A Prayer to My Many-Times-Great Grandmothers

The winds began late yesterday afternoon.

They’ve been predicted to be quite strong, so I went outside and took the coverings (put down to protect these coaxed-too-early-by-warm temps sprouts from our occasional, normal, nighttime cold temps) off of my rosemary, lavender, and drancunculus, afraid that, left on, they’d blow off in the night and break the tender new stems that — regardless of the fact that it is still (in some technical sense) Winter here — are now several inches long.

Today is sunny, windy, cold: a typical March day here in February. Now, six years later, this weather reminds me of nothing so much as the day when G/Son was born in early March, a “raw” day when, unaware that Son and DiL had headed for the hospital, I cleaned house with an odd mania and then ran out, impelled to buy sleepers, and mittens, and yarn to knit a blanket for the new baby that was “soon coming.” I came home to check the messages on my charging cell phone and to learn that it was time for me to head, post-haste, to stand in a clinical hospital hall and invoke all the Goddess and Gods I know, using a Witchy variation upon the Prayer of St. Patrick. (Thanks to Madeline L’Engle.)

In Columbia’s district at this fateful hour,
I place all heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it has,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along the path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness;
All these I place,
By Hecate’s almighty help and grace,
Between DiL, and her babe, and the powers of Darkness.

How on Earth has Gaia danced near six times around the Sun since I cast that spell?

I had to run errands today and, all over my bit of landbase, there are cherry trees in bloom that “shouldn’t” bloom until early April. On every sunny bit of Earth, there are daffodils blooming that shouldn’t bloom for another few weeks. Some flowers, I’m learning, pay more attention to the hours of light, but some pay more attention to temperature. And, as a result, there’s chaos in every garden that I pass.

I drove out to a favorite spot to sit, wind-whipped and cold, against the trunk of a favorite oak tree and to spend time in communion with the white-capped Potomac River, icy jade green as it flows alongside the white skeletons of beech trees. (And, Sun in Pisces and Gemini ascending, I cannot breathe in enough of this ionized air, this wind that does a dance to make the Spring Come. It’s as if my nose and lungs are — as, indeed, they truly are — instruments of praise. More! More! More! Ahhh!) All of the plants and trees in my landbase are telling me that we’re in the middle of an historic shift. Some of them will survive and some won’t. My foolish attempts to cover things up when they sprout before their time will help for a year, or two, or three, as my age and arthritis lose the war against the climate, but not beyond that. And, so, again, I cast my spell:

In Columbia’s district at this fateful hour,
I place all heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And fire with all the strength it has,
And lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along the path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the Earth with its starkness;
All these I place,
By Hecate’s almighty help and grace,
Between my landbase and and the powers of human-made climate change and Darkness.

Somewhere, deep in my RNA, there are many-many-many times great grandmothers who watched the ice advance and change everything that they knew about when to hibernate and when to gather and who, centuries later, watched the ice retreat, leaving in its space a “too early” Spring. They watched the changes as they made the long trip north, from Africa, to middle Europe, to Sweden to North America. I call to those women now, with my back against the tree and my face set to the river. I call to them to help me to live through this chaos, this change with no precedent, and, yet, with precedent enough, flowing in the blood of my veins, flowing in my G/Son’s veins, child that he is of wind, and raw weather, and bright blue skies.

What is there, within you, to help you birth this painful and scary change?

Picture found here.