The Queen’s Chronicles: MOTHER EARTH DAY EVERY DAY

The Queen’s Chronicles: MOTHER EARTH DAY EVERY DAY

Earth and woman share a correspondence of function, a facility for creativity and abundance, a worldly wisdom. Each is primary and potent. Even in appearance, are they the same. Just as the roundness of the earth and Her cyclical seasons resonate in every woman, the surface shapes and internal configurations of the earth are defined by the physical attributes of the female physique.

The soil, smoothly moist and rich, arid, cracked and parched, is Her skin; and the lush foliage, the fuzzy moss, the spindled grasses, are Her many splendid tresses. The trees are arms, legs, limbs, which reach out and dance in all directions. The roots, feet firm on the ground. Gems and crystalline minerals make Her strong skeletal system; and the rivers, creeks and streams are the blood that flows through Her veins.

The air is Her hot breath, Her holy exhalation. The seeds of plants are Her sacred monthly flow. Her pregnant belly is indicated in the rounded hills and Her mountainous breasts swell all the way to the sky. The valleys reflect the soft shapes of Her cradling elbows and comforting lap. The ocean is Her womb, the saline-rich source of all life. Rock clefts like labia, and vulvic caves are passageways into Her cavernous interior; the power of Her hallowed deep places, palpable.

Mother Earth, Mother Nature, has Her moods as well as any woman might. Her emotions, like the weather, are mutable and span the full spectrum. She rainbow-glows, radiant in health and beauty. She twinkles like the stars; sparkles with good humor. She grows overcast, gets dark, oblique, breezy and cool. She weeps with dew. She simmers and hisses on slow burn. She vents her steam. She quakes in anger. She rumbles and grumbles and tears the house down. She sparks, bursts, erupts, explodes, implodes in passion. She can be gentle, generous, humorous, dependable, destructive and very, very scary. Hell, indeed, hath no fury like an earthy woman scorned.

Mother Earth, universally worshipped as the fertile, female provider, protector and parent, was always treated with great dignity and care. Cultivated fields were left to rest one year in seven lest they become worn out with the never ending work of producing food, and wars were routinely put on hold during the planting season. Woman was cherished as the incarnate daughter of the Great Cosmic Queen, because she embodied the same supreme capability of life. Her natural understanding was held in esteem, and her body, its terrestrial contours reminiscent of those of Mother Earth, was respected. Once upon a time, that is.

A rather bizarre form of pornography, known as pornotopia, was produced during the Victorian period in England. Mother Earth was personified as a voluptuous female landscape laid bare to the voyeuristic viewing pleasure of man who surveys the scene before him from the perspective of a fly promenading upon Her full-figured splendor. Her hills and caves, rises and recesses, were described in somewhat smarmy terms which were meant to elicit the fascinating, fearsome, forbidden Oedipal fantasy of a man mounting his own mother in lust. Where in the past, the Earth had once been revered, She was here reviled, defiled, desecrated. Stripped bare of Her powers, She was reduced to a passive sexual object, sacked and soiled.

Today the body of the Earth, our first mother, is routinely bruised and abused. Raped and burned; dug and dammed; dynamited and nuked. As many as one hundred distinct species of plants and animals are disappearing from existence each day, directly or indirectly due to human domination. And the bodies of women everywhere fare no better.

How in the world did The Good Earth — the very material (from the Latin, mater, meaning, “mother”) of life itself — get to be a dirty word? Or Mutha, for that matter? According to the esteemed Oxford English Dictionary, dirt means, “grime,” “stain,” “smut.” Dirty is “lewd,” “defiled,” “contaminated,” “dingy,” “unsanitary,” “filthy,” “polluted,” “foul.” Not one mention of dirt as the flesh of the Goddess, as the source of the nutrients that nourish us, as the bosom of the Mother that will cradle us when we die. How did it come to pass that the Earth Mother whose grace we depend upon for absolutely everything has become so thoroughly sullied? And more important, how can we repair the damage?

We can begin by commemorating Earth Day in Her honor. Since 1971, Earth Day has been celebrated to remind the people of the world of the need for continuing care which is vital to Earth’s safety and our own. The vernal equinox was originally chosen as the official date to honor Earth for its symbolism — equilibrium and balance — in order to encourage and inspire a universal sense of interdependence, cooperation, and unity. Now we celebrate it on April 22, which has, heretofore, been Arbor Day.

The vernal equinox calls on all mankind to recognize and respect Earth’s beautiful systems of balance, between the presence of animals on land, the fish in the sea, birds in the air, mankind, water, air, and land. Most importantly there must always be awareness of the actions by people that can disturb this precious balance.
- Margaret Mead

On Earth Day the United Nations Peace Bell is rung to initiate a moment of global equipoise when people worldwide can join in a renewed heartfelt commitment to the protection and care of our planet. The United Nations Earth Day event is the centerpiece of an annual global holiday that strives to awaken a common objective of local and global harmony with nature and neighbors.

The original Earth Day proclamation states, “All individuals and institutions have a mutual responsibility to act as Trustees of Earth, seeking the choices in ecology, economics, and ethics that will eliminate pollution, poverty, and violence; foster peaceful progress; awaken the wonder of life; and realize the best potential for the future of the human adventure.”

Last month, two billion people worldwide participated in Earth Hour by turning off their lights as a visual demonstration of the dramatic difference made possible by each individual coupled with the efforts of others. But one hour, one day is barely a beginning. Let one hour, one day inspire two, twenty, two hundred. Let every day be Earth Day.

There is no social-change fairy. There is only change made by the hands of individuals.
- Winona LaDuke

With every blessing from Mother Earth and every blessing for Her,

XxQMD

The Queen’s Chronicles: April Fool’s Day

People everywhere seem to have regarded themselves as sufficiently ridiculous as to require some serious comeuppance, judging by the universality of Festivals of Fools. The special Fool Days are dedicated to a ritualized recognition of our all-too-human folly. On Days of the Fool there are no intermediary clowns. Everybody gets to play the fool.

Within this ceremonial context, we can act out an upside-down idiot reality with absolute impunity. We are free to tease and taunt, safely flaunt our fatuous fate. This comic relief, this unrestrained retreat from seriousness, serves as a safety valve for society. It allows for the cathartic release of emotion, tension, anxiety, and the diffusion of disappointments and dangerous resentments.

Archaic definitions for fool include “imbecile, idiot, mentally defective, silly, stupid, devoid of wisdom.” “Fool” is from the Latin, follis, which means, “bellows, ball filled with air.” As in, wind bag. Airhead. Buffoon is related to the Italian, buffare, “to puff.” There is an airy quality implied in the language, which describes a fool — an incredible lightness of movement, of the moment, of being. A new way of seeing, which dissolves the solidity of the so-called real world. There is a Yiddish proverb that says, “The complete fool is half prophet.”

In Scotland, November 8, is kept as Dunce Day. This Fool’s Day was named after Duns Scotus, a ninth century scholar who created a cone-shaped hat to energize the brain of his foolish students. The first Tuesday in May is the Fool’s Fair in Wales. Awa Odori, A Fool Dance is staged annually in Japan, while the Russians celebrate the Day of St. Basil the Fool of Moscow. Fashing, or Fastnacht, is a raucous two-day Feast of Fools that precedes the pre-Lenten carnival in Austria. Purim, the Jewish Feast of Esther, is celebrated with an atmosphere of exuberance, a joyous, boisterous mocking of tradition and decorum, when it is customary, on this one day only, to drink to giddy excess.

The Hindu holiday of spring fools is Holi, celebrated as a high-spirited fire festival, which proclaims the death of Winter and the onset of spring fever. For five days there is utter relaxation of the accepted rules of behavior. Lewdness prevails. People spray each other in the streets with powdered color pigments. There is a ribald shift in the normal relations among the castes and between the sexes, which often degenerates into mudslinging and public beatings of men by women.

Most of Europe and North America celebrate the Fool on April 1st. In Scotland, April 1 is known as Huntigowok. In Fife, a peninsula north of Edinburgh, the foolishness continues on April, 2, Taily Day, when the fun is limited to the immediate area of the backside. An entire day dedicated to buttocks jokes and “kick me” signs.

In France, the Fools Festival is Poisson d'Avril, “April Fish.” Is this a reference to the sun's leaving the constellation Pisces? Because April fish are easy to catch? Or, perhaps, a symbol of the meatless Lenten month? Here, too, people concentrate on each other’s ass ends. The idea of the day is to surreptitiously pin paper fish on the backsides of the unsuspecting. Unsigned joke cards decorated with fish are also exchanged.

So why April Fools' Day? Because April weather is so capricious? Because in April we are like a kindergarten class of hyperactive puppies exploding out of winter into recess? Or, as they say in Indiana, "April is the cruelest month?" Holi and Purim are celebrated near the Spring Equinox, as were the Roman holiday Hilaria and also the vernal festival for the Celtic God of Mirth.

Perhaps these spring high jinx were the true precedents of April Fool’s Day, but the official story goes: Until the Middle Ages, New Year was celebrated in Europe beginning on March 25, the approximate Vernal Equinox and lasting eight days until April 1 when festivities culminated in a day of visiting and gift exchange. Then in 1582, the new Gregorian calendar was adopted and New Year’s Day was suddenly changed and officially established as January 1. Those folks who forgot the change or who insisted on maintaining the old traditions were called April Fools. They were gifted with joke presents and sent on fool's errands.

Today, we silly so and so’s who putter with nature, who foolishly toy with the elements and fool with the future could stand a strict Trickster talking-to. A little comical self-critique is most certainly called for about now. A good swift kick in the perspective is what we need. The stakes are enormous. The joker is wild. We can no longer afford to play the fool.

With blessings of serious fun,

xxQMD