All Souls Are Created Equal

[art: Susan Entwistle]

Today I declare to the robins, so hot after this searing week, to the faun, just born, to the joe-pie weed, to the fritallaries in the milkweed, to the ticks falling from the maples into my hair, I declare that I know that no soul is smaller or bigger, younger or older, better or worse than any other soul.

Today I declare that the creation of every soul is a mystery hidden in the depths of time so vast as to defy the simplicities of human memory or human investigation.

Today I declare that this body, my body, and all bodies, the bodies of starlings and stars, were all created within the body of a mother and I declare that every body, my body, this body of this earth, the body of this cosmos, will return to the great dark womb of the dark matter around which we all turn again and again. All of the mothers—hatching, matching, catching, and dispatching—worlds upon worlds upon worlds.

I summon the old mothers, the Haudenosaunee mothers who circled their clan with wisdom and protection, their mothers and our mothers who circled this earth one footstep at a time, and their mothers before them who hold the memories of all the bodies we have been. I summon the mothers enslaved whose children were taken from them, the mothers who saw their children murdered before them, the mothers of the vanished forests, the vanished flocks and schools of fish, the mothers of worlds that disappeared as men declared, white men, slave-owning men, property-owning men, deists sure that god had been created in their own image, that they were created equal to each other.

But of everyone else? Some souls are more equal than other souls, they decided.

Tonight I will go out under the stars to commune with the fireflies. Each year, as the wetlands become drier under the searing heat, their numbers diminish. I will follow a firefly, blinking and bright, up through the canopy of leaves to the stars where the stars remember that every fly is a star, is a soul, is equal to every other soul.

I will listen to the frogs croak out the memories of what has happened on this land, to the stones telling slow stories of souls whose bodies vanished and returned, and I will know that in the darkness between the tree trunks the great bear mother is watching me, ready to guide me back inside the mountain of remembering.

Pray with me if you would today not for a nation, an idea, an abstraction, but for souls, all souls, coming and going, remembering how to love each other, without borders, without qualifications, without passports, without classifications, without property, without buying and selling, without anything but love.

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Perdita Finn has been a seal, a hemlock tree, a stone in a mountain stream, some kind of burrowing creature, and is in this incarnation a woodwife, a witch, and a writer. Her books include Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World, Mothers of Magic: Summoning the Wisdom of the Ancestors and with her husband Clark Strand, The Way of the Rose. She lives with her soul kin in the moss-filled shadows of the Catskill Mountains.

Beginning on July 14th she is offering a 7 week pilgrimage into the Long Story of Our Souls through The Shift Network.