Ingwaz -Part 1
The seed following ice is quite poetic this time of year. We have had multiple snow storms and ice storms. I pulled Isa the night before a blizzard here. And today we have freezing rain with snow on top of it. We have gone from 60 degrees down to below freezing. The weather has been quite remarkable.
It actually felt like spring and I could see the plants wanting to germinate. I worried about my tigerlilies that were showing green tips. I'm worried about the possible damage to any plants that got confused by such extreme warmth in between severe weather events.
Climate change has been on my mind quite a bit. From bats in Australia with their brains literally boiling in their skulls, to frozen sharks washing up on the shores of Massachusetts. We are in a very dangerous tipping point for our climate and yet humans still can't see how we contribute to our own demise. As if everyone comforts themselves with the belief that things will always be as they are now, and we are somehow so special that it won't happen to us.
Wildfires over the past months denuded the hills and mountains of California. Then came the rain and with it landslides, rivers of mud, that have claimed 18 lives as far as we know up to right now.
Barley is in danger on this continent. There are few areas left where the soil is right and there is the right balance of sun and moisture. Our local beers, grain for food production, etc. are in danger. The bread basket of America may not be able to sustain wheat and grain production anymore.
Ingwaz, in it's agricultural meaning, brings all this to mind. We can plant our seeds correctly and at the right time and still not get the harvest we have earned due to some cataclysm of nature destroying the fields.
There is a time for quiet germination, for silence, and removing yourself from the busy world outside. We have lost our silent places, our wild and hidden glens. Everything is built up, landscaped and corporatized. The wild beating heart of our childhood imaginations, of our pagan yearnings, is threatened by orderliness and conformity. Things are too structured and neatly trimmed or placed carefully.
In my backyard, despite my attempts to create wild corners in the yard, letting the blackberry vine ramble, the strawberries and blueberries have their way, scattering wildflower seeds to do their worst, I can still hear the highway rushing like water in the air. I can see only a few stars. There are so many streetlights and ambient light from the city roughly ten miles away. I miss the deep darkness of the country, the silence of the wood so profound you can hear the trees creak as they sway, the clattering of branches and the brush of tall grass in the breeze.
I miss those wild places where my heart felt at ease.
When I was in college, in the spring I gave myself a task to complete. I would walk through the woods behind my dorm and collect little yellow flowers (they looked like tiny tigerlilies) to leave at the statue of the Virgin Mary. She was a goddess substitute since I had no statues for my deities. I would travel over the footbridge to a standing of pine trees where I had built a little altar of flat stones in the circle of five tree stumps. Across from this was a cliff about 8 feet high that I would climb down to the river's edge and gather water in a clam shell. I had found these bleached shells lodged in the mud cliffside by the hundreds, like a fossil deposit. I had to carry it very carefully as I climbed up the cliffbank and traveled back through the trees to the altar. I left this shell and it's water as an offering. The offering was not just the physical shell but the labor of retrieving it as well.
It was a spring ritual for me, as soon as the snow had melted and the green things started to sprout up again, I would wander the wooded area and get to know the plants and animals. I came across deer who would stop and stare at me. A beaver who followed me while he was swimming along the bank. I felt a crane once, lift off from the bank. And I do mean "felt". I could feel the force of its wings as it pushed downward.
I guess I am a "strange bird". When I tried to share these things with others they just couldn't seem to understand the emotion and vibration it released in me. I was even mocked a couple of times.
So maybe these places were meant to be a sort of Ingwaz for me. They recharged my energy, my heart and soul, after a long winter. They were meant for me to experience. The retelling of them lost its lustre. The listener couldn't relate to them having not been there and having not been like me. Not to say that I am anything special, but my chemistry of experience, biology, neurology, etc. is unique to me.
I contemplate seeds a lot. There are family farmers in my living memory and my distant ancestry. One of my earliest memories is of my father walking the fields with me explaining how potatoes grow. I was so little that trying to walk over the mounds of dirt in the field kept tripping me, the dirt waves were so high.
I don't know how this got so rambling. I've been reading a lot lately on the connection between women and the earth and Celtic myths. I guess a love for the land and a deep sympathy for how it is treated by humans is close to the surface of my mind. It will probably come up again in the next entry when I discuss the rune itself.
I am heartsick lately for the lonely, dark, wild places I remember from my youth.
It actually felt like spring and I could see the plants wanting to germinate. I worried about my tigerlilies that were showing green tips. I'm worried about the possible damage to any plants that got confused by such extreme warmth in between severe weather events.
Climate change has been on my mind quite a bit. From bats in Australia with their brains literally boiling in their skulls, to frozen sharks washing up on the shores of Massachusetts. We are in a very dangerous tipping point for our climate and yet humans still can't see how we contribute to our own demise. As if everyone comforts themselves with the belief that things will always be as they are now, and we are somehow so special that it won't happen to us.
Wildfires over the past months denuded the hills and mountains of California. Then came the rain and with it landslides, rivers of mud, that have claimed 18 lives as far as we know up to right now.
Barley is in danger on this continent. There are few areas left where the soil is right and there is the right balance of sun and moisture. Our local beers, grain for food production, etc. are in danger. The bread basket of America may not be able to sustain wheat and grain production anymore.
Ingwaz, in it's agricultural meaning, brings all this to mind. We can plant our seeds correctly and at the right time and still not get the harvest we have earned due to some cataclysm of nature destroying the fields.
There is a time for quiet germination, for silence, and removing yourself from the busy world outside. We have lost our silent places, our wild and hidden glens. Everything is built up, landscaped and corporatized. The wild beating heart of our childhood imaginations, of our pagan yearnings, is threatened by orderliness and conformity. Things are too structured and neatly trimmed or placed carefully.
In my backyard, despite my attempts to create wild corners in the yard, letting the blackberry vine ramble, the strawberries and blueberries have their way, scattering wildflower seeds to do their worst, I can still hear the highway rushing like water in the air. I can see only a few stars. There are so many streetlights and ambient light from the city roughly ten miles away. I miss the deep darkness of the country, the silence of the wood so profound you can hear the trees creak as they sway, the clattering of branches and the brush of tall grass in the breeze.
I miss those wild places where my heart felt at ease.
When I was in college, in the spring I gave myself a task to complete. I would walk through the woods behind my dorm and collect little yellow flowers (they looked like tiny tigerlilies) to leave at the statue of the Virgin Mary. She was a goddess substitute since I had no statues for my deities. I would travel over the footbridge to a standing of pine trees where I had built a little altar of flat stones in the circle of five tree stumps. Across from this was a cliff about 8 feet high that I would climb down to the river's edge and gather water in a clam shell. I had found these bleached shells lodged in the mud cliffside by the hundreds, like a fossil deposit. I had to carry it very carefully as I climbed up the cliffbank and traveled back through the trees to the altar. I left this shell and it's water as an offering. The offering was not just the physical shell but the labor of retrieving it as well.
It was a spring ritual for me, as soon as the snow had melted and the green things started to sprout up again, I would wander the wooded area and get to know the plants and animals. I came across deer who would stop and stare at me. A beaver who followed me while he was swimming along the bank. I felt a crane once, lift off from the bank. And I do mean "felt". I could feel the force of its wings as it pushed downward.
I guess I am a "strange bird". When I tried to share these things with others they just couldn't seem to understand the emotion and vibration it released in me. I was even mocked a couple of times.
So maybe these places were meant to be a sort of Ingwaz for me. They recharged my energy, my heart and soul, after a long winter. They were meant for me to experience. The retelling of them lost its lustre. The listener couldn't relate to them having not been there and having not been like me. Not to say that I am anything special, but my chemistry of experience, biology, neurology, etc. is unique to me.
I contemplate seeds a lot. There are family farmers in my living memory and my distant ancestry. One of my earliest memories is of my father walking the fields with me explaining how potatoes grow. I was so little that trying to walk over the mounds of dirt in the field kept tripping me, the dirt waves were so high.
I don't know how this got so rambling. I've been reading a lot lately on the connection between women and the earth and Celtic myths. I guess a love for the land and a deep sympathy for how it is treated by humans is close to the surface of my mind. It will probably come up again in the next entry when I discuss the rune itself.
I am heartsick lately for the lonely, dark, wild places I remember from my youth.
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