How to Become a Witch by Amber K. (large ebook reader txt) 📗

whose tentacles are covered with swiveling hooks…

Imagine a beautiful world of waterfalls, where you can stand in one high place and see giant, foaming torrents of water plunging down on three sides, or 275 large falls within a space of less than two miles, or water cascading in a single vast sheet more than a mile wide and three hundred feet high, and another where the liquid cascades three thousand feet straight down, or a titan where more than three million gallons of water per second thunder over the edge…

Imagine another world, where great living creatures rear three and four hundred feet in the air and contain more that fifty thousand cubic feet of mass; these elder life forms may thrive for two thousand years and more. However, mutant albinos of their species, only sixty feet tall, survive vampirelike by sucking the fluids from the living bodies of their elder brothers…

Imagine a planet where vast systems of tunnels and caves snake underground, filled with delicate sculptures of stone and occasionally crystals more than thirty feet long. Envision a tunnel three hundred miles long, or another seven thousand feet deep, or a subterranean chamber 2,300 feet by 1,300 feet, more than 260 feet high. Imagine this deep world filled with blind, pale creatures that have never seen the light of their distant sun…

Imagine a cold world, partly covered with ice more than a mile thick, ice so heavy that it has crushed the land beneath for tens of millions of years; a planet where more than 70 percent of the fresh water is locked immovably in frozen ice, and where a thermometer from your house might show 120 degrees F below zero—if it could register coldness that deep…

Imagine a planet crackling with wild electric storms, sixteen million lightning storms every single year. Bolts of lightning streak through dark skies at 130,000 miles per hour, each one soaring to 54,000 degrees F, hot enough to fuse sand into hollow glass tubes that reach deep into the ground, ignite vast fires, or deafen the little creatures that scurry about under the chaos…

Can you imagine these exotic and wonderful places? Welcome to Earth, a single planet that encompasses all these worlds, and many more. A colony of aspen trees in Utah. The Mariana Trench in the Pacific. Thermal vents in several seas. Giant squid. Victoria Falls, and Iguazu and Angel Falls. The Sequoia redwoods of California and their mutant cousins. Mammoth Cave and other caverns worldwide. Antarctica. Lightning storms. It’s all real, and it’s all part of your home.

And it’s all filled with life—living things that dwell inside hot rocks deep under the earth’s surface, or cold rocks in a frozen desert. Organisms that are happy with a little iron to eat; or surviving thousands of feet underwater; or floating in salty sludge, dissolved arsenic, or nearly boiling acid; or who can dry up and blow around in the dust for a few thousand years, then pop back to life when there’s moisture. And one special creature that seems to thrive on constant noise, stress, pollution, and overcrowding. These are all called extremophiles, except the last, who are called New Yorkers. They are all residents of planet Earth, along with us.

We have talked about nature as composed of earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. Now explore further: nature as the foundation of our health, as our teacher, as the source of magick. And most of all, nature infused with spirit, the sacred body of the Divine, the incarnate Goddess.

Appreciating the Real World

In modern society, especially among city dwellers, there is a temptation to get comfortable in an artificial environment and venture from it only rarely; to separate ourselves not only from wilderness but from the countryside, even from the outdoors.

This would be understandable in a moon colony. On Earth, it means that we begin to see air-conditioned high-rises and fluorescent lighting and frozen, packaged food as normal—as more real than the natural world. Nature becomes a fantasy world in books and movies. This world is simultaneously harmless—a cartoon backdrop of perpetual sunshine and green trees—and scary, when we see TV specials about hurricanes or tsunamis deluging distant lands on the news. We see snapshots, some fictional and some not, and have no comprehension of the whole.

Thus we forget what gives us life and sustains us.

Forgetting this, we forget to honor and protect the living biosphere, and the earth becomes nothing more than a repository of raw materials for our use.

A whole generation of urban children are more in touch with their iPods, smartphones, and computer notebooks than they are with the stunted little Charlie Brown tree down the street. What kind of stewards will they be for our planet?

Richard Louv has written about this in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Algonquin, 2005). He points out that unstructured free play outdoors has been replaced by indoor hours spent with electronic media; not only does this alienate children from nature, but it contributes to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, stress, and childhood obesity. He calls for a “nature-child reunion.”

The remedy is simple. More children outdoors, more of the time: walking in the woods, building forts, fishing, climbing trees, hiking, bird watching, taking photos, growing gardens, walking the dog, camping with their families or Scout groups, and playing in a creative, completely unorganized way.

Obviously adults need nature time too, either outdoor adventures (backpacking, kayaking, skiing) or more gentle pursuits like gardening, neighborhood walks, and outdoor photography.

To appreciate anyone, you spend time with them. It’s true for the natural world too. You don’t have to enjoy mosquitoes and mud and cold, gray days as much as rainbows and bunny rabbits. But you may learn in your gut what you probably know in your head: that all parts of nature are necessary elements of the cycle…and that this whole, vast, complex earth is splendid just as she is.

Nature for Health

We mentioned that kids who spend time outdoors may be healthier.