I am so in love with this place, these hills, this ragged wound of a world.
I am.
~H. Byron Ballard
There is land you love because it is beautiful, or unique, or familiar, and there is land you love because it harbors within its crevices a piece of your soul.
~The Author
It is snowing outside my window, drifting flakes that can genuinely be called “flakes” now instead of the tiny, white ice balls that November usually produces. Such had been blowing around me as I walked earlier this afternoon, pulling the chilly air into my lungs as I stretched my legs and lower back. I know almost every inch of our small property now, and never have I been more grateful or felt more connected to it. I imagine, as I walk, that I am not merely passing over the good earth but through it. Merging and melding with the soil and rocks and myriad root systems beneath my feet. Are we not all connected by water anyway? The same water that courses through my blood and maintains the pressure in my cells is expelled with each breath, coming down again as snow, melting into the ground, flowing up through the roots of the trees and plants, taken in by me through food grown and eaten or tea brewed and sipped. The water cycle is a fact of life that we are all taught in school, but besides the moment of disgust when we realize that every sip of water we take was once somebody’s pee—and a lot of other things besides—it doesn’t take on any special significance until we are ready to embrace the interconnectedness of our existence on this planet we call home. And water, though inherently gender-less, has always seemed feminine to me. Water gives life, and to give life is feminine. Thus it has always been.
“A woman shakes like the earth,” my mother told me the night before my wedding, “sometimes sharp and sudden, sometimes slow and rolling.” After the hectic weeks of preparation and frustration with each other, we spent my final evening at home in a rare state of normal, mother-daughter affection. Her tenderness and attentiveness allowed me to hear her, and her words were a gift, a piece of ancient, feminine wisdom passed down from…she couldn’t remember where. In the years that have followed, years filled with the delayed, confusing, but still magical exploration of my sexuality, those words have come back to me again and again, often in the silences “after,” when I return to my thinking mind. I am like the Earth. I can imagine nothing more magical than this.
“I come from a place of hills, of old mountains and old magic,” writes H. Byron Ballard, a kindred spirit from the Smoky Mountains. “Wandering the cow paths on the mountain of my childhood gave me the leisure to observe, the sense to avoid what should be avoided, and the quiet in which to imagine that I was merely a part of the landscape there. I felt as sturdy as the ridgeline and as tall as the tallest old locust tree…It was only when I that world and tried to find myself amongst bigger buildings and people who didn’t think or act like me that I discovered not everyone felt that way. For some people, this familial feeling I had for soil and clouds and garter snakes was peculiar and possibly dangerous. Their religions and their cultures told them that the land—the world itself—was dangerous and filthy, something to be avoided if one were to remain healthy and connected to the Divine. They could not have been farther from the truth, but I had no idea how to argue the point with them and so I let them go1.”
This is how I grew up. Except, it was deer trails, not cow paths, that I wandered. But the feeling is so much the same. I began internalizing the incompatibilities of the natural Divine and the biblical Divine at a younger age, however. Raised by an ex-hippie, tree-hugging, master of homeopathy who had decided the practice was evil because it was spiritual healing not sanctioned by the Bible, conflict was my spiritual birthright. I was old enough when we left my mother’s native California to remember yoga in the mornings, her teaching me to search for Miner’s lettuce beneath the breathtaking redwoods that surrounded our first real home, and tracing my small fingers along grooves worn into sandstone boulders while she explained that those very grooves had been made by the indigenous tribes of this land who used the sandstone to straighten their arrows. I remember the Le Lecha League meetings she took us too, a community of strong and shameless women who literally let it all hang out, together. Then we moved to Ohio, became confirmed Christians instead of spiritual seekers, and forgot how to Know with our bodies. It was like leaving Eden all over again.
“Along with our strategically placed fig leaves,’ states Ballard, “we left the garden with one thing—the certainty that we were special in the eyes of the Creator and that, even though the garden was no longer our home, we were the boss in the great world beyond the sword-wielding angels. We were given dominion, by God…it was up to us to tame and control nature, to cut civilization from the heart of the wilderness. We gave up the religious observances that tied the course of our lives to the agricultural year and took to ourselves spiritual systems that further alienated us from the natural and possibly dirty, sin-filled, and soul-endangering world. We set our eyes on a heavenly kingdom and simply endured the horrors of of living on a planet that supplied our every want and need.”
Eventually we settled in a wooded “holler” in the Ohio River Valley region, where I always say I grew up even though I was almost ten when we moved there. That bit of new-growth foothills along the outskirts of old Appalachia felt like returning to the garden. My body remembered the woods, remembered how to run through underbrush without tripping, remembered the chill of spring water on my feet, remembered how to feel like I was part of it all. My mother remembered how to search with us, guidebook in hand, for edible and medicinal plants. We learned other things too, though: how to cover our hair and bodies so that they would be hidden, protected, saved; how to dress and laugh and talk in a more feminine way; why it was important to adorn ourselves inside rather than wearing makeup; to feel shame if we hadn’t been reading the Bible and praying everyday. I was being handed one truth, while feeling another, very different truth. I took up my birthright of conflict and swallowed it whole.
A candle burns beside me as I write, a hand poured, sandalwood scented, soy wax candle made in that little town in southern Ohio—another gift from my mother, because sandalwood is a fragrance we both love. The warm scent creates a bubble around me as the light outside my window fades. During this time of year, it is said, the Earth Goddess enters her “crone” stage…her vital, regenerative energy waning, sinking inward for her long winter’s sleep. I feel myself sinking inward as well, the layers of clothing and blankets required by the colder weather creating a cocoon of coziness. For me, the season’s coziness is always accompanied by a thin edge of panic, because the process of sinking into myself does not come with any assurance that I will emerge whole again. Or, that I will emerge at all. This is the bitter reality of living with seasonal depression.
“I am counting down the darkening days now,” Ballard writes in the introduction to her book, Seasons of a Magical Life, “watching every sunset, one eye on the clock. Earlier, earlier—the rose fingers of cloud and expectation caress the western mountains, spotlighting the edge of the horizon and the silhouette of the silver birch tree. And the night rises up on all the other sides, flowing in to fill the void of the lost day.”
I unconsciously hold my breath when reading words so perfectly sensual as these, releasing it at the end in a sigh of appreciation. I could be right there on her mountain, watching the sun slide down into evening behind the newly bare birch. Outside my kitchen window the sky blazes purple and orange and rose gold, a brief display of grandeur or agony, I’ve never been able to decide which. At the other end of the house the night gathers and I look for the moon as I would for a familiar face in a lonely place. I don’t see her yet, but I know that she is waning now, like the year. I have become more familiar with her cycles these recent months, each new and growing awareness of my place within the web of nature feels like coming awake. It is invigorating and grounding, both at once.
“I who am the the beauty of the green earth, And the white moon among the stars, And the mystery of the waters, Call unto your soul: arise and come to me, For I am the soul of nature...2”
These words from “The Mother Charge,” traditionally spoken by a priestess during each esbats, or full moon, ceremony, leap off the page of a book and offer themselves as another gift. Perhaps at the next full moon I will find a copy of The Mother Charge and read it aloud to myself, outside. The Mother is old and wise in this season; like her I reflect on all that I have learned over the course of the past year. I have learned that my body craves stretching, and so I practice yoga. I have learned that I can re-parent myself, and so I am becoming someone who can deal with my own emotions and is therefore able to be a calmer, steadier presence in the lives of my husband and daughters. I am growing into a spirituality that feels, finally, like home to me. I can look myself in the eyes and smile…or even cry. It actually feels good to be me most days, now. That is new.
“This is our world now, in these last days of the old agricultural year,” Ballard continues in what feels like a whisper. “There is an invitation in this early exchange of light and shadow and in the long nights. Surely part of that invitation is for each of us to sleep more deeply, to rest more fully, to practice radical self-care as well as healing. But the other part of that invitation is the opportunity—and possibly the requirement—to sit with the shadow, and in the shadows, to acknowledge our connection, our profound debt to these shadows.”
As a teenager I felt it was cruel that my birthday came in November, when the earth was dying with the fading light and the depression I had not yet learned to name was creeping in at the edges like the night at sunset. Between the bitter cold that our poorly insulated cabin barely managed to keep at bay, and the total lack of privacy or agency that came with living under the constantly watchful eyes of my family, looking forward to winter was not a thing I could do. Now, it feels appropriate that I was born during this phase of the wheel’s turning. What better time for reflection than at the close of another year of life? Last year at this time I was afraid of leaving my twenties, and now I am bursting with the possibilities and growth that my thirties hold. The best birthday present I could imagine is to look forward to the winter season fully and without fear. This year, for the first time, it really feels like I could. Maybe not this year, with the specter of dark days looming in my not-so-distant past, but…if I am able to embrace the shadows of myself within the Knowing that this season will end, that in a few short months the Mother and I will be reborn into another cycle of growth…then maybe next year the panic will be even less, and then, in time, become a memory, another marker on the journey that is my life.
“If we are to step forward with more courage and less fear,” Ballard writes, “if we are to feel empowered and also know the uses of that power—we must sit in this uncomfortable, feral, and dangerous darkness. We must come into relationship with the shadow and welcome the wisdom that resides in, permeates, and rules this endarkenment.”
You know what I said about maybe, next month, reading outside, alone, at night? That’s because I’m not scared of the dark anymore. Embarrassing as it is to admit, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of the dark, just times when it was better or worse. And honestly, I still get the sudden jabs of terror when I think of something that might be lurking out there, whether visible or invisible, but I can manage it because I’ve grown. I’m a bigger person than I used to be. I don’t have to be afraid of monsters anymore.
“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind3.”
Isn’t it funny? I’ve heard those words all my life, but I had to radically redefine my faith in order to believe them. Strange…or maybe not so strange at all. What I do know is that the shadows of winter are deepening around me, and my own shadows within, and I am not afraid. Mostly. I might not be able to see the path ahead as clearly as I might like, but I am learning to trust, I am learning to hope.
It feels like a gift.
Ballard, H. Byron. Seasons of a Magical Life: A Pagan Path of Living. Weiser Books, Newburyport, MA. 2021.
Quoted by: Gallagher, Ann-Marie. The Wicca Bible: The Definitive Guide to Magic and the Craft. Sterling, New York, NY. 2005.
2 Timothy 1:7, The New King James Version of the Holy Bible.