Earth-based spirituality – Page 16 – Feminism and Religion

The Monarch That Didn’t Get Away –Butterfly Tagging, part 2 by Sara Wright

Part 1 was posted last week. You can read it here.

Today I learned that everyone is invited to witness butterfly tagging twice a week during the month of September. Efforts to publicize the value and ‘rightness’ of tagging are being stepped up.

Several people agreed with my assessment, namely that tagging creates trauma for the insect – and the idea that this practice may interfere with the butterfly’s ability to survive the 2000-mile journey, winter over successfully and then fly north to reproduce in the spring.

To my knowledge no one else had openly expressed their personal views to those in charge of the organization. However, some folks have come to talk with me. Most of us know that trauma weakens any organism’s immune system making it more vulnerable.

The Monarch That Didn’t Get Away –Butterfly Tagging, part 1 by Sara Wright

The timing couldn’t have been worse. I entered the garden focused on photographing flowers, so I was totally unprepared to see the monarch fluttering around helplessly almost hitting the cement as it attempted to recover its ability to become airborne. Instinctively, I turned away before I realized that what I had just witnessed was the trauma that this butterfly was experiencing after just having been tagged.

This organization’s hope was that some guide or kid in Mexico would find the tagged DEAD body of this monarch somewhere on the ground after the butterfly completed its journey from Maine to its winter stopover in Mexico.

A Plant that would Feed the World by Marie Cartier

I have thought a lot about planting seeds—seeds I want to plant and of course grow– the new varietal of blue mustard green, for instance.

It’s the thing to think about in fall– harvesting and planting.

But what else? What if I could plant—anything. Anything at all.

What would I want to grow? What would I want to plant?

Earth Stories by Sara Wright

Every day I send a FB post into what feels like a Great Void including nature photos that I took around the house or in the woods that morning or the day before. There is always Something. Coalescing early morning thoughts with recent images helps me orient myself to the day to come, reminding me to be Present to Now.

Now is my only Refuge.

In these posts I also hope to capture an audience through image if not through words, introducing or reinforcing people’s positive relationship to nature before it’s too late. My intention is twofold. Help others to see nature in all her wonder, and to encourage folks who read the text to think creatively, to question, to challenge what has been normalized.

Round and Round: The Circle Game by Sara Wright

It’s raining again. In five days, the moon will be full as s/he turns her pearl -like face towards September while her rabbit prepares his treachery, and oh I am so ready to leave this season behind. This is the first year where we have viscerally experienced the reality of what a Changing Climate really means to people in Maine. A summer of floods, months of rain, gray clouds, massive humidity, the worst bugs I ever remember, and poor air quality may force even the most skeptical to pause. Extremes. Of course, what has happened here is nothing like what is going on elsewhere. Tornados, fires, drought, and intense heat have ripped through the rest of the continent tearing both human and non-human lives to shreds. Most of the earth is on fire. I would like to think that we are finally learning that our country is not immune to the unpredictability that comes with climate warming. “You are hopelessly naïve” a Voice states sternly. I bow my head. We are living the Unknown and most are denying it.

August: A Summer to Reflect, and a Time to Start Letting Go by Sara Wright

This has been an unusual summer. I can still listen to a roaring brook as I fall asleep at night. The flooding has been intense. The humidity is hardest to bare; I am grateful my cellar is finally free of water if not drying out. Our overall weather pattern remains the same; thundershowers almost every day; many clouds and thick morning fog. And tropical hurricane season is underway.

I am grateful for the moss and tall grasses that still glow lemony- lime emerald and sage green. My frog pond is empty except for snails; all the tadpoles have matured into tiny froglets that have disappeared into the dense foliage I have provided for them; ferns and anemones tower over others. A large toad only shows himself/herself mostly at night when he hunts from the water dish I leave for him. Wild bee balm spikes are in bloom providing bees and hummingbirds with enough food for now. Some bee balm are ragged around the edges but the rain has brought in a second blooming cycle. My magic bean, the one I planted in March (in the house) has masses of deep orange flowers just outside my window. Grape leaves are climbing over the ground and visiting with the bean vine.

A Dream House by Judith Shaw

The recent climate disaster, which involved the devastating fire that ravaged Maui and left the historic town of Lahaina in ruins on August 8, 2023, has been weighing heavily on my heart. In the early morning hours of August 12, while on the cusp of wakefulness, an unsettling vision appeared in my dream’s eye. A solitary house sat atop a hill with swirling darkness threatening to engulf it from below and above. A small patch of light surrounded the house, grounding it on the hill. This persistent mental image, though not what I prefer to harbor in my consciousness, refused to dissipate. So I decided to put pastel chalk to paper, hoping to release myself from its haunting presence.

From the Archives: Sacred Water by Molly Remer

This was originally posted on August 9, 2017

“Drinking the water, I thought how earth and sky are generous with their gifts and how good it is to receive them. Most of us are taught, somehow, about giving and accepting human gifts, but not about opening ourselves and our bodies to welcome the sun, the land, the visions of sky and dreaming, not about standing in the rain ecstatic with what is offered.”

–Linda Hogan in Sisters of the Earth

The women have gathered in a large open living room, under high ceilings and banisters draped with goddess tapestries, their faces are turned towards me, waiting expectantly. We are here for our first overnight Red Tent Retreat, our women’s circle’s second only overnight ceremony in ten years. We are preparing to go on a pilgrimage. I tell them a synopsis version of Inanna’s descent into the underworld, her passage through seven gates and the requirement that at each gate she lie down something of herself, to give up or sacrifice something she holds dear, until she arrives naked and shaking in the depths of the underworld, with nothing left to offer, but her life.

The Flood by Sara Wright

It is just four days from the Turning. The season of abundance is supposed to be upon us as the goddess turns the wheel towards the dark of the year. We have already lost a half an hour of light. The leaves of fruit trees are yellow, many drifting like butterflies to the ground, prematurely. The ground is sodden, like walking on sponge. Cicadas coax down the sun on the few days we have seen it since the beginning of June. A few crickets have joined the chorus. In the fields the goldenrod is painting a golden haze over emerald and lime. The quality of that green belies the changing season. No wheat- colored grasses. Flowers bloom on with a determination that reveals nature’s intention to survive. Torrential rains pour down silver sheets from the sky obliterating the possibility of peering out to see the hummingbirds dip and soar, sip bee balm nectar. Fog is a constant companion on my pre-dawn walks – the only time I can listen to birds when the air quality is clean. That three – mile walk is my sanity and sometimes my only exercise. By 8 AM some mornings the air is already reaching the poisoning stage. Most days the windows stay shut. ‘Moderate’ is wishful thinking. If a morning sun burns through the clouds the invisible killer starts burning my eyes if I step out the door to sit on the porch. Inside, the humidity is so high that I am chilled; never below 75.

Legacy of Carol P. Christ: The Flourishing of Life and Feminist Theology

This was originally posted on July 28, 2014

I first encountered the image and concept of “flourishing” in Grace M. Jatzen’s feminist philosophy of religion, Becoming Divine. For Jantzen “flourishing” is a symbol of a theology of “natality” or birth and life, which she contrasts to the focus on death and life after death in traditional Christian theologies.

Jantzen argues that the focus on death and life after death is a rejection of birth. Birth is rejected because birth through a body into a body implies finitude. Birth ends in death. Jantzen argues that embracing natality means embracing finitude and death.