This is what I saw from my back steps yesterday morning when I tilted my head upwards. It was beautiful. The trees were greeting the warmth of the early-March sun through a melting song right along with the birds, who are calling out to one another more each day now. Even my old ears (and my ears behave as if they are really old) could hear the harmony of ice becoming water, before falling in great plunking drops from the highest branches onto the earth below, quenching the thirst of microbes and mycelium in the soil, before being taken up, up, again as sugar-water into those same branches through the roots of the trees. A perfect system: closed in a loop, life-giving, natural, everything with its purpose fulfilled.
This morning the sky is dove-gray again, with rain, sleet, and snow, all expected in today’s weather. One step towards spring, two steps back into winter; that is the way of transitions.
When a woman gives birth she goes through just such a time; in early labor the cervix softens, thins, and begins to open; a way is made. Then comes the painful time of transition, of long and powerful contractions when the woman’s body pushes the baby against that narrow way again and again, contracting, relaxing, contracting, relaxing until it is time for the mother to push new life into the world. Spring arrives here, just so. Yesterday we moved forward, today we relax back into the womb of winter.
Nature really is matrifocal; life (and we are only a part of life) is centered around life and its continuance. Life is interdependent upon life and there are no pyramids of primacy within its web. I (and all of us) came from some ancient cell floating in a primordial sea. Half of the cells we carry in our bodies are not human, but bacteria. Without them, we would not be able to live. Our continued presence on this tiny, aching, living, planet depends upon the existence of all life. Matrifocal cultures understand this. Patriarchal cultures deny this.
We are at the end of patriarchal-time, and maybe human time, now. We are seeing, and sensing, the stress of Mother Earth as she labors to birth and feed the creatures (including us) who have evolved within her systems. We are seeing the culmination now of the systems of domination, power-over, and out-of-control growth and acquisition as old, privileged, white-skinned men bomb, blast, rape, destroy, and desecrate our sisters and brothers, and our planetary home. Whether this is the end of an era, or the end of our species (and so many other species,) depends on what we decide now.
Will we dismantle the structures of patriarchy, or will we push our own extinction on an uninhabitable Earth? Will we recover our place in the web of life, or will we just destroy it and ourselves? Will we put down our weapons, and tend to life, or will we wage war unto death? It is up, and down, to us.
Courage my dears. Choose wisely wherever you have choice. Love one another.
