Earth Affirmation – Simple Discipline
Earth affirmation
“Earth-in-your-Angel, come close and listen to my secret heart. Teach me your mysteries; show me your ways of loving and living. How do you forgive? You continue to bring forth the grace of life and beauty while we dishonor, debase and discredit you. You continue your exquisite love-play with our glorious Solaris, noble Phoebus Apollo and we as a consequence are wrapped everyday of our lives in the golden light of your sacred union. Show me how to rain the green-gold light caught fast in the cerulean curve of an endless sky so that you and your own Sacred Consort may know the fiery depths of my own love; the silence of my secret devotion, and the eternal promise of my secret heart.”
Simple discipline
Create your seasonal Winter Altar in honor of Earth in her form as the great Anglo-Saxon Nature Goddess Nerthus who, in all her various divine aspects oversees love, fertility, marriage, childbirth, the good harvest and the health and well-being of all living things. And which of these aspects will be your guides and teachers in this season as we move through these three summer months of July, August and September? Who will walk with you each day and dream with you each night? In your morning or evening meditation recite your Earth Affirmation, use it as a mantra that may accompany you into the world of vision and inspired thought where you journey into your soul’s own world where encounters with Spirit are waiting. Ask those divinities and spirits who are the guardians of this month to gift you with an invocation, or a prayer that you can recite each day.
Remember Woden and Nerthus and the nature of their connection; their mutual responsibilities and their individual imperatives as you move into a time of loving; of cultivating deep and lasting relationships; of harvesting the gifts that have been laid at your table, and of collecting supplies for the oncoming “cold and dark times” that recur with the yearly cycle of your life. But remember also that it is a time for great celebration, liberated activities, giving birth to new aspects of your-self, and making sure that these aspects are taken care of very well so that they will survive the winter season.
Add rainbow-colored candles to your Winter Altar. They will represent the precious language of the narcissus, the chrysanthemum and the marigold; flowers that are so sacred to the Earth goddesses. Each morning or evening meditate and envision the ways in which you need to harvest to the bounty of your own heart’s gifts, your soul offerings, your good thinking and what life on the outside has brought to your door. Begin to know yourself as a grateful, celebratory, joyfully laughing being, while at the same time carefully tending to what needs preparing, collecting and storing for difficult and challenging times to come. For they always do.
Throughout winter refresh your altar with freshly cut bouquets of your winter flowers. Place them with intentionality and awareness of the meaning and significance of the color and type of flower. Add prints, paintings, and other items with flower images in them that have a personal meaning to you on your altar. In your meditations with these beautiful images ask for their wisdom teachings. Meditate on the qualities of the flower and begin to cultivate or deepen those qualities within you. On your altar also honor the presence of the precious opal, citrine and topaz. If you do not have these particular gems use other stones to represent them. Draw, map or write out your own mandalic journey toward your Opal, Citrine and Topaz Selves and place your gems or their representative stones in the center. Add any other sacred and or personally meaningful items to your altar. Spend time at your altar every day. Give yourself the time to meditate, to pray or simply to become inwardly quiet and to ask the great Divine, to ask Earth-in-her-Angel to give you much needed insight; to help you renew sacred intentions and to give you the strength of commitment to carry them out all in the name of gaining balance, harmony and a peaceful, loving self.