Rebirth

Easter 2009

It was our first holiday without extended family around. Back home we have a large family and we usually find ourselves around a large spread of food, engaged in lively conversation, with tribes of children running underfoot. Today it was just us, the wind and our new kite.

I grew up celebrating Easter as a holy day so the tradition and timing is very much a part of me. I welcome and honor Spring, her natural cycles and rhythms that guide our lives, and I reflect on the sacred aspects of my aliveness. The Spring Equinox in upstate New York is still quite wintry, making Easter the perfect time to honor the traditions of my family and celebrate Spring in its essence: the re-birthing and renewal of life.

Rebirth is an amazing phenomenon, acknowledging that life passes through life, and through the continuum of life there is no end and no beginning- there is only infinity. I remember pondering the idea of infinity as a child after being told that when you die you go to heaven for infinity or after learning in math that numbers continued on infinitely. It simultaneously intrigued and bent my elementary schooled mind and I could never find peace in the concept. It was only years later, in college, that I heard a recording of a nun (no less!), who asked, hypothetically, how life could be infinite if it began at birth, because in the infinite there is no end, but also no beginning.

Life passing through life.

I was alive before being born into this specific, culturally defined body and I will continue to be alive after my body has composted away. I am alive or alive, and this physical body is my earthly shell where I am honored to exist in this physical realm. I was reborn into this body and I will be reborn many more times, this lifetime, and wherever my spirit exists afterward.

It is in this spirit that I celebrate Easter; reminded of how vast and all encompassing life is and the infinite nature that is my spirit alive. In the here and the now I am Earth, I am Mammal, I am Woman and Mother (once Maiden and someday Crone) and I am one of her many, many creatures. My consciousness urges me to find ways of peace, health and wellness for all earth creatures. I find myself a woman, versed in sexuality, growing babies and giving rebirth to spirit in Earth form. I see my place as an earth keeper and birth worker: a birth keeper, if I may borrow the phrase from the beloved Jeannine Parvati Baker who now continues her infinite living somewhere beyond this earth plane. We are the generations who have important, conscious decisions to make as we stand in the throes of our current paradigm shift. Time and information is moving very quickly in the mind’s eye and it is an good time to breathe deep, nourish the soil, make amends with natural forces and find ways to cohabitate with other peoples, animals, and plants (and all sentient beings). It’s true what the boys in Old Crow Medicine Show sing in their tear jerker of a song: “We’re All in This Thing Together, walking the line between faith and fear.”

Today I celebrate my renewed energy in the ways of elemental harmony: balancing the forces of earthly life and spiritual infinity. Somewhere, integrated in that light, is our universal consciousness- the vast being we called God in my childhood- and the energetic force that connects us all. I honor Ostara, goddess of the dawn, bringer of new light to a dark winter. After all, life was not gone these past cold and wintry months; it was merely sleeping, waiting to be reborn.

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Tagged as: birth keeper, consciousness, Easter, infinity, paradigm, Spirituality