As may be clear to anyone who has labored his or her way through these sundry rants of mine, I struggle on a pretty significant level with the concept of Creator/trix. I never bought the Christian idea of God in any way (big shock coming from a lapsed Unitarian), but anything much more anthropomorphic than, say, "the Tao" is a bit of a burden for me. Yet, clearly there is an upward struggle to evolve on our planet--in spite of thermodynamics' demands for greater entropy--and I'm left looking for a conceptual hook to hang my neopagan hat on.
During the student ritual I led last summer in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California one night, I was struck with the nature of this organizing life force (for me at least). For me it is "the Green Fire". Standing on a mountain, surrounded by forest--forest which overcomes fire and clearcut to grow time and again--I felt the overwhelming presence of life's drive to encircle the Earth and blaze forth, like a raging wildfire, which can be contained but only extinguished with enormous and draining effort.
This fire is kindled by the polarity of potential and actuality, of male and female, which create one another by their own existence and provide the spark for ignition. Perhaps a better analogy is with the two pole of a battery, the negative seething with electrons which will flow to the positive given the most minimal pathway.
The Green Fire is, for me, the quintessential manifestation of the Divine, of magic, of creation. It is inescapable, inexorable, inexplicable. It is.
Postscript: The above-mentioned ritual took place mid-June, 1998. I wrote the above on March 5. On March 19, I find that Caitlin Matthews, one of the finest writers on matters Celtic, has also used the term, "green fire", in this very same context in her latest book, just out this month, linking it with Angus mac ind Og. An interesting coincidence...or not. Perhaps the very concept is spreading through the collective unconscious like...well, wildfire.
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