~ Mother Earthbeats ~

As written in her own words, I would like to share… Thanks Storm!!

In just a few scant days and hours, the hoop of life will turn into East, or so it is said by my people. We would have been anxiously checking the marks on the centuries old calendar rock that now sits in a farmer’s field. With excitement and yes, some dread, we wait for that one moment, that click of time, when the creation decisively turns. And when that click happens, we would sing to welcome the sun back from its journey and prepare to sing as well to the first salmon that comes up the river/stream lifeblood of the people.

Now there are just a few scant days and hours left of the time of North; the time of wisdom - the doing time when one uses the knowledge gained during the this last full turn of the circle. Are the nets ready, are the root sticks sharpened, the bark scrapers ready for the baskets and mats and capes to be made? Are we ready with all that we know to face the unknown of the new turn?

East, the time of spirit, the time of renewal, the time of newness and innocence. The time when never more clearly we see the same in a different way. Everything is right before our eyes, if we’ll just take that moment to see it. Outside my front window I see a cherry tree, and, as always, I am astonished as I see this old friend changing before my eyes. Every winter, I fear for it…with limbs so bare and brittle and seemingly lifeless. And I wonder, is this the year it won’t bloom? Is this the year it won’t be able to welcome and feed the winged that always return to it? But now I see the buds breaking from it skin and know those buds for the promise of renewal and newness. Oh, how painful it must be and oh, the struggle it goes through to meet this promise one more time.

Commercials tell us that ‘new’ is better, improved, exciting. I think ‘new’ is scary and disturbing and unsettling. New is when everything is the same, but different. New is when my comfortable, self-satisfied, knowing certainty is rocked. New is when I believe..I dream and I have no knowledge to support that belief or dream…just the surety that anything is possible because that is the way of Creation, and I am, after all, a piece of it. The faith, the hope to give me the courage to face ‘new’ until it too becomes a comfortable warm place for me to rest in.

I don’t know what I don’t know…and the promise of East is that with the willingness to see with the innocence of a trusting child, to look at the same thing in a different way, to allow myself to step out of the comfortable and into the uncertainty, I will see and hear and taste andlearn things I can’t even possibly imagine. And the older I get, the harder it gets to do so. So many winters..so much struggle to gain what little knowledge and wisdom I have…so much loss, heartache…so many questions for so few answers.

And yet, and yet…East stirs my blood and focuses my vision even further outside my window. My woman’s hands long to plunge into the dirt and plant and help my Mother in her birthing pangs. My woman’s heart speeds up to meet the nesting call…time to purify, to clean, to build for the future. And so, if I let the Creation into me..and if I let myself join into it, then East will sweep me along in the hoop and there won’t be room for fear or courage…just the living…facing the new, the different…with the comfort of what was, to face what is, to be ready for what will be.

Hoi, my relations. Just a few scant days and hours and we will be the East, one another, as part of this hoop of life.

Storm