“God is voluptuous and delicious.” Meister Eckhart
On my recent trip to Ireland, this understanding became more and more clear…that God is indeed voluptuous, delicious, fertile, fecund, and oh so full.
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The beauty of Connemara brought me to tears. The skies are wide open. The colors of the land entranced me. The sheer magnitude of the spirit of creation seeped into my cells, showing me the sheer magnitude of what I really am.
Connemara SkiesConnemara Colors
The Beauty of the Elements
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The Burren is stark land, and yet in its own way, also delicious. God and Goddess do not discriminate in their fullness.
The BurrenThe Burren Close-upBurren Wildflowers
The ephemeral grows alongside the enduring.
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Look at these ancient symbols of the Goddess we saw at the Celtic and Prehistoric Museum on the Dingle Peninsula. This museum was amazing in the artifacts it houses, as well as the sheer humor and delight of the owner, Harris Moore. He dated these artifacts at around 6,000 years old.
The Goddess, according to some, was the way for ancient people to have some kind of understanding of this fecund, voluptuous nature of the creation they lived in.
Ancient Carvings of the Goddess
Many of us learned of God as something more severe, judging and stern. Open your eyes to the voluptuousness of God and Goddess. You don’t have to be in the wild western land of Ireland to experience this aspect of the Divine.
You are this voluptuousness, this deliciousness, this divinity, living and breathing in your female body.
I want to do to you what Spring does with cherry trees. ~ Neruda
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I’ve been contemplating Neruda for days now. Discovering this one simple quote, above, led me to this poem of his. And I melted. Oh, my, what this poem exudes.
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I posted a few lines:
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
on Facebook and Twitter, and what came back was rapturous delight from women. Gasps. Oohs. Aahs.
I didn’t receive pithy statements about the beauty of the lines, but rather short exclamations of feeling.
Feeling. Something wakes up in us when we experience these words.
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Life is erotic. Life re-creates itself, over and over. Life is an impulse, a continual impulse to come into existence. Life is birthing itself in every moment.
“What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.” Meister Eckhart
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Most of the lessons we’ve internalized about ‘what Spring does to cherry trees’ isn’t about life or God or ooh and ahh. Think of a nice big fat cherry pie. What we’ve been taught to believe is like taking that cherry pie and cutting the tiniest sliver out of it, then serving it up as the whole pie. The slice is so small, it can’t even stand on its own. And it doesn’t even taste like cherry pie anymore.
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Pleasure, Eros, Sensuality, Sexuality. These themes are woven into Neruda’s works, but he speaks of life, of earth, of people, of longing, of creation, of love.
And in these lines, he wraps the oh-so-humble elements of this human earthly existence in robes of divinity:
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water.
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a cluster of fruit, every day, between my hands.
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.
We are sensual beings. We live in one big erotic field. Life is pulsing through our veins. Life throbs. Life longs.
In spring, we are in the outward, pulsating part of the cycle of life. Just as in the cherry tree, we feel this pulsing, this desire, this longing to create.
It’s actually really practical, too. When your creations and actions flow from this inner impulse, they come from the intelligence that is life. They are vibrantly alive and captivatingly juicy.
This impulse is a guide to truth and integrity. It is a guide to aliveness and to joy. It is a guide to feeling all of what life offers, even those feelings we’ve pushed away for so long. It is a guide to pleasure and the land of the unknown.
I could feel this in the women who responded with alive oohs and aahs. Our power lies in our bodies, in waking up to and living in the divinity that breathes fire into each and every female cell.
Do I dare live, love and create from this place? Do you? Do we?
