The Blessing Way

Under current circumstances of corruption and cruelty, I ask myself daily how I/We can counter the Age of Rationalism, patriarchy, capitalism and financial gain- where all life is only a product for our use, efficiency, and financial profit. Under these modern cultural circumstances, where nature is so often not considered alive but is a mere resource for our use, I can feel devastated by the silencing of the living world.

I’m sure we have had the very common, communal experience these days of the language: ”Oh, we are not going to talk politics” - which is the term we have given to this current and overwhelming devastation. In fact, the living world and its “politics” is all we should be talking about right now, navigating and collaborating and working hard to resolve, to heal, to make right, and to live in balance for the generations to come.

So, I’ve made a decision to throw myself into standing up for and showing up for what I love in my own community and my own watershed here in the northeastern Appalachians. First and foremost, I am committed to supporting the Mother, which includes all the mothers and mothers-to-be on this entire planet. At my own home, I have committed to providing a space for women to come together, sit down collectively on the Earth, and reconnect with each other and the source of life we all bear. Last week, we provided a Blessing Way for Sarah, a woman in our shared valley who was a couple weeks away from childbirth. Women from our community gathered round to put her in a big chair with pillows by the pond. We bathed her feet, shared wisdom about motherhood, and each gave her a bead, a shell, or a significant charm we’d picked up from our own lives. These included a rune symbol picked up from a recent trip to Scotland, a shell from the coast of California, a bead one woman had kept since early childhood, an acorn…and these were laced together and made into a necklace for the mother-to-be to wear around her neck during labor so that she would feel the force of our collective support - in the Old Way. We also wrapped a blue string around our wrists, from one woman to the next, until we were all connected to one another as the child is to the mother. Then we symbolically cut the string between us, wrapped it around our wrists and wore these little bracelet-reminders until the baby was born and we could cut the chord, celebrating our absolutely unique individualities on this planet. We also lit the mother candle and each drew light from it so that we could, again, light these candles when Sarah went into labor and support her labor to bring in a child.

We not only experienced the time and place of early summer in this particular valley (named after the infamous Cherokee midwife, Betty Whitecloud) that we were all becoming a part of, we were cycling back to the wisdom of the ages. The idea that a woman sharing this valley would be birthing in isolation and that none of us would come forward to celebrate and welcome the new life into our community…seemed absurd, though it happens every day in our busy modern world. This mother knew none of the women who came to support her, but by the end of the sharing, as she said in her own words: “I began knowing none of you, and now I have all of these new friends.” Her sixteen year old daughter and 7 year old son also got to witness this supportive “friendship making” as they sat with her, listened, and shared.

And their father, Sarah’s husband, showed up in most vital way to feed and nurture the mother. He showed up having split almost a whole chord of wood for the communal fire, and he insisted that we use that very wood to stoke and feed the fire that would bring new life. He showed up with a mobile he’d made for his new baby boy complete with eagle feathers (he works on a trout farm and has relations with the bald eagles, bringing them scraps of fish skin in exchange for a dropped feather here or there) and things he’d picked up on the trail with his son. He hung this mobile from a tripod he made of three saplings to hang over our altar. He gifted a heron wing -symbol of birth and grace - to our community that he’d salvaged from a beautiful heron that got caught in the grating at the trout farm. We swooshed the wing across each others faces and moved the Heron’s grace forward.

In these acts of reciprocity coming from shared land, we were practicing natural interconnectivity in our own community - where my birth is your birth, where my garden is your garden, where my fresh eggs and flowers and veggies are yours. This is a vital act of resilience. Let us make more things together, and share more things together! When we make more things and are aware of what we are taking from the Earth, the Earth becomes alive again, the rivers need to be free and clear and swimmable and drunk from again. The plant life needs to be cared for, encouraged, and regenerated again. We replenish what is under attack; we celebrate each landscape having its own personality and its own stories.

Bringing ceremony back into our communities also helps recreate our interconnectivity. During this summer solstice season, I always keep close to my heart the many First Nations People who have worked to keep the Sun Dance Ceremony alive here on the North American continent. Thanking and dancing for the sun on summer solstice, giving back to that great ball of fire that is responsible for all life on Earth seems only natural: why would we not name the sun a living god when it brings us light and infra-red energy with a total luminosity of energetic output at 175 quadrillion watts, when it is responsible for photosynthesis, plants, oxygen, heat, vision, color, and the movement of air and water? Why not take four days out of your year to dance with the sun, to fast, to give back in song and prayer in your very own flesh and body for a force so great? This physical/spiritual act is also an act of resistance, a making of relations with the sun, the plants, the animals, lfie - born and unborn children… and when you make relations, you care.