Carolyn Lee Boyd is a writer, student drummer, retired human services administrator, and herb and native plant gardener, currently living in New England. Her essays, short stories, memoirs, reviews, and poetry have been published in, among others, Return to Mago E*Magazine, Sagewoman, Feminism and Religion, The Goddess Pages, Matrifocus, and The Beltane Papers, and various anthologies. She would love for you to visit her at her website, www.goddessinateapot.com where you can find some of her free e-books to download as well as contact her.
Thank you for these thoughts, Sara. Your comment reminds me of how often myths revolve around the seasons and their importance- for example the stories of Demeter and Persephone or Inanna’s descent that seem to establish the seasons. Expanding our view of time may, I hope, help us move back into Nature’s cyclical time as we can see beyond the mechanical, linear view of time that has been so destructive in our culture.
Time Unbound/ Carolyn Boyd. I like this essay because it opens the doors to possibilities. We know so little about either the workings of the earth or the cosmos ( contrary to what science tells us) that I feel more comfortable depending upon mythology to help me understand time… it’s not that I have no interest in physics it’s that physics can’t ground us in the way mythological time does. We experience cycles on this planet when we live according to nature’s seasons/goddess time. These cycles are NOT illusion – they happen even in places that appear to have no discernible seasons. One of the most distressing aspects of climate change is that I am losing touch with the seasons as I have known them. Rain has become a perpetual flooding. My cellar has been wet or under water for almost a year. Ditching my road in early March in 60 degree temperatures and then being slammed back into at least a foot of heavy snow is not only confusing to me but also to all the animals and birds that live here. We are all struggling. What we are experiencing is REAL for this moment in human/ non human living beings time… What we are not doing is grounding the POSSIBILITY of creating genuine change by our human actions. Goddess time tells us cycles repeat for good or ill and today we are repeating a deadly story with a deadly end. What we are doing to the earth we are doing to ourselves.
Thank you, Sara. I hadn’t thought of the connection between bees and Carol, and it just happened to publish today, but you are right in so many ways! A coincidence except maybe there are no coincidences. Maybe this is Carol’s way of smiling at us and reminding us to keep on keepin’ on, just as she did.
I wish I could reply directly to comments, because I wanted to also reply to the various early comments about the Big Bang theory. I have been reading a lot of cosmology for non-cosmologists recently, including Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Lessons book. In it he posits just what we were talking about – the “Big Bang” not being a Big Bang, but rather a rebirthing of the universe, in other words, the end of one universe and the becoming of our universe out of the universe just ended. I also just finished Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s excellent book The Disordered Cosmos, in which she writes extensively about how Western science, including physics and cosmology, is pursued and understood from a Western perspective, with all that entails. She also has very readable and understandable explanations of particle physics and such.
I love it that this article appears today, the day feminist scholar Carol Christ died two years ago because when I think of the Bee Goddess, I think of Carol… She lived and taught the ways of bees…
Thanks for your comment, Sara. Exactly! And so few people in the western world realize that the way we commodify nature isn’t the way it has always been, but an aberration that could cost us our planet. When I read these words in Carmina Gadelica, it felt like coming home to a way of thinking I hadn’t known was in my ancestry.
What we have to remember is that humans routinely communicated with all aspects of nature until the last 3-400 years – As the machine age progressed – nature ended up a commodity – this is an atrocity we are paying dearly for now.
Thank you so much, Frances! I so appreciate your kind words!
A wonderful poem, Carolyn- rich and rare.
Big O or Original Ovulation – I love those, too! How different our society’s culture would be if we saw the cycles of the universe as matrifocal, akin to the cycles of the life, death, and regeneration of living beings.
I did have another thought as I was reading these comments. If we think in terms of drumming, especially given that it has for millennia been an essential aspect of women’s spirituality, maybe we can think of the term “Big Bang” as the universe’s drumbeat, setting in motion the vibrations that create life. Maybe Goddess being loud and proud…
oh I like that Carol! Big Bang being a Drum! haha
Sara, I’m sorry I didn’t see this comment until now. What I love about the expansion and contraction theory of the universe is that it is, as you say, reflective of the circular/cyclic nature of the universe. The universe is cycling, but breathing at the same time. I agree that the name “Big Bang” is very patriarchal and I think it would be much better for another term to be used, since according to the expanding/contracting theory, the “Big Bang” is only one phase of what is a repeating cycle. Maybe “Birth Moment”?
Carol, Brian Swimme complains about the name “Big Bang” in his Canticle to the Cosmos series – he says: “what are we – pieces of shrapnel?” He speaks about the “Cosmic Egg” and recognises that Indigenous peoples have long imagined and storied more organic origins. Swimme and Berry named it the “Great Flaring Forth” in the title of their book. I have called it the Big O or the Original Ovulation, but Birth Moment seems good too. Of course She is birthing in every moment – so Sara is onto that with the Steady State theory.
I am intrigued by this post…. recently I have begun to read about the Steady State theory that the Big Bang replaced – something about the big bang smacks of patriarchy – the steady state theory speaks to the cosmos as rebirthing herself – intuitively this makes much more sense to me. There is a circular/cyclic nature present in all of nature that has brought me back to steady state…