One of my favorite words from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is Onism: the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience. The sentiment is beautifully captured in this video they’ve created, but as I lay here in a bed that is not my own in the deeply mysterious Basque Country, there is a subtle longing not only for the places I will never know in this lifetime, but also for all time that came before and that will stretch into the sweet hereafter. For the next two nights, we will stay in this nearly three-hundred year old house set in the foothills of the western Pyrenees and as we ambled earlier through the cool, lush countryside, I found myself almost hypnotized by the all-surrounding sound of fresh running water and wondering, “haven’t I been here before?”
Basque is Europe’s oldest and most perplexing language as linguists have tried for decades to discover from whence this strange and beautiful tongue evolved. It has no known origin and is completely unrelated to any other language- an absolute anomaly. Scholars believe that indigenous hunter-gatherers who lived here since the last Ice Age mated with migratory farmers from the near East during the Neolithic period who then settled and were isolated here. Basque Country was also one of the very few places to survive the Black Death of the 1300s which savagely reduced the entire population of Europe to half in less than five years. There are secrets left untold here and I sense the answers living in the land itself. Land shapes its people, and people, in turn, shape languages that are interwoven with and inseparable from the land. Thirty five percent of the population here speak Basque as their primary language and with that preserve the collected wisdom of twelve-thousand years of survival.
This is a remote, wet and quiet part of the world. The all-surrounding green is stunning to the senses, but the sky is often grey and the stones used to construct every road, home and church are big and heavy. Sometimes the sun breaks though and time almost stands still. Certainly the animals of the village, zen-like cats, sheep, ponies and horses understand they exists in a kind of heaven. We watch them slowly amble, sleep and play in the ancient fields absolutely content in their fate. Even though the current residents of this region have all learned Spanish and have long ago adapted to the dominant Castillian culture, there is still a palpable feeling of insular self-sufficiency. Like many cultures who’s history largely did not survive the often brutal spread of Christianity, the Basques are thought to have been Pagans. Evidence has been found dating up to the Spanish Inquisition that large gatherings and rituals were performed in a cave in a neighboring village a few kilometers away. This “evidence” was of course gathered by the Spanish themselves in what would become the largest witch trial in history, where 7,000 people were accused and tried and many were killed in prison or burned at the stake.
I have chosen the witches’ cave of Zugarramurdi as a stop on our family road trip for the opportunity to be in another sacred and ancient ritual space. The largely successful eradication of earth-based religions has perhaps been one of the most consequential efforts in human history. Would we be so inclined to rape our mother and pillage her temples if we lived more in holy reverence for our eternal bond? Many sources have reported that witchcraft is the fastest growing spirituality in America. This gives me hope. Famous Wiccan priestess Phyllis Curott recently wrote, “Witches know that while our paths are unique, we are all traveling in the same sacred landscape. The experience of an embodied divinity, of living in a sacred world, calls us to activism, to embody and protect and revere the innate divinity of Creation, to act in sacred ways because we live in a sacred world.” I never identified as a bruja until recently. Certainly my spirituality and practices that have developed over the last 10 years are steeped in shamanism, to say nothing of the tribal lineages from which I come. It’s past time for me to own my magick… indeed, for more of us to own our magick and to harness it together for some real healing on whatever front that moves you. Tomorrow I will go into the cave, call in the ancestors-human, plant and animal, and listen for the secrets to unfold. Listen. You have to listen with every sense of your corporeal being. It is the drop of water landing in a puddle that teaches you your oneness in the whole. It is the wind sending whispers of ethereal time. It is the mouse and the bat… all instinct. It is the cave itself, the womb and the tomb.
What can it mean these days to practice earth based spirituality? For me, it can mean finding “god” in the food we grow then eat and in the touch of my husband and son. It can be seeing the strongest parts of my lineage embodied in my mom and gifted through to me. It is offering my own gifts of insight, inspiration, exploration and adventure to nurture the divine in others so that they come forth in their power to perpetuate the tides of creative resilience and restoration. It means treating my body and the land with ultimate reverence and recognizing that every part and being of this living earth is an expression of the holy. The numbers of people who identify as agnostic or atheist are steadily on the rise and this presents an opportunity- a space for people to seek for themselves a relationship to that which gives their lives meaning. There is a phenomenology of spiritual encounters in nature. When we go out into and upon the sensuous earth, we can access a space within ourselves removed from the tyranny of authoritarian rule. Here we can practice the kind of expansion, emptying and transference of energy that connects us to the divine within and without. As earth beings, we owe it to ourselves to practice the radiance of our oneness… and to act accordingly.
This month, one expression of practice was Forest Farm Camp as, for me, the homesteading arts can be a beautiful means of communion with nature. Also, taking the opportunity to share the skills with twenty wild children strips away the heaviness of any existential or psychic rut and replaces it with awe and access to the ridiculously silly, often baffling, totally amusing and profoundly wise child-state. I’m definitely good with children, but I can also say that it isn’t my life’s mission to work with them day in and day out. “I’ve just been culturally conditioned not to work with children because I’m too manly. I don’t know what your excuse is,” offers Skeets playfully as we muse about our Farm Camp’s triumphs and tribulations. Indeed, we’ve all been conditioned to deny the child-wisdom that exists still in all of us. Its the urge to jump straight into the mud in our Sunday best, to eat with every part of our face and body to really get a feel for the food, and to cry full-feeling at the pain of even minor injustices. As adults, we sometimes proudly concede our disengagement or even distaste for children; I’ve done it myself. So many times they are seen and treated as irrational or burdensome to the rigidity of our overbearing sense of structure. But kids are little supernovas of truth- all destruction and creation and beauty and chaos… and they are natural lovers of the earth. They are our collective legacy and there is much to learn from one another.
I would like to close this month’s meditation with this beautiful poem written by Joy Harjo, the first Native American US Poet Laureate. It’s called “Eagle Poem”.
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear,
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.
To The Path! May we love the brambles as much as the berries.