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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in tree of life

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 When is the Best Time for Sugarmakers to Tap their Maple Trees? | Spring  2011 | Articles | W

 

Hungry is the lodge without a hunter.

There was a woman whose husband had died of the coughing ill. Without kinsfolk in the winter village to help them, times were hard for her and her children.

One year there came a time at the end of Winter, when nights are cold but days begin to be warm, that no food was left in the lodge. While they had strength, the children wept for hunger.

Then the woman nicked her breasts with a knife and let the children suckle her blood. In this way, their lives were saved.

But with time the woman herself grew weak from this blood-suckling, and in the end she died. When the ground had thawed, they buried her. From her grave grew a tall tree with beautiful silver bark.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

Well, the Tree's up.

(“The Tree,” we say, no further modifiers needed: that certainly tells you something.)

It's an island of light in a sea of darkness, of color in a sea of white. Bedecked with fruits and vegetables—a lifetime's gathering—it's an island of fertility in a sea of fallow.

Behold, a migratory flock of Suns has settled among its branches. Every ornament's a prayer.

Oh, it's always too much work, the Tree. Every year I curse at the lights as I painstakingly wind them, spiral-wise, around the branches. Every year, I tell myself: You don't have to do this. Every year I remind myself: It will still be Yule without it.

Every year, I find myself doing it nonetheless. Every year, I'm glad of it.

The Tree is a sacrifice. Sacrifice bears prayer.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

Pagan Nativity

 

Among the Kalasha of the Hindu Kush,

who alone among Indo-Aryan peoples

still hold to their old pre-Vedic religion,

all expectant women give birth

in the bashali, the house of blood. There

(as always until Enlightenment

doctors, pleading ease of access,

laid them out on their backs)

they squat to push, with gravity

to pull, bracing their labor against

the building's central column:

axis mundi, the typical Tree of Life.

Just so Leto clutched the bole

of a palm tree, bearing Apollo

and Artemis. Even Maryam

the virgin (in Sura xix) brought

forth Isa embracing the self-same

date-palm. Now in these days

of darkness, under the usual

tree of stars, how many

straining mothers crouch

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Meditation in a Time of Plague

Stand before it, the Life-Tree: of all trees, biggest and best.

Step in beneath those Branches.

Lie down beside that mighty Bole, beneath those spreading Branches.

Lie down, look up, and see.

See the Bole beside you.

See the Branches above you, raying out in each direction.

See the Circle of Branches around, the great round rim of twig-tip.

Bole, Branch, Circle. Do you see?

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b2ap3_thumbnail_BlessingSimpleBasic2012-02Sm.jpgNotes: 

 

1) The tree of life represents all of reality. Reality extends past the mundane plane. 

 

2) Only speaking for myself, I am a theist who experiences all of reality—the Tree of Life—as my Goddess: I feel Her in my surroundings, reap the fruits of Her loving care, and experience magic as the Goddess and Her love made manifest.

 

Oh, Tree of Life,

You Who Are Tree Mother, Great Mother,

Great Mother Creator of All beings,

please bring me power, joy, and wholeness.

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Ted Czukor
    Ted Czukor says #
    This is truly lovely, Francesca. When someone asks me about my Tree of Life ring, I usually say it's the Druid's Oak. Then I tel
  • Francesca De Grandis
    Francesca De Grandis says #
    Flatterer! Joking aside, what you share already is perfect, so your wanting to add anything I said pleases me immensely. I love yo

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Tree with Suns

Check out this early 5th-century gilded silver pendant from West Gotland in Sweden.

If Stockholm University's Anders Andrén is right, this is an image of the ancestral universe.

According to Andrén, what at first looks like an abstract design—known to art historians as a pelta (“shield”) or mushroom-shaped design—is actually the World Tree (Andrén 140).

(Andrén does not say why it is that, if so, the World Tree's branching volutes should end in animal [=serpent?] heads, although the design has parallels in other contemporary art from Gotland [Andrén 141]. My own eisigesis [= ”reading in”] would be that here we see the Tree of Life resolving into animal life.)

At the top, we see the long-rayed zenith Sun, flanked by the short-rayed Suns of Sunrise and Sunset.

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Recent comment in this post - Show all comments
  • Tyger
    Tyger says #
    What a beautiful way of looking at the world!

Posted by on in SageWoman Blogs

  b2ap3_thumbnail_ceiba-in-rain.jpg b2ap3_thumbnail_ceiba-vieques.jpg

    "Why is the ceiba sacred?"  I learned in school that the ceiba pentandra was Puerto Rico's official national tree.  Mrs. Flores, my elementary school teacher, explained that the Taínos, the island's Native Indigenous habitants, considered the ceiba a sacred tree. 

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