FERTILITY

Fertility is one of the things that most occupied the minds of the paleopagans: the fertility of the crops and of the livestock and of the wild flora and fauna held the power of life and death over our Ancestors. Today the vast majority of us in the developed world are divorced from the immediacy of the effects of fertility on our survival. The chops and steaks in the supermarket don’t bring to mind the piglets and calves that had to be bred and borne and birthed, nor do the ever-present vegetables in the produce aisle remind us of the delicate cycles of sun and rain and soil that, if thrown off-balance, can abandon fields to dirt and stomachs to an empty winter.

On a personal level, fertility becomes a virtue when it is put into the service of life. The pursuit of generative activities can be a way to increase the well-being of yourself and the people around you. These activities can include arts of all forms, increasing your personal fertility by exercising your creative impulses; gardening and other practices that work to increase the fertility of the land; and spiritual work, lending to what Earth-centered Christian theologian Matthew Fox calls the “greening of the soul”. A green and growing spirit resists the dryness of spiritual rigidity and the apathy that can be the result of living in a society largely disconnected from its roots, and this can only be a virtue.

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