Springtime?

These are my hardy, wonderful Iris reticulata that I planted 3 years ago. The snow covered them yesterday and today they bloomed and brought a much needed bit of color to our bland early spring landscape.

The girls and I went to my mother’s for the weekend and while we were there we dyed Easter eggs. Ailee had a lot of fun arranging them on my mom’s egg plate. We are celebrating the spring holiday on Easter this year, rather than on the spring equinox since I was tired of celebrating spring in the winter. In my own pagan path I have come to feel that aligning my celebrations of the holidays with what is happening outside my door is much more important than trying to recreate what the ancients did or follow what the modern Wheel of the Year does. That means delaying spring holidays and dealing with a prolonged winter in comparison to ancient European models. My goal is to become indigenous to this place that I live. To be part of this land in a way that is spiritual as well as sustainable. I feel that this is a central issue for those of us who choose the pagan path in America. While we can draw on European traditions and myths to inspire us and we can worship European gods and goddesses, we are not European. Not anymore. We must find a way to become truly American, without copying or stealing from the first peoples who were here before us. We need stories that speak of the Oaks and Maples of this land. Some of the stories and sacred symbols translate well, such as the mighty Oak, but here in the Midwest we don’t have Rowan trees except in the occasional yard. We do have many wonderful trees with their own sacred stories to tell, such as Sassafrass and Pawpaw. The question I am attempting to answer is how do we become indigenous to a place in the modern era? I have found signposts pointing the way in David Abram’s writings, in Bill Plotkin’s book Nature and the Human Soul, and in the myths and stories of the Norse and Baltic gods and goddesses. For me, spring isn’t heralded so much by a date as by the first robin of spring, the first thunderstorm, watching the birds fledge and the bulbs slowly emerge. Outside of the Science Center in Detroit I saw another first dear to my heart, the first sunny dandelion blossom. The dandelion is also an import from Europe, though it is much more indigenous than I am.