048_goatMy dear friend Kim-a-roo was working on a garden project this summer.  Part of that involved what is often referred to as “busting sod”, or digging up the earth and turning it over.  Mixing it up.  Break open the ground and serve it notice that you intend to practice a conscious relationship with it for a specific end (which itself is a push-and-pull process like the Chariot of the tarot).

There’s a cost involved.  It’s hard, back-breaking work if you want it done right.  The earth reserves the right to do the unexpected, and test your resolve.  Push and pull.  Sweat and toil.

Our planet has withstood comets, the rumble of it’s plate-like skin shifting, volcanic ejections of the turbulence deep below, radiation, asteroids, gravity and the solar wind.  Titanic, goddess-level stuff that obliterates us on a sublime level.

But down to the human level, in the earth are countless hidden things, ideas in the form of treasures or forgotten objects.  Thoughts and feelings stored for later, traveling through time to emerge down the line for an encounter with a human consciousness.

So Kim-a-roo starts digging up all sorts of crazy artifacts from the recent past in her yard.  The most striking to me is a red plastic goat, likely a toy part of a farm or animal set.  She takes a picture and I bug her to let me share it with you.  This is a little bit of a sideways thanks to Xtine, who’s hooked me up with the goat of the week.

I have a yellow version of this goat (many of my old toys from the ancient days are still intact), which like the picture of me as a young wiselet I promised Xtine is “somewhere” in my dimensional storage chambers.  At some point I’ll lead these things out into the light for all to see.  When the moment is there.

Kim-a-roo is breaking ground in her own life, building a family, starting a garden both inside and outside.  Doing the real deal, push-and-pull, sweat and toil, getting permission to know what the momma knows and discovering the earthpower secrets inside herself.  Hard core goat stuff, Saturn stuff, pan stuff.

Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjostr pulling the chariot.

Carl Sagan in the Cosmos series talks about life on earth as examples of matter becoming conscious.  Through us, perhaps, matter is witnessed in forms that might never reach a moment of experience.  The tyranny of objects is that they wish, through us, to be used and reckoned with.  We are the (perhaps unseen) agents of their object-existences.  And they provide for us a concrete fact with which to work out our projections.

Kim digs up a red goat because that’s where she is, doing the work.  She shares her experience online and I pick up on it because I love earth secrets.  I mull over the significance for several months and then it comes to me.  Red is passion, fire, innocence, trust.  Goats are a pure animal or a diabolic one, depending on belief, but they are a magnificent creature worthy of respect.  It occurs to me that Kim has dug up a Yule Goat.

The Yule Goat is associated with making sure all is well, that people are doing what they ought to live their lives.  This is similar to Santa Claus making a list and checking it twice.  How cool for her to find such a wonderful ornament, a toy from the past to delight us in the present!

An unexpected trickster goat out of the earth to be sacrificed and rise again, to ensure that we see another return of the sun.  A holiday season present from the earth reminding us we have work to do in the year ahead, that there is much healing, crafting, and learning to be done.  For we are in the Celtic New Year in one sense, about to experience the time of the year when this world and the unseen world have a party, disguises which unmask us.

Mehhh!