Mother Earth
The following words are taken from notes written down when Mother Earth came to visit us on October 21, 1999. This is how she appeared to us, although she can take any form she wishes: Dark hair with leaves, tree limbs growing out of her hair, brown eyes. Mist surrounds her. She looks very old, but very young. She is very wise, but can be silly. She laughs with a cackle or like a young girl. A raccoon suddenly appears in her place, and then she returns.
“I am three thousand loving mother’s smiles, three thousand warm father’s embraces, three thousand grandmother’s kisses on your forehead or cheek. My love can never be measured.
“My parents must put a warm blanket over me. The Evil One will cause me pain, but I will get better. But how many of my children, my little loves, will suffer because of it? Many of my children will become butterflies and find me in the new world.
“Jesus heals me and whispers to me and causes my fever to ease. My beloved is taller than any mountain. Like me, he has leaves growing in his hair, and a wild mane like a lion or horse flows from his head. He is powerful with his skin, hair, bark, scales. He is the wolves howling at night or the gentle babbling of the brook, morning sunlight or lightning bolts, strong and weak, harsh and gentle, but always loving.
“I must suffer for awhile, and when I do, my pain will be so great, I will not know what is happening. The Great Storm will strike the United States and bring it down. Yet there is a greater storm than this coming, and he has no room for me in his heart. He will scourge me and lay wounds upon me, but he will not win. I am not his mother. I did not give birth to him.
“I hear the whisper of the spider when she weaves her web. I do not judge. I only love. I love all, even the most evil of men. I love them still. I love the monsters and the saints.”
Buffalo Dream
October 2012. This week I had a dream. I dreamt I was looking out the window of our house into a forest. In the forest was a great, tall tree with wide-spreading branches. On two of the wide branches, a man and a woman lay full-length, facing each other and the trunk of the tree. They were each cutting off branches of the tree. Then they were gone, and I saw that the tree had many missing branches, and there were large white plastic markers attached all over the tree, indicating that the tree would be cut down very soon. I panicked, thinking “this tree is my tree, and I can’t let this happen.” I was about to run to the phone to call 911. Then I saw, just for a moment, a male and a female buffalo looking at me with big dark eyes from right in front of the tree, and then they disappeared.
I spoke with our Faerie family about the dream. They said the man and woman represent all of humanity, who are in the process of cutting down the great tree of life of Mother Earth, a branch at a time. But now things are speeding up, and we are at risk of cutting down the tree completely. The buffalo, who were almost completely wiped out and are just beginning to return, represent many things – Mother and Father Creator, Mother Earth, the Faerie Folke, and Native American spirits and others from the spirit lands who are watching us.
It is up to us to make choices that will help Mother Earth. This includes voting for pro-environmental candidates, protesting anti-environmental legislation, and honoring Mother Earth with loving care for her plant and animal children.
The Battle of the Rings
Before we met and married, both of us had read J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, and we had each retained our own set of the books. When the first movie was released to theaters in December 2001, we became curious as to whether the events portrayed in Tolkien’s books had actually taken place at some time in the distant past. Our Fair Folk family had already mentioned to us that Tolkien was a unique individual, who might, in their opinion, be referred to today as a shaman or spirit journeyer. They told us that, in his journeys, Tolkien had met many of the Faerie, and, during their encounters, they shared some of their history with him. We do not know whether Tolkien knew he was meeting real people or whether he believed them to be merely the product of his creative imagination. Our family, however, tells us that many of the events he wrote of did, indeed, take place. Therefore, Tolkien’s books are a mixture of fact and fiction.
Like rings of a tree, Middle Earth is closer to the Mother and Father’s realm than is the physical Earth we know, while, in contrast, the Dark Realms are farther out past our Earth. The Hobbits Tolkien speaks of are members of one of the Gnome tribes, and, while all Gnomes do not have hairy toes, this particular tribe does. The Battle of the Rings took place long before recorded Human history, at a time when Fair Folk and Humans mixed in an uneasy truce. Many of the Gnomes with whom we are acquainted are well over ten thousand years old, while some are much older even than that. The grandfather of one of these Gnomes took part in many battles during that dark time, and he was, even then, considered ancient by Gnome standards. Because these battles took place in Central Europe, much of the rest of the world knew nothing of them. Sadly, the battles in the days to come will be so terrible that all Creation will know of them.
Artwork by Jonathon Earl Bowser