When you look at a photograph of a giant Sequoia tree, you see quite a lot. The tortoise-print type bark. The branches. The height. The width of the trunk. Perhaps you may see a few things around the base of the tree (dirt, leaves, fern...mud). You can read all about this tree. You can learn how it grows from a tiny seed, into a tree that can stand over 250 feet tall. Almost as tall as a Redwood tree. You can learn how to read the rings of the tree, which will tell you how it grew, if there was a fire, how much it rained and snowed that year, and...how old that tree is. There are things you can't learn from reading. The smell. The touch. The energy. You can't see all of the creatures that call that tree home. You can't hold a piece of naturally fallen bark in your hands, and understand the tree's breathing nature. You can't hold a naturally felled branch in your hands, and use it as a walking stick. Those are lessons that only Mother Gaia can teach you. You can look at a photo that shows you the top of the tree, a nest in the tree or a bird on a branch of the tree. You can not know the feeling of having to arch your neck back so far that you nearly topple over backwards trying to see the top of the tree. You do not know what it feels like to cradle in the root nooks of the tree for a nap. You can not hear that bird talking to you.
If you do travel in nature, from time to time, you may take a long your handy duty GPS. You know, to make sure that you don't get lost. Then, when you're smack in the middle of no man's land, your GPS suddenly stops working. You blame it on bad connection. You twist and turn with the GPS firmly in your hand, holding it up towards the sky, hoping to get good reception. You start checking to be sure your batteries are fully charged. When you realize that you still have a lot of battery life left, you start trying to figure out something else to blame. It's not until you realize that you're good and lost, and you start opening your eyes to what truly surrounds you, that you come to the quick understanding that it is Mother Gaia who has allowed you to become 'lost'. I live in an area where your GPS quickly becomes nothing more than a light duty paper weight. Those 500 - 5,000 foot mountains? That's why your GPS stops working. That brilliant multi-billion dollar satellite system that orbits this planet, has no line of sight, and therefore you are ultimately, invisible. It's a good thing. If you are relying so heavily on your little gadget, then you clearly need to be lost....for as long as it takes for you to pull your head out of your ass and start realizing that there is more to life than a GPS tracking device and a bag full of trail mix.
National Geographic specials, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, NOVA, In Search Of....all are fantastic channels and programs. I highly recommend that you watch as much of this as you can on your television (if, you own one) or computer. Personally, I have voluntarily not had a television in my home for almost 13 years. In fact, the last thing I saw on a television was the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York City, New York, USA....and all of the redundant, rhetorical and bullshit news casts that followed. I got so sick and tired of hearing it, not to mention the bloody horrific adverts that followed each 5 minute news segment, that I just had the cable disconnected and the television was used for nothing more than watching movies that we owned on VCR/DVD. When I thought back on that choice, I realized that there was much more that I was being forced to watch. I didn't care what new scent of Axe they were coming out with next. All of the movie previews looked like they were made for a crowd of drunken morons. I watched kids spilling stuff, with happy smiling moms wiping up their messes with a new improved brand of paper towel. I watched political adverts from all sides of the political spectrum, basically promising everyone the same exact things, only the words they used were different. Wolves in the clothing of sheep is what that was. When I turned off my television, I was suddenly freed of the bollocks that had entered into my home. Not that I have ever been one to watch television. I have never had one program that I 'had to' watch....even educational ones. Do I miss it? Oh hell no!
I had my own web site for almost a decade. The site had over 200 pages if information on it for people to refer to as they needed to. I thought I was doing great, until I realized that most of the visits to my web page, were my own. I allowed it, and all of that information, to waft off into the super-information highway to hell. Willingly, I allowed a full decade of information to go to what most people would consider to be a total waste. Thing is, it's not a waste. I'm the one that provided that information. My personal data base is housed inside my skull, rather than some plastic box and a piece of computer hard ware. All of that information is permanently housed in my own handy duty living hard drive. Best of all, that information base keeps on growing and growing with each passing day. Ahhh! You didn't think that Elders and Crones could ever learn anything new? Think again. We don't know everything. We never claim to, and we never will know everything. Why? Because life keeps growing, and changing on a daily basis. There is always something new to learn. We may have to really look for it....but we find something new to learn every single day. The scent of a new type of Rose. The feeling of a fresh rain on our faces. The chill from an unusually chilly breeze that wafts across our backs. A new writing that we're interested in reading. Poetry, music, theatre, dance....every aspect of life is growing and changing, and we are interested in learning as much as we can.
One thing novice Pagans do not yet understand is the fact that we Elders and Crones are almost forced to deal with "issues" and "problems" that we grew out of, and away from, by the time we were 10. No, I'm not joking. We didn't have these gadgets. We did have social networking. We called it "Outside" and "Nature". I'm sure, for you newer generation folks, there's an app for that somewhere. Us Elders will stick to our feet being firmly planted in the dirt and the mud, while we walk with blades of grass between our toes, wisps of wind on our backs and the light of the sun on our faces. Oh sure, we can give you recipes until the cows come home. Heck, you can even feel free to download them and print them out into a 'kitchen witch cookbook' that you tell your friends you made all by yourself. I've got 3 conch shells that says you'll never use even 4 of those recipes. One reason, you probably don't even know what most of those ingredients are used for, how they are naturally obtained (meaning - not bought in a store or market), much less how to properly prepare the mixture for human consumption (since there are many items in our recipes that have to be properly cured before they are non-poisonous for human ingestion - like Bella Donna, for example). You can't download that off of the Internet. There is no app for that.
You may very well be 'into' meditation, Yoga and 'all that new-age pagan stuff'. You may be very good at it too! Yay you for having taken a few moments out of your life to learn how to stretch and mold your body into the shape of a giraffe trying to give birth to a gorilla. You can not pick up a kindle, iPad or laptop and fully learn what each Yoga pose, chakra center, reiki wave, auric light and meditative position truly means. Those are things you have to learn for yourself as you travel along your life's path. You can be 60 years old, and be considered a Yoga master....and still have no idea. Elders and Crones earn their titles by picking up books, breathing in the healing energies of Mother Gaia...and really listening to the tales and stories that nature has to tell us, and teach us. When we hug a tree, we are not hugging a piece of vegetation. We are hugging a sibling. When we talk to our familiars, we are talking to old and dear friends that understand us, just as we understand them. When we sit and gaze up at the sky, we are seeking wisdom and knowledge that the ancients have to bless us with. When we tell you to turn your gadgets and gizmos off and leave them out of our homes....don't question us, just do as you're asked to do. We don't give a rat's ass who is going to call you. We don't care if you have an app for anything. We also don't care if you can get a book on your Kindle. We use real books, with real ink and real bindings. Do we have these gadgets just like you do? Of course we do, and we use them daily. We just don't use them to learn from. We use them to educate, inform and laugh at. Besides....you can't use a pen and create works of art in the margins of a Kindle book. You can't place flora and fauna samples between the folds of a laptop, and I'm sorry, but there is no remote control that will turn off the next natural disaster. Start turning off your electronics, and start turning on your brains.
Comments
Post a Comment