This being the "merry month of May" and "so green, so green, so green," (Thomas Dekker poem), we decided to take some thought about Nature.
It is always an insightful and often a very unifying experience to get inside the Mind and Being of "The Mother": Mother Earth, Mother Nature, even Mother Creation. In metaphysical teachings and mythology, as in life, it is "The Father" (the creative, masculine, yang energy) that initiates the process of creation, but it is "The Mother" that gives it form and body. The Mother has her own teaching and messages.
The Celtic Druids evolved a whole alphabet and teaching from "The Green World", as they called Nature. This is the Ogham and has 20 letters associated with trees (the Ogham that I know) or birds ( there may even be a third Ogham) and contains much wisdom and knowledge from and about "The Green World".
The second hexagram of I Ching is The Receptive, in contrast to the first hexagram, The Creative. The Mare is the symbol of The Receptive, the Dragon being the symbol of The Creative. "The Horse belongs to the Earth just as the Dragon belongs to Heaven. Its tireless roaming over the plains is taken as a symbol of the vast expanse of the Earth. The Mare combines the swiftness of the Horse with the gentleness and devotion of the Cow". Peoples living close to Nature learned from the qualities and characteristics they saw in Nature and the continuous cycles of seasons and growth. And, as we discussed several weeks ago, we humans are part of Nature. It was Leonardo da Vinci who predicted disaster in some fashion for the Earth if Nature went out of balance. So, we will contemplate The Mother and her teachings and messages.