Earth stuff

It seems that I am spending nearly every day at the Reserve. I guess there are advantages to not having enough work.

I visited the Goddess Oak, and saw that she is a Horned Goddess. In Wicca and other Neopagan religions, the Horned God is the male counterpart of the Triple Goddess. He represents nature, wilderness, hunting, and sexuality. This Goddess Oak has no truck with gender stereotypes. She says her horns, which join up above to create a circle, represent the cycle of life, and all that entails.

Her open trunk, in which I see the face, is, she says, a sign of courage: she is willing to show her hidden face to the world. And the hole, like a belly button below, is a place of generativity.

When I sat with Kairos, it was about us all being made, not of stardust, but of earth-stuff. I am earth-stuff walking in earth-stuff. I lay against his trunk, and watched a rook chase a buzzard right toward me. The buzzard returned and landed on the oak just 50 yards away.

On this day, walking as earth-stuff in earth-stuff, I seemed to scare the animals a little less than usual. The muntjacs still ran, but with less panic.

And, of course, all earth-stuff returns to earth. I looked at the ways disease and death had altered an ash tree.