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Discover some pine timber
and a large rock within the solar.
Quiet down and really feel gratitude
curl round your shoulders.
Take heed to the wind
sense that there’s sorrow too
on this place,
deep and previous,
threaded by the
strains of solar
slices of shadows.
It tells of what has been misplaced,
what has been stolen,
of silenced tales,
and of fracturing.
Make a vow,
silent and sacred,
to do what you may,
to rebuild the net
to reweave the material.
Lie in your again within the pine needles,
really feel your physique soften into the bottom
and grow to be nonetheless.
Enable your self to really feel held,
heavy bones and smooth pores and skin
changing into a part of the land.
Surprise what number of of your
ancestors saved different individuals
from changing into ancestors themselves.
Watch the daylight making tiny rainbows
by your eyelashes and pines.
Discover a fairly rock.
Don’t take it.
Depart it the place it belongs,
on the land that gave it delivery.
Go residence.
Hold your promise.
One thing that I’ve needed to grapple with during the last a number of years is the legacy of colonization and the way it has formed my very own life, historical past, assets, alternatives, and story. I’m a white American of almost 100% European descent. My ancestors have inhabited North America for greater than seven generations, however this isn’t the place we “got here from,” it’s the place we settled, colonized, and took over. As somebody who feels deeply embedded with the panorama, deeply rooted on the land during which she lives, deeply knowledgeable by the magic of place—this place, proper right here proper now—it’s troublesome, complicated, and painful to reconcile that my individuals had been colonizers, individuals who invaded, managed, co-opted, and colonized the land, collaborating within the eradication of different individuals as they did so. There could also be no higher time to mirror on this legacy than on American Thanksgiving (aspect observe: I all the time make a donation to the Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts on today annually and recommend you achieve this as effectively).
Final yr, on Thanksgiving, I walked right down to the pine timber and laid on my again on the brown needles. As I did so, feeling gratitude curling round my shoulders and listening to the wind. I let my thoughts drift again to additional distant occasions during which these lands had been inhabited by the Osage individuals and earlier than them, the indigenous individuals of the Paleolithic, bluff dwellers and mound builders whose stone cairns and sacred areas nonetheless dot the rocky panorama above the springs that feed the rivers that runs under my very own hilltop residence.Even in my sensation of gratitude and peace, I felt the sense of sorrow there too, deep and previous, threaded by the strains of daylight and slices of shadows. With the sunbeams filtering by the pine branches and making tiny rainbows by my eyelashes, I felt like I might hear the wind telling of what has been misplaced, what has been stolen, of silenced tales, and of fracturing. Even within the sensation of feeling so held by the land, my very own heavy bones and smooth pores and skin changing into a part of the earth proper right here, I additionally marvel what number of of my ancestors saved different individuals from changing into ancestors themselves.
As I rose to depart the nice and cozy pine needles and the cradling floor, I discovered a reasonably rock within the moss, dotted with sparkles of crystal druzy quartz and shining within the solar. I stooped to choose it up, and as my fingers touched the tough floor I heard: Depart it. That is your ritual of Thanksgiving. To see one thing fairly and never really feel entitled to take it for you personal, however go away it the place it belongs. Go residence. Hold your promise. Reweave what you may.
So, I lifted my fingers and blew a kiss into the wind and walked residence, empty-handed.
In April of this yr, we took our 4 youngsters on a historic journey to Virginia and to Washington D.C., visiting historic websites and reconstructions of forts and villages, websites of wars and colonies. Within the fort at Jamestown, website of the primary European colony within the U.S., I used to be trying on the sky at simply the proper time to see two tiny cardinal feathers drifting by the air into my open hand. Tremendous and grey and tipped with the slightest bits of crimson, I carried them pinched between my fingertips like a treasured treasure as we wandered by the tales and struggling of males’s historical past, a protracted chain of who captured whom, who killed whom, and who fought the place and for the way lengthy. This weight of colonialism seeping into me till my head started to ache and I puzzled, as I usually do, who invented jelly, who experimented patiently with leavening as a result of they in some way knew wheat and water could possibly be enticed to rise. I learn placards about who enslaved whom and who bought whom and who starved and who ran and who shot and who burned, and I puzzled about all of the moms nursing infants and waiting for first steps, who ran fingertips throughout first sharp tooth slicing by the smooth gums of beloved infants, a few of whom would develop sufficiently old to bear arms and strip the lives from different moms’ infants.
Outdoors the mud-plastered copy colonial kitchen, I knelt right down to run my fingertips throughout smooth leaves of lamb’s ear and ran my fingers throughout tall spikes of rosemary, bringing my fingers to my nostril to inhale the slender and decided reminiscences right here too, soups tended and medicines brewed, teas steeped and tinctures bottled. I appeared as much as see two bald eagles circling in to land by their excessive, extensive nest in a tall pine tree and osprey busily gliding backwards and forwards carrying sticks bigger than their very own our bodies to type a house for his or her younger. I puzzled how a lot life has been tended on daily basis proper above the heads of warfare.
The tiny feathers in my hand are so smooth I can hardly really feel them as I stand there, trying up on the sky.
Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min, is a priestess, mystic, and poet facilitating sacred circles, seasonal rituals, and household ceremonies in central Missouri. Molly and her husband Mark co-create Story Goddesses at Brigid’s Grove. Molly is the writer of 9 books, together with Strolling with Persephone, Entire and Holy, Womanrunes, and the Goddess Devotional. Her latest ebook is Within the Temple of the Extraordinary and he or she is the creator of the devotional expertise #30DaysofGoddess.
Classes: American Historical past, Earth-based spirituality, Goddess Spirituality, Goddess Spirituality, vacation, Magic, Nature, Poetry, Postcolonialism
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