This is the thirty-third issue of my free newsletter. Your feedback is most welcome!
Solstice Greetings! It is a fitting time to be writing this, with snow falling in soft white lacy crystals, and an icy wind blowing outside. Snowflakes are such a magical form of water. In December I’m torn between the desire to stay indoors and curl up with a book or a journal, and the equally strong desire to go to social gatherings, to share warm potluck dinners and hug people and be around children. My tendency is to be more gregarious and not catch up on the quiet inward moments which the season offers. But the weather has its own agenda. These mountains have snow and ice storms that keep wise people off the roads completely.
At Earthaven this Tuesday, there will be a practical celebration of the solstice: a delivery of firewood (and kindling collected by the children) to every household, stored solar energy for the woodstoves that keep most Earthaveners warm. At each household, hot tea or cider and other goodies will be offered in gratitude for the wood. A celebration of beauty and pleasure took place last night, which included many readings of poetry from Hafiz, Wendell Berry, and Mary Oliver, a Brain Gym exercise for re-integration, some original and traditional songs, a rap about the divine feminine, and an outrageous male strip tease down to the leopard-skin briefs. A “pay it forward” massage was started, “because touch should be as abundant as food,” in the words of Steve Torma, who planned the event. Darkness was celebrated with lore and poems about the owl. After extinguishing all the lights, we called out the name of the darkness in ourselves we were each confronting, shining the light of awareness on it. And with the lighting of each of our tiny votive candles, we welcomed the return of the sun in its annual cycle.
How different this celebration was from the garish displays of artificial lights we have come to see as normal in December. To quote Martin Prechtel, author of Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, “We live in a kind of dark age, craftily lit with synthetic light so that no one can tell how dark it has really gotten.” I read about a town which prides itself on having the most Christmas lights of any town in North Carolina. People come in their cars from miles away and tour the streets, and traffic is often backed up on the weekends near Christmas. Imagine the cars idling with exhaust spewing from tail pipes, while people look at blazing displays of fossil-fueled lights for which mountains were destroyed to generate the electricity. Perhaps we seek so much artificial light because our culture is so impoverished of inner light. Sometimes I think of what the world will look like after the fossil fuel bubble has burst and we are no longer driving everywhere in our cars. There will be so many square miles of asphalt roads and parking lots to be removed, so much wreckage from our ill-fated love affair with cheap oil, gas, and coal. When we finally slow down and walk, we will see the detritus of our civilization much more than we do from the window of a moving car.
When I spend time with a creek or river, I regularly pick up any trash I find there. Again, the words of Martin Prechtel came to me the other day as I was dragging plastic bags out of the stream: “Out of respect for the Holy.” If water is sacred, as I believe it is, then trash does not belong in it or near it. We would not allow rusty cans, broken bottles, plastic wrappers and styrofoam on an altar in a church. We are water, we cannot live without water. There are Biblical verses in which Christ is referred to as water that comes to a dry land or desert. When will we awaken to the need to care for the gift of water with reverence and gratitude?
To quote Starhawk’s latest book, The Earth Path: “All water is one—one whole, one awareness. All water is continuously aware of all the other water in the world…Water is a flow of life-giving awareness, constantly cycling through the world. We must bring ourselves into right relationship with that pervasive consciousness. Only through a balanced relationship with water can we have abundance and thriving life. And water knows. Water Spirits, Water Goddesses and Gods, however we want to name that intelligence that is so different from ours—something knows and feels when we approach with love and respect.”
Share your gratitude with water. Share your appreciation with a friend or a family member. Do a tiny act of kindness.
Many blessings!
Cathy Holt
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