Golden Tears of the Goddess

Long ago in the East, a Goddess had pity for our humble starving ancestors and wept. Her tears fell to the Earth as golden pears, to nourish Her people.

Pears are truly a divine fruit. When ripe they are pure sweetness that melts in your mouth with none of the tartness of apples or mucilaginous qualities of tropical fruits (I like those too but they ain’t pears). It’s hard to imagine a more perfect food than these golden droplets of sublime sweetness. Pears nourish us in so many ways and even heal our digestive, circulatory and nervous systems. Pears are very high in minerals, nutrients and fibre, which is perhaps why they are also lower in calories than most sweet fruit. They are one of very few alkaline fruits available to us and among even fewer in the Northern hemisphere. In part, because of this lack of acidity, they are anti-inflammatory to the digestive track and able to gently heal many serious maladies such as colitis, stomach/intestinal/bowel inflammation and ulceration. This fruit when consumed regularly, also heals heart and nervous disorders, as well as poor circulation.

These golden fruits have thin skin, yet seem to be designed to be picked while green, perfect for “shelf ripening” and storage. Unlike most fruits that are picked when ripe, pears are tricky because they ripen from the inside out. So, by the time they look fully ripe on the tree, they’re rotten inside. Maybe they decided to be eaten and moved around by birds, staying longer in the trees, rather than being spread by bears who prefer to pick up rotting windfall. Pears need to be picked when the pinnules (little mouths the fruit’s skin breathes with) turn brown, the shoulder softens slightly and the stem easily parts ways from the branch when the pear is lifted to a horizontal position. Then, depending on the storage temperature, they ripen over weeks or months. When perfectly ripe, their flesh has an incredibly soft smooth refined texture and sweet taste.

As if all these qualities were not enough, she is also undeniably one of the most beautiful, sexy fruits. She still stands out even among all the exotic imports from around the world. I imagine her sumptuous qualities have inspired more paintings and photographs than any other fruit. A racy complement back in the day when folks were more discrete, was to say “she has pear-like hips”. If it was the apple that tempted Eve, it was the pear that tempted Adam.

Needless to say I have a predilection for pears and always have. They are my favourite large fruit and until I began to grow them I honestly could never get enough. This summer we’ve been blessed with generous fruit harvests, followed by long bouts of blueberry and pear gluttony (with grape and apple still to come). Like bears, my daughter and I eat our fill from endless amounts of these lovelies. By divine design one fruit’s season dovetails into the next, each lasting for a few weeks. These binges on fruit, gentle to digest and covered in lacto-bacteria, have actually healed my stomach biota and other digestive ailments when nothing else could. (Much of my digestive troubles have been caused by long term use of herbal antibiotics for Lyme).

I’d like to diverge, to challenge the prudent wisdom of our culture about never being a glutton. There is another side to this that has to do with respecting and honouring our body’s desires and needs. We condemn gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins, but perhaps gluttony too has its place and time in the natural cycles of life. For example, to glut on fruit can be, not only a huge gift of nutrients for our survival and well being, but a gentle purge for detoxing and self healing. To indulge in something we crave, that’s in season and unadulterated (directly from Nature), seems quite natural and good to me. Certainly, every other animal does it. So, unless we imagine we have transcended our animal nature or want to always starve and control it, then why wouldn’t we have times (when it’s ecologically sound) that it’s good to follow this deeper instinct and pig out. It could even be argued that in times of great abundance, with something like fruit that is just going to rot, it’s our environmental duty to pig out! I would argue that this is just like times in the cycle of our days and years when we should eat less and fast. Just as the celebrations of abundance in the fall, the time of fasting in the late winter, recognized by all religions of the Northern Hemisphere, wasn’t just practiced for abstract ascetic reasons, or because of the long nights and returning light. It was practiced every year at that exact time because this was the leanest time of year for the land Herself. It wasn’t just a way of honouring the sky god but a way of honouring the Earth and acting in accord with Her cycles of abundance. The people who started these religious practices clearly understood their obligatory relationship with the ecology.

My food desires are not just for fruit. My cycle of longing begins when the fasting ends and I deeply crave that first gush of life in the spring, the Maple Sap. Then later in the spring I crave greens and eat huge amounts to satisfy the longing for greenness that’s grown in me all winter. At first I feel my body truly needs the fresh spring growth and my whole being absorbs it like parched earth. But towards mid summer, the deeper craving (and physical need) seems to naturally pass. I still like and eat raw greens, but the heat of our affair drains away with the summer and we’re no longer passionately engaged in the same way. By then my eye has wandered to small fruit. As fruits begin to ripen my inner craving lusts for the fruitfulness and sweetness of summer. Again, I am fulfilled each day and with each new fruit as the desire for, and availability of, these beauties rises and fades, until I am truly satiated. By then, it’s fall and I begin to crave root vegetables, to brace my bones for the coming winter scarcity. I crave squash and fat to fortify and insulate myself from the bite of winter. By the new year this craving too, feels satisfied. Even the seemingly endless desire we have for something as condensed as wild flower honey, the ambrosia of the Goddess fresh from our bee’s, is quenched by the generosity of its incredible flavour and nutritional power. After a couple of days of indulging, the desire for more honey is gone, my inner honeycomb filled.

With this understanding I surrender to this cycle of desires which has been both created within me and is fulfilled in perfect harmony outside of me, through the ever changing fecundity of the seasons. As each desire is fulfilled, by just ‘living well’ on the land, the assurance that the Earth is taking care of me, grows deeper. Like roots taking hold. Roots that will support me and my family. And not in a “tooth and claw” survival way, but in true wealth and richness. With this great inheritance that She brings and bestows upon me my indebtedness to Her grows. It naturally makes me want to protect and nurture Her even more. This is how our partnership with the Earth can be. And how it has been for the greater part of our time here as humans.

It’s easy to imagine this Eden-like existence if you live in a unmolested wild place of fecundity, but to most of us this fecundity is something we have never experienced or if we have it wasn’t in a place we could live. The sad fact is we are inheriting a stripped beaten Earth, and must take responsibility for Her. While many areas have grown back and are beautiful and look ‘natural’, even in these ‘wild’ places we can sense there has been great damage done and riches extracted. The wealth of the the land has been stolen and Her heart carelessly stomped on in the plunder. And this colonization and raping of the land has happened almost everywhere. There is only one way out of this cycle of destruction. We need to step up for her NOW, start protecting Her, having faith in Her and feeding Her. Stop acting like a rebellious teenager and become responsible for Her. In time, when the body of the land is healed and strong, from our care, Her fecundity will grow into a magical arbour that we can step through. Step back into co-creation, far away from the narrow minded barrens of industrial culture.

Ok, now I coming back to the lovely pear. If we look deeply into the origins of pears, like their cousins the apple and many of the other foods we eat every day, we will find they are a complete mystery. With the help of academics assuring us, we’re convinced we know about all about the origins of pears. But what we know adds up to nothing. This is because in our search for the origins, which is like a finding a needle in a field of haystacks, we’re equipped with the wrong tools (a rational methodology and a lack of historic understanding). We’re looking for the needle through a distorted smeared lens of prejudice, rather than with the magnet of our heart. If you look it up, it will say that the pear species, we grow today, appeared in many places roughly around the same time (presumably meaning pears were bred simultaneously in many parts of the world) about 6000 years ago (found in the northern steppes of Europe, northern Eurasia, China, the Middle East and North Africa). It shouldn’t be surprising these finds perfectly coincide with the rise of conquering ‘warrior-king’ cultures. When we look down the narrow hall of history it is full of mirrors. Which is to say we generally only see ourselves. So the only archaeological finds that get admitted into his-story must relate to the roots of western culture somehow, since we are the climatic results of social evolution. We call this area, where much of western history is founded, the ‘cradle of civilization’ and we imagine everything including agriculture started there. But the truth is nobody knows what culture actually created this amazing being, the pear, or how they did it. Mark my words, some day when our theories allow for it, archaeologists will find a much earlier samples of the pear and this will dramatically change the story. These huge perspective shifts in history, and the sciences that backs it, happen all the time. Corn and many other primary foods were all thought to have been domesticated thousands of years earlier than is being admitted now. When theories open because of new ideas then earlier samples are found. And like an inch worm we will find the story stretches back, far beyond our limited historic grasp.

From my perspective it seems clear that by 6000 years ago pears were so widespread that we’ve found them all over, even with with our needle-in-the-haystack type of archeology. Not only do we imagine all these foods were part of the movement towards civilization, that we are part of, but we are also comforted by the huge assumption that the pears were bred out from wild pears. But this is also fiction made up from our limited understanding. Breeders today are still unable to make something like a sweet pear from their hard wild cousins. Many new pear and apple species were created during a recent surge of breeding in the 1800s but all of these new varieties started with the domestic pear or apple species. Even by the laws of our science and with GMO technology we cannot find a way to do this. If these miracles were created just through breeding it would have taken hundreds of years of concentrated effort. There is zero evidence for any such theories or legacy. Perhaps there was another way that has been lost or well hidden.

When things are found in many places simultaneously like pears have been, I think it’s fairly obvious that it is the result of a much earlier dispersion. And in this case, not a dispersion of the actual genetic pear material, because there are a distinctly different species of pear which would discourage the directly genetic link theory. But rather a dispersion of knowledge. This knowledge was not a controlling knowledge as we find in warrior king culture but a deeper wisdom manifest from a partnership. This knowledge comes from a much earlier time when we lived in partnership with the Earth and with the many kingdoms of life. All that is to say, more realistically, the origins or pears are from a culture that existed from 20–30,000 BC, about thirty thousand years old. (for referencing this early cultures see Marija Gimbutas). For all we know these partnerships that brought about this beautiful fruit may have happened before the last ice age and the fossilized evidence has just been lost forever. While striving for the truth we must always admit we know very little.

I’ve had the privilege to work with lovely pear trees over the last twenty years. The thirty or so trees I tend are of Siberian rootstock grafted with many sweet and cider pear species (all growing in a few different mixed polyculture orchards that I initiated about twenty years ago). Working intimately and in isolation with Her I have come to my own understanding of Her origins. These jewels are gifts born of our marriage to beings that live on the other side of ‘reality’, in other non-human dimensions. So, when I say pears are the tears of the Goddess I’m deadly serious. While the way has been lost or hidden, we still have access to these dimensions and I have seen into our past. In earlier times, in Goddess cultures 10–30,000 years ago and in earlier animistic cultures over the last hundred thousand years, orders of people from our communities spent all their time emerged in such multidimensional endeavours and partnerships with Nature. This was supported because the value of such work was understood as being in the best interest of all the people and their descendents. That was the way we all survived and thrived for a hundred thousand years and we didn’t question it. Just as now most of us give all our energy (consciously or not) to supporting consumer culture and following along unquestioning with modern ideologies.

When we start seeing and feeling our past in a broader way it becomes possible to understand how such a miracle as the Pear may have come about. These horticultural miracles lay at the foundation of western culture, and still sustain our civilization. But, like most of what western culture claims as its own, these princes and princesses we call our food were kidnapped from earlier civilizations. So, it’s not surprising nobody knows about it, talks about, or asks questions about it. It’s all been long ago buried and swept from our minds and history books.

Even while we are eating Her and tasting Her we deny Her divine existence and origins.

Learn more about Steven’s work and The Sacred Gardener School at thesacredgardener.ca