I will sing of the well-founded Earth, Mother of all, eldest of all beings:
She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land, all that are in the path of the seas, and all that fly; all these are fed of her store.
Through you, O Queen, we are blessed in our children, and in our harvest and to you we owe our lives. Happy are we who you delight to honor!
We have all things abundantly: our houses are filled with good things, our cities are orderly, our sons exult with feverish delight. (May they take no delight in war) Our daughters with flower-laden hands play merrily over the soft flowers of the field. (May they seek peace for all peoples)
Thus it is for those whom you honor, O holy Goddess, Bountiful spirit!
Hail Earth, Mother of the Gods,
freely bestow upon us for this our song that cheers and soothes the heart!
"This is the core of our task: to remake the world in the image of those ancient stories. To respect and revere ourselves, and so bring about a world in which women are respected and revered, recognized once again as holding the life-giving power of the Earth itself. We can reclaim that image in each of us: the creative, ecstatic, powerful feminine that each of us embodies in her own unique way. Lacking it, it is no wonder that we are grieving, alienated, imbalanced - that we cannot find a way to belong to a world that teaches us to cover up not just our bodies but our feelings, our dreams, our intuition. There comes a point in each of our lives when we face a choice. Will we stay as we are, embracing the pale shadow of womanhood permitted us by the patriarchy? Or will we sink deep into the heart of the boglands, and find in the depths what it is to reclaim our creative power as women? As always, the stories show us the way. The old stories, the ones which tell us that women are the land, the Body of the Earth Mother. The old stories, the ones in which the Earth is sacred, and so women are sacred too: the force of creation, the givers of life. The stories in which women are the bearers of the Grail, the keepers of the cauldron of inspiration and rebirth. "
Sharon Blackie, IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED (2016) In 2018 I went to the Gatekeeper's Conference in Pewsey, in the U.K. It was also my delight to visit a number of prehistoric sacred sites, including Avebury, Silbury, the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, the great (fallen) Stones and Henge of Arbor Lowe in Derbyshire, the Nine Maidens, also in Derbyshire, and others. Truly, as I sit here in my urban home, I reflect that it has often seemed, among these ancient Mysteries, that I feel most at home. I was also introduced to Sharon Blackie's book IF WOMEN ROSE ROOTED which I enthusiastically read throughout my visit, feeling that it resonated greatly with me. The author lives in rural Ireland, close to the beloved land she writes about, and speaks with passion, and the bitter/sweet story-teller lilt of an Irish Bard, about an instinctual need women women have to return to mythic (and actual) roots in the land. In some ways she reminds me of Clarissa Pinkola Estes, as she urges women to regain, and celebrate the creative power of the life-giving Divine Feminine in mythology. and speaks of an essence deeply rooted in nature because we ARE nature. She returns again and again to the need to be ROOTED in the Earth as well as a mythic and conversant landscape that is also woman affirming; the Heroine's journey, she writes, is not the same as the classical Hero's journey proposed by Joseph Campbell - because it is a journey of interconnection, relationships, co-creative and co-experienced cycles, and finally, the journey of belonging to the Great Mother, the great "conversation" of the planet. The Heroine's journey, in a new and yet ancient sense, is perhaps now the journey of the Eco-heroine. Ms. Blackie speaks with passion because she believes it is urgent for all to "rise rooted", as the death dealing forces of patriarchy and sociopathic, unlimited capitalism are quite literally destroying the future for not only humans, but all children of Mother Earth.
The title is a poem in itself, and as an artist who compulsively for decades has been putting roots on faces and hands and bodies........well, it jumped off the shelf at me! Yes, all my work has been "rooted" for a long time, even if I haven't always consciously been so............ but like many Americans with a life of bewildering change and movement, I have always wanted to be rooted, attuned to the essence of place, without always knowing how or why. I look at 45 years of art, and always the Tree is there. The Tree that is Asherah, the Tree of Life, the union of Above and Below. For me, intuitively a quest to find identity within the those vital roots, found in the living, composting dirt, and among the twining vines, flying webbed among the branches with the sparrows.
Silbury Hill, Avebury, Wiltshire, UK - believed to represent the pregnant belly of the Great Mother
When did we lose our roots? When did the separation between nature and human happen? When did the Great Earth Mother, eternally birthing and growing and dying and returning again...........when did She disappear under the weight of myth and patriarchal cultures? When did the processes of nature and the cycles of nature cease to be sacred and became profane? A question I many have sought to answer as we move fully now into ecological crisis.
The Nine Maidens, Derbyshire (Henge and Processional in background)
"For it was no peasant, but calm and cunning wizards, ruling and pegging out in granite the windings of the dragon track that writhes unseen in marsh and moss and meadowland, that twines in stellar gravity among the eaves of the cubic sky. So they, upon the veins of Anu, print a spell of glory in our blinks of lives. Rightness of the world Self seen: the green, the garden.
Speaking With the Land In so many rural areas of the UK the 21st Century seems like it is just another layer atop a continually emergent pentimento, the patterns of a much older landscape. Of course this is true everywhere, but it is so much in daily evidence in the UK and Europe. That "pentimento" is like an ancient tattoo - circular, serpentine, full of standing stones, henges, magic wells, pregnant "harvest hills", and geomantic ley lines. For me, when I was able to walk and explore this overlay my vision expanded to a broader vista, a panorama that opened in my mind as I imagined the world of those who walked there so long ago. And that very faint yet vibrant Pentimento gave me a vision as well of what, as myth makers and "geologians" for the future, we might re-invent from the dreaming Earth.
As far as these energized, ley crossed sites go, what poet and Bard Robin Williamson called the "veins of Anu and the windings of the Serpent Track", I agree with those scholars who believe that once upon a time the very lands the people walked on, the land they grew their food and marked the Solstices and Equinoxes and the movements of the moon and the stars upon, was the "temple" itself, The Deity was beneath their feet, and all around them.
As Marija Gimbutas, and later Michael Dames, have argued, these sites mark a sacred landscape that was once viewed literally as the Body of the the Great Mother from which the blessings of abundance came, and ultimately to which, in the great cycles of the year , all return. Here, and in ubiquitous similar sites in Southern and Central England, Ireland, Scotland, the Orkney Islands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Brittany..........perhaps as well in the mysterious realms of the great Temples of Malta, or the barely excavated, and truly ancient circles of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey as well, we see the remnants of a worship of the Earth as Great Mother that lasted for a very, very long time.
According to Michael Dames in his book the Silbury Treasure, Silbury, which I visited in 2018 along with other similar "harvest hills" (there is one along the Processional to Arbor Lowe as well) literally represented the pregnant belly of the Great Mother, and were associated with certain times of the agricultural cycles. In the Neolithic and early Iron Age he makes a significant argument that there was a universal religion which regarded the LAND ITSELF AS THE DEITY. Situated just south of Avebury, Silbury Hill in Wiltshire is Europe's tallest prehistoric structure. When his book was first published in 1976, archaeological investigations sponsored by the BBC had demonstrated that the hill was not, as had previously been believed, a burial mound, nor did it have any buriel remains connected with its antiquity. Dames surveys the history of earlier digs at the hill, then uses comparative archaeological evidence, astronomy, ethnography, folklore, mythology, mathematics and place-name research to argue that the shape of the site is designed to represent the pregnant Belly of the Goddess.
As with the ditch/henges that surround stone circles, Silbury would have been at certain times of the year surrounded by a human made body of water, which Dames believed not only was fundamental to the "temples" that these ceremonial sites represented, but in the case of Silbury, actually formed the shape of a squatting (birthing) woman. He believes that Silbury was a sacred mound that was part of the Avebury ceremonial landscape. He likens the "Goddess form" of the henge surrounding Silbury to similar pregnant Goddess sculptures and icons found throughout Europe during the Neolithic.
As a child, I had great conversations with flowers and squirrels. And, of course, my cats. Even earthworms were not immune to my words of concern for them. Much later, I read avidly of the Findhorn Community, or Perelandra, or the Sirious Community, the conversations members of these communities had between the Devas of the plant kingdoms and those who came to learn and grow amazing vegetables, healing herbs, and magical gardens in conscious collaboration with them. We need to learn to "speak with the Earth" again. This impresses itself on me again, and again. Not in some removed, abstract, distant way, but intimately, beneath our rooted feet, in our creative hands rooted in a great collaboration with the planet that stands aside, protects, and at best shepards the land. That releases for good the outmoded concept of "domination" of nature. Humanity must become friends again with the family of planetary life, the "Covenant" of the Garden. I believe that our next evolution as a planetary humanity is not out in space, but right here, on the Earth. There will be many new innovations, but there will also be many, many re-discoveries of what was once known and understood. This is indisputable in the face of climate change, and a technology that is advancing much more rapidly than we are evolving as a global humanity to meet it. So where does religion come into this? To be honest, I am not a religious person, although I have an abiding interest in and experience of spirituality. But I am a mythologist, and religions are founded upon myths, upon world and creation stories, which are ever revised and co-opted throughout history within different cultures, sometimes to serve specific purposes. The change that must occur within western religious systems is that we cannot continue with a patriarchal, tribal alpha male centered mythos. Nor can we continue to worship deities that are founded upon ancient warrior sky gods - wifeless, daughterless, motherless, preoccupied with with dominance, however they are packaged. We can't continue with religions that are "Renunciate" either, not if we wish to make our way back to a "conversation" with the land that sustains us. Dissociative religions that teach that divinity and sanctity lie somewhere other than here, whether that be conceived of as Heaven, Paradise, some elusive "Enlightenment" or Nirvana, or, as various New Age groups teach, that life is "not real", and hence we must reject its "unreality". ..... will not serve our children, or all the many other forms of consciousness that are co-evolving on planet Earth with us. The paradigm is changing and the Goddess is rising - why? Because She must.
This is what is meant by the Return of the Goddess. For Restoring the Balance in the divided human psyche. We cannot understand Her perhaps as neolithic peoples understood Her, but we must facilitate Her rising as people of the 21st Century urgently need to understand Her. Not as some hierarchical deity that replaces a tyrannical, misogynist sky god with an equally "dominating" and merciless matriarch - but as, scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis demonstrated in their Gaia Theory, the Body of the Earth itself, which we are living IN. Not ON, but IN.
And what we do to Her, we are doing to ourselves. I respond deeply to Sharon Blackie's call to women to "rise rooted" . For those of us who have been rooting about in the shards and buried roots of prehistory and mythology........while we cannot really know what the ancients did or believed, we can sense it with our feet, divining rods, instincts and imaginations, and (gnow) that it is something that points toward a different way of being. One we can invent, re-invent, and re-member ourselves into.
I will sing of the well-founded Earth, mother of all, eldest of all beings.She feeds all creatures that are in the world, all that go upon the goodly land,all that are in the path of the seas, and all that fly; all these are fed of her store.
Homeric Hymn to Gaia
Earth Day, but truth be told, all days should be Earth Day, because our Mother Gaia is the greater life we live within, the greater life we have the privilege of being each a tiny part of.
I found myself thinking about the many "Green Hands/Earth Hands" sculptures I've made over the years, an image that occurs over and over for me. Rooted in the Earth, greening and flowering in our creativity and the works of our hands. I guess, after all, each of them is a kind of blessing and a prayer.
“'What is life?' is a linguistic trap. To answer according to the rules of grammar, we must supply a noun, a thing. But life on Earth is more like a verb. It is a material process, surfing over matter like a slow wave. It is a controlled artistic chaos, a set of chemical reactions so staggeringly complex that more than 4 billion years ago it began a sojourn that now, in human form, composes love letters and uses silicon computers to calculate the temperature of matter at the birth of the universe.”
Lynn Margulis, Ph.D., collaborator with James Lovelock in the Gaia Hypothesis
“Psychologists have not begun to
ponder the emotional toll of the loss of fellow life. Nor have theologians reckoned the spiritual impoverishment that extinction brings. To forget what we had
is to forget what we have lost. And to
forget what we have lost means never knowing what we had to begin with."
Mark Jerome Walters, The Nature Conservancy (1998)
"Wildness we might consider as the root of the authentic spontaneities of any being. It is that wellspring of creativity whence comes the instinctive activities that enable all living beings to obtain their food, to find shelter, to bring forth their young: to sing and dance and fly through the air and swim through the depths of the sea. This is the same inner tendency that evokes the insight of the poet, the skill of the artist and the power of the shaman."
Thomas Berry
"This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings."
Gaia, mother of all,
I shall sing,
the strong foundation, the oldest one.
She feeds everything in the world.
Whoever walks upon her sacred ground,
or moves through the sea,
or flies through the air, it is she
who nourishes them from her treasure-store.
Queen of Earth, through you
beautiful children
beautiful harvests,
come.
It is you who gives life to mortals,
and who takes life away.
Blessed is the One you honour with a willing heart.
One who has this has everything.
Their fields thicken with life-giving corn,
their cattle grow heavy in the pastures,
her house brims over with good things.*
It is you who honoured them,
sacred goddess, generous spirit.
Farewell mother of the gods,
bride of starry Heaven.
For my song, allow me a life
my heart loves.
Homeric Hymn to Gaia XXX, translated by Jules Cashford.
* The original pronoun was, of course, "he". I changed it to remember that not all Beings of the Earth are "he".I suspect Gaia, in all Her magnificent diversity, would approve.
I think it was Joanna Macy who coined the term "world as lover, world as self". May that understanding reach our hearts as we celebrate, indeed, our Beautiful Mother.
Eureka! I Found it.............that poem by Drew Dellinger that I first saw on Jennifer Berezon's DVD PRAISES FOR THE WORLD. This wonderful DVD, which I bought after seeing her perform last year at Kripalu, is of a ritual performance in Oakland that featured the poet Drew Delinger, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem, Joanna Macy, and many others, all within the container of Jennifer's exquisite devotional song.
Mr. Dellinger's poem has haunted me, especially after I wore the DVD out by playing it over and over again. So here, with the miracle of blogging, is a link to a UTube video in which he recites it live, and I invite anyone reading this to listen, and to listen to the music of Jennifer Berezon as well. For my own pleasure, I copy the poem below.
let’s meet at the confluence where you flow into me and one breath swirls between our lungs
let’s meet at the confluence where you flow into me and one breath swirls between our lungs
for one instant to dwell in the presence of the galaxies for one instant to live in the truth of the heart the poet says this entire traveling cosmos is “the secret One slowly growing a body”
two eagles are mating— clasping each other’s claws and turning cartwheels in the sky grasses are blooming grandfathers dying consciousness blinking on and off all of this is happening at once all of this, vibrating into existence out of nothingness
every particle foaming into existence transcribing the ineffable
arising and passing away arising and passing away 23 trillion times per second— when Buddha saw that, he smiled
16 million tons of rain are falling every second on the planet an ocean perpetually falling and every drop is your body every motion, every feather, every thought is your body time is your body, and the infinite curled inside like invisible rainbows folded into light
every word of every tongue is love telling a story to her own ears
let our lives be incense burning like a hymn to the sacred body of the universe my religion is rain my religion is stone my religion reveals itself to me in sweaty epiphanies
every leaf, every river, every animal, your body every creature trapped in the gears of corporate nightmares every species made extinct was once your body
