Earth-Mother
The bitter cold continues. Unaccountably I was not awakened by the alarm this morning. At least I have no memory of shutting the alarm off and returning to sleep. I customarily rise before sunup to begin my day. I enjoy a session of reading and writing to begin a day of activity. It seemed that I had been robbed of precious time, time which cannot be recovered, as there is only so much allocated to the one life one is given. Children live in eternity as if newly born they have no sense that the life force diminishes, is spent, is burned up by the passage of days, months and years. Despite one’s efforts one fades away as time passes.
But all of this is as it should be. To be alive is to be subject to pleasure and to pain; you cannot know one without knowing the other. We recoil from pain. We turn from even the idea of pain, even to the extreme of fabricating a religion as a pain denial mechanism. Pain is a reminder that death is interwoven with life, always and co-extensively. Nothing lives without the pain of birth, my own, of which I have no recollection, and of which my mother would never have forgotten. Every seed must crack the crust of the earth with the tiny green shoot to reach the nourishing life-giving light. To live is to endure the sacrifice that life requires.
It seems to me that much of our Christian fundamentalism is just such a sacrifice-denial mechanism; a stampede of allegiance toward those with power and money insisting that prosperity and comfort is every Americans right; a gospel of health and wealth. That’s crazy. It is obvious that no one avoids the slings and arrows of existence.
We sacrifice to live, and we ought to sacrifice for one another.
I am reading Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries by Mircea Eliade. Here is a quote:
The earth mother was the first to die……but this death was at the same time a sacrifice made in order to augment and extend the Creation. It followed that men, too, in their dying and being buried, were sacrifices to the earth. It is thanks to that sacrifice, after all, that life can continue, and that the dead hope to be able to come back to life. p age 189
One thought on “Earth-Mother”
Two very different subjects, so I will tackle one at a time. Human’s have a great coping mechanism and that is that we may recall something as physically painful, but we cannot actually remember the pain. This is a good thing. For mother’s enduring the extremes of childbirth, can one imagine a woman going through the agonies of labor for a second child if she could indeed recall the torture of that procedure from the first round? Nature erases that recall so that more children can be conceived and join our march from cradle to grave, for a portion of our ability to sustain ourselves is the knowledge that we are all in this together and the end is always the same.
“Religion is the opiate of the masses” as Mr. Marx so unapologetically stated. Not a very kind statement, but true, none-the-less. Being mired in its traditions and tenets blocks those who embrace it from being able to see an unskewed world. A world where nature moves in mysterious but beautiful ways without the guidance or help of a supernatural being. When we wipe away the magical thinking we can see the unimpeded glories of heaven on earth, (regardless of our transgressions against the planet), for surely there is no other heaven than the one we take for granted under our feet every single day.