Hello Earth
Here I am, dear Earth, fresh home from the Winter Solstice gathering of the Goddesses of Shining Light. As around the circle we spoke our names, each added the statement, ‘I am here’. Some said, ‘I am glad to be here.’ One simply said, ‘I am’.
Men may attend our Solstice and Equinox events, by invitation. The only man this morning, a first-time guest, said, ‘I am honoured to be here’. One of the women, who works with family violence victims, acknowledged him later: ‘How often do we hear a man say that? “Be the change that you want to see” – you are the change. Thank you.’
Earth, we saw a photo of you today, which one of us had on her phone. Taken from Voyager 2, near Saturn, it is famous as ‘the small blue dot’. What excited us was the huge ray of sunlight in which that dot floated. We as a group constantly use our collective energy to bathe the earth in light.
Leaning in, stretching up, bowing down, skipping in a circle, twirling on the spot, we danced for peace, for love, for joy … for you, dear Earth our Mother.
Listing gratitudes, we admitted we are blessed to live here, not in a teeming city but a place where every day we can open our doors to your beauty and sigh with delight. We gave thanks for being able to draw in so much light from our surroundings and send it out again as healing whilst affirming our vision of a new world. We gave thanks for what the Virus has shown us: that we can live differently, and how fast the environment can recover from our depredations; grateful for this pause to our old ways.
Offering our light, our vision, our gratitude – we sang, we reflected, we meditated. ‘We are seeing the start of something,’ said the one we call our Grandmother Goddess (not the only grandmother among us, but having that role towards the group). ‘I’m glad I’ve lived long enough,’ she said, ‘to know how things happen step by step, even if it doesn’t always seem so. I won’t be here at the end, but I’m glad to witness this beginning.’
Notes:
We were conscious of observing the rules for those gatherings which are now allowed – which led to some fun alternatives to actual hugging, such as mimed kisses or holding up our hands and focusing energy through our palms to each other, saying, 'Bzzzz!'.
I posted this on Instagram immediately after I wrote it. Since then I've pared it down to the 369 words necessary for sharing a prose piece at Poets and Storytellers United's Writers' Pantry #25.
Photo: Public Domain. The image was processed by JPL engineer and image processing enthusiast Kevin M. Gill with input from two of the image's original planners, Candy Hansen and William Kosmann.