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| Volume I No. 7 December 18, 2004 |
| Copyright 2004 by Osireion.com. All rights reserved. sekhmet@osireion.com Subscribe To Palimpsest and Osireion Announcements Return to Osireion Home |
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Our Sexual Cosmos: The Virgin At 9 Months And Holding This week the temperatures finally dropped below freezing here in the Carolinas and nearly all of my remaining potted plants gave up the ghost. As we will be entertaining several times in the coming week, we spent the morning clearing away dead and frozen debris and storing pots for the winter. While not a complete surprise, it was a delight to find lots of new orange mint leaves peeking out of the protected spots in their giant pot, and the tip of one tulip just breaking the top of the soil. Meanwhile, among friends, acquaintances and in the news – all around me – are other signs of hopeful beginnings, in some cases having been preceded by lengthening darkness, pruning and death. During my early years of gardening, I was reluctant to trim, uproot or otherwise destroy anything that I had so lovingly tended during the warm season. It took a few seasons of happy discoveries like the ones above to teach me that life is ubiquitous, irrepressible, cyclical and ever-changing. This is a comfort when the long nights are followed by seemingly lifeless days of dead leaves and empty fields. Nearly all ancient cultures and religions celebrated the Winter Solstice as the rebirth of a god-child representing the sun and life. As a mother who was raised in the Christian tradition, I have often wondered what it was like for Mary in those last months before giving birth to Jesus. The thought of riding that donkey to Bethlehem is almost more than I can bear, now that I’ve been “great with child” myself! These days my children are grown and I watch with amazement as they begin to produce my grandchildren. But I continue to find myself pregnant at regular intervals, and giving birth to new creative endeavors, new ideas and projects, new realizations of how I can best embody the divine in our world. For I would be great with child and suffer birth pains over and over, could I but lessen the fear, loneliness and suffering – if I could help open the eyes of just one more person to the wonder and eternal nature of their own life. On Tuesday evening we will gather loved ones to feast, play and observe the longest night of the year. We will light many candles in the dark to remind us that when dawn comes, the sun will renew its climb to the ascendancy of summer. No doubt we will feel poignant, remembering the events of the past year, including the many small and some large deaths and prunings which have come our way. But we’ll also feel joyful, knowing we have witnessed yet another turn of the year’s wheel, knowing we will wake once more to promise and life. Inevitably, the longest pregnancy finally comes to term, my slow-growing orchid buds finally open, the sun-child re-enters the world – all glorious evidence that existence is by nature life-giving. As those buds swell to bursting, let us look to the season ahead with hearts open to the surprises of change, the joy of our creative nature, and the beauty of simply and harmoniously living life to its very fullest. Sekhmet lives and writes in South Carolina, and is the founder of Osireion.com; She is a lifelong seeker and mystic, wiccan in practice, with years of study in creative consciousness.; For more information, write sekhmet@osireion.com. |
| In the end it is all about fire. Drop the mystic and the scientist down to the pit, let them burn and see who comes up still alive. -Rumi |
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