We Are The World

The only relationship of real power we will ever have is our relationship to the Earth. We are her, she is us, literally and metaphorically. Everything is made up of the same stuff, Shamanic Elders have been telling us this for thousands of years and Quantum Theorists agree; we are microcosm of the macrocosm and all that we are is writ large in our world.

We ARE the Earth expressing herself, imagining herself, experiencing herself, knowing herself.
So consider this - how are you today? How is your mind, your body, your spirit? How are you taking care of that world?

Which songs are you singing?

What do you love?

What have you given birth to?

How is your inner world?

Whose air do you breath?

Who are your neighbours?

Do you know the tidal ebb and flow of the moon in your body?

What are you connected to?

Who are you and what are you here to do?

The way you do something is the way you do everything - so if you are taking care of the world that is you (harmoniously, organically, carefully, lovingly) then you are both directly and indirectly taking care of the world that is all of us.

Imbolc - 1st February

Imbolc; the word has so much love in it for me. Partly because of the beautiful family ceremony that we do on this day (I wrote about this last year, you can read it here) and partly because however much I like reading and painting and things-you-can-do-indoors with any spare moments that I happen to be blessed with, best of all I love being outside and with Imbolc tends to come the first whisperings of that outside time of year.

This year it's particularly outsidey as spring appears to have sprung. Most of the yellow flowers that you would associate with April are already here, as (rather confusingly) are some blackberry flowers! It's tempting to get all doom-sayerish and talk about how our disregard for it is sending our environment haywire, but I don't actually think that helps.

This is Daisy Dog's paw amongst the daisies.

Thoughts have power, words have power. If we put our attention on the doom and gloom then doom and gloom is what our experience of being alive will be. I am full of anger and grief for what I see as atrocities being meeted out on a daily basis to everything and everyone - but I don't want to live in a constant state of anger and grief. I don't advocate putting your head in the sand, that's not going to help; I believe that we need to do what we can to change the world on every level. So attend anti-fracking rallies where you can. Sign petitions, all that stuff (as I did in Exeter on Sunday. There were pitifully few of us.)

I believe it's incredibly important to acknowledge our grief about the state of our world and our fears for the future, grief and fear are both part of becoming motivated to act for change - but if you stay in grief and fear then ultimately I believe that they are immobilising, so we have to feel them AND - believe in Love. Be love. Know that everything is made up of the same stuff; we are part of the wholeness of creation, part of The Goddess and she is part of us. So, if we 'will' that it be so, if we WILL with every bit of our Breath, our Will and our Imagination that the world is a place that will support the life and health of all things, then it will be so (as long as there are enough of us wanting that). And that little bit in the brackets.... that's the crux of it! There have to be enough of us. So it seems to me that the most useful, the most political, the most revolutionary act is the dissemination of information about our world and what's being done to it. If  Sunday's anti-fracking rally showed me anything at all, it's that far too many people out there simply have no idea what's going on. Some of them genuinely can't see any further than the end of their noses and don't care to, but far more just haven't noticed.

The lambs are still being born, right on cue - some say that Imbolc means 'Ewe's milk'.

This year my Imbolc ceremony will focus itself not on what I want for me but on what I want for my land; the place of my roots, that without which I am nothing, have nowhere to live and nothing to love.

Christina Rosetti wrote

At Last 
Many have sung of love a root of bane:

       While to my mind a root of balm it is,

For love at length breeds love; sufficient bliss

For life and death and rising up again.

Surely when light of Heaven makes all things plain,

    Love will grow plain with all its mysteries;

    Nor shall we need to fetch from over seas

Wisdom or wealth or pleasure safe from pain.

Love in our borders, love within our heart,

    Love all in all, we then shall bide at rest,

    Ended for ever life’s unending quest,

         Ended for ever effort, change and fear:

Love all in all; —no more that better part

         Purchased, but at the cost of all things here

Don't Worry, Be Happy

"Though free to think and act, we are held together like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable: these ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them." Nikola Tesla

Dear old science; if you believe a quick trawl through the inter-web it's becoming more and more of a hippy as it gets older, certainly it's catching up with the truths that ancient wisdom traditions have been stating since before it existed... that everything is made of the same stuff and that there is a consciousness throughout the constantly moving web of energy flashing in and out of existence that informs 'what is'.

On one level it blows my Newtonian educated mind on a daily basis, and on another I know it to be true with every fibre of my being and every second of my experience.

So the question is, what difference does it make? Why does it matter that we live in a world made up entirely of vibrating energy?

It matters because it's entirely made up of vibrating energy. Everything is made up of the same stuff. The land, the water, the trees, the birds, the air, you, me, even two-faced politicians and fracking executives. We are all part of a shared energy field, a unified living being we call Earth. We share the same breath and we all affect the field.

Oneness is not an idea, it is a reality.  We are the world and therefore we are what is wrong with the world and what is right with it. So BE what you love. Be generous, kind, compassionate, caring, funny, authentic, passionate, nurturing, original, creative, brave, peaceful, joyful, wise and be full of gratitude. Protest the bad stuff, make practical attempts to change what is not serving the good of all, but remember that if we do that from a place of anger and fear then we are creating anger and fear, and if we do it from a place of love and gratitude then the miraculous, seemingly ludicrously unlikely nature of our universe can place us in a world full of just that.

Where do you want the path of you life to lead you?

Become a dreamer, create a beautiful dream, not the nightmare that many of us (human and non-human) are living in.

Floods and Fracking

Two days before Twelfth Night our celebratory tree was unceremoniously stripped of it's decorations and bundled into a pile at one edge of the room. This is not the way we usually go about things; there is usually a gathering round the tree of slightly sad faces toasting the end of the season. There is usually a fire and a sense of coming out of the darkness slowly and with attention to the details. The tree is cut up and made into little kindling bundles that will last most of the rest of winter and the decorations are placed lovingly in their little boxes, wrapped up with the hopes and wishes for another season of love and peacefulness at the end of this year. Why the rush? Well, the outside started to come inside...

The mop by the fireplace and the towel on the floor tell a tale of water coming up through ancient tiles and creeping wetly across rugs, water that has kept on coming for days. It's a tiny dribble, measurable in buckets-full each day, nothing at all compared to what people are experiencing in Cumbria, Lincolnshire, Wales, Scotland, and doubtless many other places that haven't made it onto the news, but the fact that a house that is nearly 10,000 feet above sea level can flood means that none of us are safe from this wet. It's not just about high tides and rivers bursting their banks, it's that the land is utterly sodden, waterlogged past the limits of what can be absorbed.

Lanes have become canals.

The rivers are expanding their dominion daily.

Although not everyone seems to mind.

Druid (mostly a Border Terrier) has decided that he's a water dog. Luckily he has not been so foolhardy as to jump in any of the rivers, but every puddle requires his close examination.

Canine larks aside - we live on an island (you've noticed?). Our government is issuing licences for Hydraulic Fracking on this island. Hydraulic Fracking uses from 4 to 8 million gallons of water per borehole. This is filled with approximately 40,000 gallons of a mixture of up to 600 chemicals including know carcinogens and toxins such as Uranium, Mercury, Radium and Formaldehyde. During the process some of these chemicals can, and in some cases do, leach out and contaminate nearby groundwater. Where will these contaminants go?

There have been over 1,000 cases of water pollution as a result of fracking in the US (not to mention air and land pollution and increased risk of earthquakes) and cases of sensory, respiratory and  neurological damage due to ingesting contaminated water (source www.dangersoffracking.com). These are some of the ways in which the human population are being affected by fracking. If you're still reading this then there's every chance that you know we are not the only ones here - but we are the ones with the power to change things.

So let's get to it.

Solstice Slow Time

Happy Solstice!

This morning at dawn and intrepid band of travellers braved the elements to walk to Scorhill (on Dartmoor) to greet the dawn. It was so windy that a friend's smallish daughter was blown over and nearly everyone there remarked at some point that we must all be completely bonkers.

It was incredibly beautiful. Wonderful to be out in such extreme weather to a place where wildness lives.

To be reminded that this is the time to stop.

Or at the very least slow down.

Take some breaths of the howling, thrashing air and remember;

Few things really matter, but love matters and you and I and all our relations (human and other-than-human) matter. And none of these would be anything at all without Earth - who IS us and all our human and other-than-human relations, everyone from cats to carrots. And so she matters most of all.

Merry Mid-Winter - however you celebrate it.

For My Ancestors And For My Descendants

Happy Halloween, or Samhain, or whatever you chose to call this day when the veil between this world and that other is at it's thinest and the old year dies. The apples are picked, the firewood is stacked and it's time to draw-in, to simmer down, to reflect.

I've been 'haunted' for the last few days. My paternal grandfather has been popping up everywhere in a most persistent manner; a few days ago I looked at a basket that I use for recycling in the kitchen (before it's taken to the box in the shed), I look at that basket ten times a day but suddenly I remembered that I had given it to my Grandfather for his 80th Birthday and filled it full of home-made goodies. I heard a Carly Simon song on the radio and remembered that he had given my my first ever album as a young teen. I noticed that you can still buy a 'Freddo' frog shaped chocolate, when I was little these were his favourite and I would delight in buying one for him with my pocket money. Memories came crowding in and I realised that he was trying to get my attention (or more accurately The Spirits - the wise compassionate, all knowing, utterly loving Spirits - who are individuated only so that we may understand, were trying to get my attention).                                  

     
I spent many hours with him/them last night. First I was asked to light a fire. I did so with due ceremony - a fire in honour of The Ancestors - both personal and general, both recent and ancient, this is well within my comfort zone and my 'normal'. I was then sent to collect a small leather case which is filled with old photos, letters and documents. There are (or were) all sorts of wonders in this suitcase. The Spirit that I was identifying as my Grandfather, who my brother and myself called Grandadda, was getting more and more impatient with me; it had taken me a long time to do as I was asked, he'd been asking for days. His impatience increased as I opened the case.

Immediately the case was open it was clear that what was required of me was that I burn the contents. Whatever recoil from this instruction you are feeling as you read this is unlikely to be as strong as mine was. I have been raised in a family who's feeling for what some of my family call 'La Generosa' (The Generous Ones the one's who came before us and to whom we owe our-selves) has been very much at the forefront of my up-bringing. On my Mother's side of the family my GrandPop was an Irish tale-teller and story lover who had a history to relate for nearly every eventuality and who kept the stories of the generations alive by constant recounting. My maternal grandmother was on the one hand descended from Robert The Bruce and on the other from Italian nobility. You simply don't, you really DO NOT destroy family records or memorabilia..... history is how we learn. So - being asked to burn the contents of the case was horrible. Beyond horrible.

I couldn't do it. I spent hours reading all the letters, looking at the documents and the photographs. Grandadda was getting crosser and crosser, more and more anguished as I refused to do it. I would not understand unless I did as I was asked.

So we reached a compromise. I would burn all but two of the letters that were written from 1905 to 1911 by my Great Grandfather Edward (Ted) to my Great Grandmother Fanny. They were sweet letters, mostly concerning themselves with the presents various people were giving them as they got married. He signed himself 'Your ever faithful sweetheart' until they were married, were-upon he signed himself 'Your ever faithful ex-sweetheart'. These were lovely people, kind people, people like you and me. Reluctantly I put the letters on the fire. And the minute I did so, the penny dropped.

In the verbal histories of my family my great great grandfather is referred to as The Old Bastard (that's him, above). He - like my Grandadda (Ed) and his father (Ted) was called Edward Snow. When Ed's father Ted died (when Grandadda was three) he left his share in the family business to Edward Snow - his son. But Edward Snow - his father - took the inheritance. Hence the less than adoring title of Old Bastard. Now that the letters between Ted and Fanny are (mostly, but for the purposes of the lesson - completely) gone all that remain are equally loving letters from The Old Bastard to Fanny enquiring about her health and that of his grandchildren. So history has been changed. My son's will inherit a suitcase full of another story entirely than the one I was raised with - because I'm pretty sure they haven't heard the 'Old Bastard' story and now the evidence is that he was a kind and caring man. One who sent his granddaughters coats and his daughter in law money. This is not fully the point of the 'great burning' (I still can't quite believe I did it - in some small ways I will probably regret this for years). What Grandadda was trying to make me understand (and I'm not sure I'm managing to convey it at all) was that in looking back at the Ancestors as individuals or as a 'culture' we will only ever keep repeating the same stories, make the same mistakes, create the same reality.

At this time of year we honour our dead, we stand in gratitude for our place nearest the fire, honour our bodies and our inheritances. If we are wise we look much further back than those we know as ancestors, to the common ancestors, the small tribe of people to whom all of us ultimately owe our genetic inheritance. People who knew the Earth as alive and sentient, people who we like to think and certainly hope behaved with grace and respect for hundreds and hundreds of generations. BUT - we must also look to the future, to the descendants for our wisdom. They are the ones who are truly inheriting the terrible dislocation that the last thirteen generations have engendered. In the letters it became clear that these people who lived 100 years ago hardly differ from the majority of the people of my generation in the west at all, obviously they couldn't operate a blog without a serious up-date but they are pretty similar in their concerns. My sons and their friends seem to me to be a different kind of human completely. At the forefront of their concerns are the whole tribe of Earth Dwellers and the Earth herself. I thank the Goddess for them, for all of them, and I will be looking forwards for my wisdom, not backwards, whilst thanking those who have gone before me that I am here at all.

What we've been up to!

Blog posts here have been a bit thin on the ground lately, not for the lack of things to blog about - but for the lack of time. I've been a busy bee - making, making, making: Rattles,

 Large piles of home grown vegetables.....

 Stacks of freshly made drums......

There's been quite a bit of painting, both of drums and walls - Fergus has been making himself a workshop in our tumble-down 'barn' - or rather a lean too next to that. Exciting! (This is him in the kitchen, the workshop has not got to the place where you could paint a drum in it yet.)

I've also been making A New Endeavour. I'm not quite ready to let the cat out of the bag yet, but there are 'things afoot!'  When it comes to birth I will share it here, and I hope you'll be as excited about it as I am.

So, now you know!