Visions of a Dark Horizon

I’m not sure I can really write this properly – it’s all in my head, the thoughts and ideas coming fast and spinning wildly – but I have an understanding that I never really had before, concepts of divinity and spirituality and religion that I never really considered before yesterday.  I’ll try to start at the beginning, if there is a beginning for a thing like this.

I’ve been very upset and dismayed lately related to the attacks in France and Beirut and so many people’s reactions of fear and ignorance and hatred.  Seeing elected officials, even candidates for president saying they want to stop refugees from coming to america, or only letting the Christian refugees in, or registering and monitoring the Muslims…  It’s all driven not only by fear, but by ‘religion’; this group thinks God wants them to kill that group; this other group must discriminate against those guys because an old book ‘maybe’ tells them to by one interpretation; this group says that this plot of land was given to them by God and so they must kill everyone who believes otherwise, and somehow all these groups have complex reasons why all these religious texts that say ‘love one another’ don’t apply to EVERYONE, just the people that look / behave / believe the same thing they do…   It’s upsetting, and it’s destroying the world.  That was my first big epiphany… religions that, objectively, are supposed to lift people up and help the needy and their communities, help bring people together, have somehow gotten to the point where they are literally destroying the world.  Religion is being used to tear apart countries, destroy communities, ignore planetary destruction like climate change, and so much more.  So that was my first true eye opening epiphany, and it happened while I was driving to the grocery store.

This realization made me start thinking about my faith.  I’ve been Wiccan, or ‘neo-pagan’, for more than half my life, since I started exploring my own spirituality with open eyes after being raised Catholic.  I don’t harbor any ill will towards my Catholic upbringing, it was a fine path, but it didn’t ‘speak to me’, it never answered the questions I had about the universe and about my part in it.

Studying Wicca and modern Earth Religions – actually STUDYING, not just reading a Silver Ravenwolf book and wearing a silver pentacle and smudging my dorm room on the full moon – made me realize a number of things over the years; yes, I believe in and pay honor to the Goddess and God in their many forms, but I also realize that these are masks on the divine, that we need to create archetypes for our divinities because we need some way for our tiny little mortal minds to connect to the infinite that is the universal divinity.  I hold my Wiccan beliefs very deeply, and the rituals and spells I perform do make my life better, they do help me, and my beliefs do make me a better person, but until yesterday there was still something missing, something I didn’t understand.

And now I do.

I don’t ‘think’ I understand, I just understand – I somehow, in the grocery store, stumbled upon a higher meaning, a different way of not only seeing my spirituality, but also understanding spirituality and divinity in a more ‘global’ sense… the truth of religion, of spirituality, of The Goddess and God figures.  I understand it on a most basic level now, and it just makes my heart sing, it makes me happy in ways I can’t quite describe to understand in this way – it feels like unlocking some secret of the universe to me, it really does.

Start with a tomato seed.  That’s where it started in my mind – a tomato seed.  So tiny, like a grain of sand.  If you dropped one on the floor you’d never find it again.  Now, with soil and water and sun, that seed will begin to grow.  It shoots a little green stem up out of the dirt, then spreads leaves out, drinking in the warmth and energy in the sun, converting that light energy into chemical energy.  It starts taking in carbon dioxide and then releases oxygen.  That’s elementary school science, right?  But if you think about it, it’s so much more…

Now our tomato plant continues to grow – still just taking in water and sunlight and nutrients from the soil. The stalk grows thick, leaves form, then flowers pop up all over it, drawing in insects to pollinate it.  Once pollinated, the fruit begins to grow, gaining in mass every day, growing rich with nutrients.  The fruit grows and ripens, turning from green to rich orange, the tomato plant straining under the weight.  I can pick that tomato and take a juicy bite.  I can make salsa, put tomatoes in my salad, whatever… I can pick many tomatoes off a single plant, for a couple months even, until the end of the growing season.

And then at the end of the growing season, the tomato plant yellows, withers, and dies.  It’s nutrients can then be absorbed back into the earth, and seeds from any tomatoes not picked may sprout again the next spring, starting the cycle anew.

I saw this all play out in my mind – it’s not a new concept, of course.  The metaphor of the growing plant has been around as long as people have known that plants grow.  There is even the parable of the mustard seed from the bible – a tiny seed grows into a tree, that sort of thing.  What I realized, though, was that this wasn’t a metaphor.  What I was seeing, what I was understanding, was not a metaphor for life or religion or anything like that…  This is where it gets hard to articulate.

I realized that THIS is Goddess and God, Religion, Spirituality taken at their most pure, their most primal.  This is where it all came from – this is how our divine creator revealed herself to us (also her creations) at the beginning, before dogma, before doctrine, before bibles and prophets and popes and churches.  Some like to picture this as our ignorant ancestors cowering in caves because they didn’t know that thunder was just sound waves created by lightning super-heating the air around it, but I realize now that this is wrong; our ancestors had a much deeper, more pure connection with creation, unhindered by the trappings of modern religion and ritual and dogma.

The tomato plant has a purpose in the universe – it grows, nourished by the energies of the world, taking only what it needs; warmth, water, sunlight.  It feeds insects, it produces fruit that feeds other animals and people, and then it dies, further nourishing the world around it. I realized that’s my purpose too – To grow, to try to take and use only what I need, and to give of myself to make the world around me a better place.  That is the pure, unfiltered message of the divine – that is what Goddess and God are saying.  That is how the world was built around us, that’s how we are supposed to fit in it.  It’s so simple but we’ve totally lost sight of that.

Let me try to describe it another way… If you believe that the world, the universe, was ‘created’ by a divine intelligence, then it would make sense that we would see evidence of that creator in the universe they created.  We would see messages in the world, if we understood where and how to look.  This was one of the reasons I became Wiccan so many years ago – because if more or less everything in the world required a masculine and feminine to create life, then the ‘creator of the universe’ couldn’t just be ‘God’, that didn’t make sense.  Why would a deity or a religion be completely focused on the male when it’s clear that the creative force in the universe is feminine?  That’s just stupid.

So look at the world, look at the messages in the winds and skies and rocks and soil… it is so clear to me now that this is the truth of divinity, that we are all seeds, growing into plants, and our purpose is to give our fruit to others for the betterment of the world around us.   Everything else, all the other dogma, all the other ritual, it was added later, additional agendas that reduce and diffuse the true message.  After all, the trees do not tell the flowers they can’t grow, the wolf only kills what it needs to survive, nothing more, and the tomato plant gives of itself freely, without ever questioning why.

That’s the message from Goddess and God, the divine… We don’t need anything else.  We just don’t.  If you follow those things, that’s the ‘Word of God’, the message of the divine.  It’s so simple, but it go so lost.

I’m glad I’ve found it again.