Rising Up with Oestre

Who can resist the rising energy of Springtime?  Plants resurrecting themselves from the barren, seemingly dead, chilly winter silence.  Amazing!  Profound! Thankfully, Endless!  

Spring Quotations

March Quotations

Spring Equinox Celebrations

We enjoy a secular and pagan version of the Easter holiday: colored eggs, bunnies, chocolate, sumptuous meals, family and friends gathering, games, Springtime themes, fun.  


Since I am not a Christian, Judeo-Christian mythology holds little interest for me; I favor Greek, NeoPagan, and Chinese mythologies.  All have tales of creatures and beings rising from the dead, defeating death, resurrecting, fertilizing, born and reborn, Emergent, living on, Transmigration, in the springtime of your life, Springtime in California.  

"Easter is named for a Saxon goddess who was known by the names of Oestre or Eastre, and in Germany by the name of Ostara. She is a goddess of the dawn and the spring, and her name derives from words for dawn, the shining light arising from the east. Our words for the "female hormone" estrogen derives from her name. Ostara was, of course, a fertility goddess. Bringing in the end of winter, with the days brighter and growing longer after the vernal equinox, Ostara had a passion for new life. Her presence was felt in the flowering of plants and the birth of babies, both animal and human. The rabbit (well known for its propensity for rapid reproduction) was her sacred animal. Easter eggs and the Easter Bunny both featured in the spring festivals of Ostara, which were initially held during the feasts of the goddess Ishtar | Inanna. Eggs are an obvious symbol of fertility, and the newborn chicks an adorable representation of new growth. Brightly colored eggs, chicks, and bunnies were all used at festival time to express appreciation for Ostara's gift of abundance."
- Easter History  

"Fertility rights are ceremonies of a magic-religious nature performed to ensure the perpetuation of mankind and to control the environment. Expressed as invocations, incantations, prayers, hymns, processions, dances, and sacred dramas, these liturgical endeavors were, and still are, believed to be closely connected with the mechanisms of nature. The basis for such rites is usually a belief in sympathetic magic - that is magic worked on one level to have an effect on a different level, and based on the assumption that life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, are one and indivisible. If such fertility rites could induce fertility in the animal and human worlds, then the vegetable world would also be stimulated to reproduction, resulting in an abundant harvest."
-  Robert Ellison, The Solitary Druid, p. 130

Ashes to Ashes

Palm Sunday--
heroes smiling,
people cheering

Mardi Gras and 
Shrove Tuesday's
debaucheries--
reasons for repenting.

Cleaning out
the fireplace--
Ash Wednesday

Ashes to ashes--
yet departed Guides
live on

Forty days
of austerities--
questioning demons

Buds emerging 
on leafless branches--
metaphors of
Rising from the Dead.

Devastating EARTHQUAKES--
Nature
does not care.  

Ash Wednesday

Origins of Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday

By T. S. Eliot, 1930

"The silent sister veiled in white and blue
Between the yews, behind the garden god,
Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke
no word

But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken

Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew

And after this our exile


V
If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Where shall the word be found, where will the word
Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence
Not on the sea or on the islands, not
On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land,
For those who walk in darkness
Both in the day time and in the night time
The right time and the right place are not here
No place of grace for those who avoid the face
No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny
the voice"