beauty it is begun.
In peace it is finished.
In peace it shall never end.

My help is in the mountain

Where I take myself to heal
The earthly wounds
That people give to me.
I find a rock with sun on it
And a stream where the water runs gentle
And the trees which one by one
give me company.
So must I stay for a long time
Until I have grown from the rock
And the stream is running through me
And I cannot tell myself from one tall tree.
Then I know that nothing touches me
Nor makes me run away.
My help is in the mountain
That I take away with me.

From War Cry on a Prayer Feather, 1979

Earth teach me stillness

As the grasses are stilled with light.
Earth teach me suffering
As old stones suffer with memory.
Earth teach me humility
As blossoms are humble with beginning.
Earth teach me caring
As the mother who secures her young.
Earth teach me courage
As the tree which stands all alone.
Earth teach me limitation
As the ant who crawls on the ground.
Earth teach me freedom
As the eagle who soars in the sky.
Earth teach me resignation
As the leaves which die in the fall.
Earth teach me regeneration
As the seed which rises in spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself
As melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
As dry fields weep with rain.

from Hollering Sun, 1972