Hunt For Fertility

April 24, 2011

Ask Hettie Quackers, Uncategorized

Dear Hettie Quackers,

Has living on a farm and connecting with the earth helped you understand the meaning of Easter?

~ Dawn

This time last year I had a huge epiphany.

As Easter was approaching I had been pondering the season and feeling rather uninspired. I didn’t feel like forcing myself into a false celebration and I just couldn’t find any point of connection with the Easter Holiday. I had found deeper meaning in many contemporary cultural festivals, and deeply involved in teaching others how to honor the seasons and create meaningful Seasonal Celebrations, but I was stuck when it came to Easter. I mean bunnies and chocolate and pink marshmellows.

Come on. Count me out.

We did take our daughter to our friend’s house for an egg hunt with bunnies and eggs and chocolate. It was lovely, we ate together over piles of fresh grasses and blossoms with classical music in the background. It wasn’t until a week later though when I chatted with Madame Hettie about it that I realized.

OOOhhhh . . . Egg Hunt!

Its a Fertility Festival!

This is how it happened: Fast forward to a few days ago when I heard my daughter calling from downstairs. Mama, Mamini come come come….. I have to show you the eggs I found. For some reason I actually did go – she brings in eggs from our ducks every morning and I was working so I might have just said, “later babe, I’m working.”

But I didn’t….

As I rounded the corner of the stairs she announced.

“Mama, I found forty-one eggs!”

There they were! All in her arms and she was beaming. It was absurd and hilarious. And magical.

Each year when the girls (Hettie Quackers wants to make sure you know that means her too) start laying, we can never find the eggs at first. They stash them in new and unusual places of safety and quiet in anticipation of hatching their brood.

We hunt for them and sometimes find a secret cache. But this was incredible!

Eggs: Quintessential sacred food and symbol for fertility…

Egg production is resurrected each Spring after slow sleepy winters, and usually with a hunt.

History tells us that originally during the Assyrian and Babylonian celebration of Ishtar, pronounced Easter, the goddess of fertility, rabbits (known for their fertility) and eggs were the honored symbol. Taking the time to listen to the dreams that are calling us, whether it’s a child in your womb or gestating a new idea or vision.

Nature tells us that there will be a hunt.

So now as I turn my head to the coming and expanding light, literally the dawn of Spring, I am feeling the buzz of emergence or planting seeds and nurturing fertility all around. I am also calling on my inner huntress and allowing for the possibility of magical discovery.

Where is the hidden fertility hunt in your world emerging and how are you hunting for it this Easter?

Tell us in the comments!