when hands become instruments of fertility and love making
on the turning of the wheel, again
✾ Oral recitation at the bottom of the post ✾
The age has come when my breasts yearn to fill with milk and my belly knows its capacity for roundness is greater than it has yet stretched. But as it stands, these are physiological desires and ancestral memories. To what, then, is my fertility dedicated?
This question walks across my mind as the spring season turns summer — the first berries begin to ripen on their branches and the salmon swim upstream to spawn. In the South, the yucca flowers blossom on their phallic stalk. Heady aromas of wet earth, fermented honey, and tree resins fill the air on my morning commute through the woods.
The cross quarter days, as they are known, are times of perceived pause amidst the constancy of change and are thus times of great spiritual power. They are feast days meant to celebrate the marriage between the Sun and the Earth in their long form dance, the Sun pulling the Earth closer in and His longing for Her as She tilts away. In early May, the Sun’s warmth is felt again. He is so near that plants begin to grow and animals have enough sustenance to support the next generation.
My heart is in great pains to know that most modern people do not remember their dependence on this First Marriage and the fertility brought forth by that Sacred Rite preformed by the Light and the Dirt. Most of our food is grown in acres of monocroped fields of depleted soil, imported fertilizer, and trucked in water. Today’s celebration of this sort of day host dances around a pole (sometimes a plastic one!!!) with no real context for what this rite is doing, that is, blessing and empowering the force that impregnates the Earth and all of Creation. We are too removed from the dirt, our own bodies, and each other to recognize this force in the land and in our bones. So we dance in white with ribbons tangled around a felled tree or an pole purchased from a megacorp and say “oh well! Maybe we’ll get it right next year!” We take various substances in hopes that the old rite of offering ones fertility to the Earth’s body and revitalizing oneself through the sacred rite of copulation on a holy day will overcome us all in some ecstatic orgy, and it never does.
On the eve of a gathering quite like the one described above, I slept on the earth by a stream populated with enchanting but dangerous spirits peeking out of the edge of the water. I dreamt that I was in the home of my highschool sweetie. I had just seen his spirit as a ghost appear before me and disappear again. I went slightly mad trying to call him back, leaving offerings of bread and milk in hopes that the sustenance would give him the energy needed to manifest again, but I had to move on as I was called to the main room of the house to speak on a panel about the colors red, white, and black and their association with Beltaine. Asked to speak on Beltaine at a local Irish cultural festival this year, I remembered the dream and thought it obvious:
Red is blood, menstrual blood, a substance made of womb lining and egg, a substance full of the potential of life. Spring time is not the season of harvesting animals, so one could argue that this red is purely menstrual in nature. Female fertility in tactile form outside of the body, void of contact with the male sex fluid.
White is semen, coded with an abundance of possibile realities, 99.99%* of which will never manifest but are abundant in the male body.
Black is the soil, the deep earth, steaming compost, turned and turned again, out of which food for all creatures grows and through which intelligent plant bodies communicate. She is the Dark Mother, through which all things come and to which all things go.
We can not replicate traditions of the past without cultural context. If we do that, we will find ourselves emptier then before, confused and searching for answers that involve wasting resources that the Earth just does not have to offer us anymore, not without our active participation in the Ritual. If we do not know how blood, semen, and dirt are braided together by the fates to empower life, our Maypole dance is just a good time. While there is technically nothing wrong with a good time, we have not the luxury of time. We must make contact with the Earth over and over and over again, make contact with wild places quietly and with respect. We might then remember our place on and inside the body of the Mother.
I am growing red corn and black corn, perhaps as offerings to the feminine aspect to which I have devoted myself again and again. With seeds that can feed many in my hands, with hands that can put them in earth and spread home grown compost over them, I am facilitating the Great Rite preformed by the Earth and the Sun in hopes that food for myself, the birds, and my community will grow strong. Our ancestors who practiced these rites knew this, for they were dependent on the land beneath their feet and their homes to feed them. With whispers of famine ahead due to war and the withholding of Earth’s resources (that we really had no business possessing in the first place), perhaps the most ancestral thing one can do is depend on the land beneath their feed and their homes to sustain themselves. The Earth asks for our fertility — our blood, our semen, and, if we make them, our children. Perhaps it is sympathetic magic. Perhaps it is food for Her body in exchange for the food fed to us. Perhaps it is just how it goes.
The question of one’s desire to procreate, to me, is not one worth asking anymore. How could I put my desires before that of the Mother that feeds us, the Lover that holds us in grassy meadows and kisses us with the scent of wild roses? As fertility rates plummet among modern people, I wonder if the Earth is saying: You have forgotten how to participate in the Great Marriage of Earth and Sun and therefor I do not want your children. Give me your sexual fluids. Place your hands in my body and assist me in making more of myself. I do not speak for the Earth — I only wonder.
Though my breasts long to feed and my hips widen to create safe passage for a possible being, the culture that surrounds me is actively abandoning Her, and I cannot feed a human child to that cult. I can, however, use my hands as instruments for lovemaking — grow babies in the Earth, ensure habitat for wild and domesticated animal kin, and be something of a radio signal through which children who were unknowingly offered to the technocratic machine can hear whisper of their Mother and remember who they can serve. I am not attached to the human species making it out of this mess, but I am curious about the possibility, and to explore that, more hands must be instruments of fertility, more ears must hear the three part harmony of mosquitos and think it a wonder, and more hearts must have the will to act in accordance with the chatter of the birds.
And that is all.
*this is not a scientific number by any stretch, but one speculated by the writer.
The day is the 19th of May and it is the birthday of the one that made way for me to come back to the Earth Mother, to hold Her in my hands as She holds me to Her bosom. I awoke before the birds and as I heard the first one start gabbing, I went outside to eavesdrop and partake in a sacramental spliff. It must have been before 5am. The chatter of the birds grew rapidly as they told each other of their night dreams and which salmonberries they would have for breakfast. My feet were still covered in dirt from farming without shoes the day prior, my shoulders crisped by the Sun moving closer in to Earth. I quietly wished her a happy birthday and nodded a “good job” for making a servant of the Earth Mother, Great Cosmic Mother, Corn Mother, and so on and so on.
And that is all.
✾ when hands become instruments of fertility and love making ✾