Gaia

“I am afraid of you,” I said, to some presence in and around me that I did not fully understand. “I am afraid of being overwhelmed by feeling. I would rather be numb, and yet I know I cannot live without you.”

“Do not be afraid,” a gentle, feminine voice startled me by saying. “Any time it feels like too much for you, give it back to me.” And the image that had come to me during a client’s solo journey returned. This time, it was for me. I saw myself kneel on the bare ground, felt my fingers slip into the soft, fluffy, cool soil, and scoop out a burrow. I sensed this hole could go as deep and broad as a prairie dog colony if needed. I knew it could hold anything and everything. And I suddenly realized that the voice I heard was Gaia.

“How long have you been speaking to me?” my heart wondered, without words. “Has it been you sending me these images and songs all along, across all these years?” The response came as an unfolding vision, woven with indigenous myth, layering onto a the memory of a moment I shared with the field near my home three nights before. I was sitting on old wooden gate, gazing across the tall grasses and gently tree-covered contours, and saw myself on this land, hundreds of years ago, gathering acorns and berries, and curling up to sleep. I was struck through with the sensation that all the earth does is give and give and give: everything we need to eat and to shelter.

Then all the mothers I know gathered around me and I perceived the earth as a feminine presence, imbued with this constant giving from its body to feed, to tend, to love. She is endlessly gentle, without wrath, infinitely tireless and adoring. And the sky stretches above her from horizon to horizon, and deep past planets and galaxies to the edge of the universe and beyond. Mother Earth. Father Sky. Between them, on the surface crust, are all of us, all their children, fed by their soil, their sun, the wind and rain that move between them, propagating and forming every living thing. They ask nothing from us but that we live, breathe, and die, that we transform the air, the rivers, the light, and the bodies of plants and animals into offerings of wonder and reverence. How much we suffer making our lives more than that!

This is an old, old story. I am neither the first nor the last to hear it. It occurred in a flash and settled into my bones in a deeply personal way. What is this fear that I will starve, that I will be cast out, that I can somehow fail to be… me? Many of the women I have worked with over the past weeks echo threads of this same struggle, playing out this twisted modern myth in their own unique octave. One went immediately prostrate on her back allowing the sand to breathe her in and out of its body in a blissful ten minutes of silence. One was feeling confused and overwhelmed by a inner call to serve, and felt deeply moved by the idea that the flowers she is receiving are gifts of love from her inner purity and that there is also a force of wisdom and strength ready to help her. One was scrambling to find ways to return to the embrace of the earth and found that in each moment of presence, she can dig her toes into the soil she carries within her own body.

We are not and cannot be separated from nature. That is the lie we have constructed as we’ve surrounded ourselves with the wood, metal, and plaster of dead forests and hills; as we’ve turned our minds from the fertile, vibrant movements of our brilliant imaginations to the memorization and reproduction of a hundred tasks and a thousand facts. But we can no more severe our ties to the breathing earth than we can deny the burden of our ancestors’ suffering. Their grief and exile and hunger and rage are our inheritance to unravel. And so is the vast expanse of all-seeing sky and infinitely yielding and generous earth.

The question remains: How am I to live honorably as a daughter of all these things? How am I to heal the wounds in my body, between my siblings and cousins, human and beyond? How do I hold the sorrow of being orphaned while learning to trust, every step of the way, that the door to my home is wide open? I am listening, listening, with every ounce of hope and love left in me, for the echoes of what is calling me, for everything Gaia offers me so that she and I can both heal. You can count on me to tell you what I hear and what I see. Even if I do not know what it means.

May you plant these words, stories, and images in the soil of your own body. May you warm them with the kindling of your daily toils and the ember of your soul light. And may we share with me whatever harvest, whatever famine, comes so that we may weave new ways.

Nancy

Michael Meade shares how many cultures have initiations into adulthood that include a ritual shift from the lap of the birth mother to the lap of the earth mother. Join us in a thought-provoking, emotionally-resonant discussion of the classic tale of the Ugly Duckling, the difficulty and suffering inherent in being metaphorically orphaned, and where we can find sustenance as we search for our tribe and our purpose.