This morning, I woke up early as usual to find that it had been raining for a good portion of the night. It was a very gentle rain that had filled our rain gauge to the half inch mark. After the first cup of coffee, the idea to put our houseplants, which are predominately cactus plants, outside so that they could be nourished by the rain was made. Though it was only 8 Celsius, I carried them out wearing my best waterproof outfit, my skin. My bare feet did get quite cool, but the plants will love me for the effort.
This is the first rain of the year in our corner of the universe where the drought has meant that there is a fire ban in place. Hopefully, enough rain falls to allow campers to have camp fires. The gentle rain is expected continue until midmorning tomorrow. I went back out to fill every pail that I own with rainwater from the rain barrels so that the water will be available for the garden should we return to an extended period of no rain. Water is life. Even the plants in a desert need water from time to time.
The idea of a mother nature that is also the goddess of the sea, is as ancient as human memory, an archetypal image that is embedded in all of us below the level of conscious knowledge. In so many cultures, this archetype is depicted as nude. It is only in the modern world that we somehow have cloaked the goddess in material to hide her. Not only do we pretend that mother nature is shamed by her natural nudity, we drape all young mothers-to-be as their children are born.
It is hard to imagine a goddess of the sea and the mother of the earth that would feel shame, yet that is what art now demands. The same is true for the god of the sea. Like his consort, he must now be rendered sexless. A loin cloth or an artfully draped swath of material somehow becomes part of his costume, even when he is in the sea. Modern sensibilities demand nothing less as the thought of gods and goddesses being nude, skinny dipping, and engaged in creating the world is too much to handle. Naked dreams send them scurrying to see a therapist with worries that they are somehow becoming perverts in their minds.
Life emerged from the sea. Each new life also emerges from a sea of its own, an umbilical sea. And, every single life form emerges into the world without artfully draped material hiding their nudity. Yet, almost at the moment of birth, human babies are swaddled and not because of the air temperature. It is not seemly for a baby to be naked. Humans are strange and irrational beings who need to feel the rain on their bared bodies, get in touch with their roots, the archetypal gods and goddesses who had no fear of their bodies or their sexuality.