Our usual solar stories about the turning of the year focus on the birth, maturing and death of a sun god who might fight his rival at midsummer and will probably father himself. Imbolc is all about pregnancy and birth. Beltain is all about impregnating. It’s a very heterosexual narrative, when you get down to it.

Nature is not exclusively about heterosexual reproduction. What we would understand as homosexual behaviour crops up in all creatures. If you’re part of a wolf pack or a bee hive, it’s about the group, not about spreading your own genes directly. Many plants have both male and female sex organs – if you insist on understanding them in those terms! On top of this, plants will also reproduce through suckers, bulbs and other ways of doing it for themselves without any need for pollination. Some creatures change gender. Oysters have all the kit, and effectively change gender every few years. Other life forms – fungi particularly, are asexual, and reproduce without any input from anyone else.

Where, in the traditional wheel story, would you honour the oyster? Or the male seahorse who carries his young in a pouch? Where, in the cycle of the year do we talk about how most of the elm trees in the UK are probably descended from just the one tree, and spread asexually? Where are the stories that place our equally natural gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, not so gendered and asexual Pagan folk within the wheel of the year?

The straight, breeding and heterosexual narratives of the natural world are at best a simplification, but they leave out so many stories. How do you talk about the rise and fall of mountain ranges, if your rituals are pinned to this solar wheel? How do you talk about deep geology, and the ancient relationships between water and landscape? What the land and the water do to each other does not translate into a straight and reproductive story. The focus on reproduction and fertility misses out the other manifestations of nature; sun, wind, rock, hill, lake, snow... that just do not work that way. Nature is about more than sex.

In reclaiming other stories about what nature means, and moving beyond the wheel, we make more room for those of us who are not all about heterosexual reproduction. The Pagans who have decided not to have children, or who are unable. The Pagans whose minds and/or bodies don’t fit so neatly into gender identifications. Last year I was at an event where a small activity announced it would divide into men and women and each groups would do things. I felt totally alienated by that, despite being fairly straightforward in my female biology and mother status. I’ve found this in other ritual spaces too. Ask me to be maiden, or mother, and I feel lost and disorientated. I just want to be ‘person’. I suspect that for the many people who are more complicated than me, the experience is even more challenging.

 

So let’s start telling those other stories, about the strange sex lives of the mushrooms, the shifting nature of the oysters. Let’s open up our understanding of nature to get away from this reductive human story that focuses on reproduction, because there is so much more to discover.