It's important to know that. They are often confused. Too many people ask for Healing, when what they want is Health.
The Health Goddess in my Pantheon is Venus Cloacina, also know as Venus of the Sewers. She is the Goddess of the healthy compost heap, that makes even the most barren soil fertile. She's the Goddess of the midden, the cesspool, and the pit latrine. Those places where we dump our shit so we don't infect the whole village with cholera or typhoid.
She had a shrine right in the middle of Rome, and it was believed that the health of the Empire rested in Her hands.
They were right. Anyone who has ever been somewhere that didn't have a good way to deal with human waste will tell you how quickly people become sick.
We had to replace our septic system last year, so I learned a lot about septic systems. A healthy septic system is actually a whole ecosystem of its own. It was not cheap and it was a rather tortuous multistage process.
When it was done, I erected a shrine to the Goddess Cloacina. Her symbols are Flowers and
The bulbs have begun to come up and it is very pretty to look at.
The Goddess of Health is a Maiden Goddess or a Mother Goddess. Spring, Summer or Fall. Health is a state of exuberance and action. Health is a cherubic fat cheeked infant or a careless teenager. Health is the old guy who runs marathons or the old lady who power walks up and down your street every morning
Health is all about balance and plenty. Turning manure, kitchen waste and grass clippings into healthy soil, growing food in that healthy soil, feeding our children and ourselves.
Healing is very different.
My Goddess of Healing is the Old Woman. She That Opens the Doors Between The Worlds. Kali Ma. Crooked Woman. Midwife. Psychopomp.
She is the one who attends birthing, healing and dying. More on birthing and dying in another post; here I wish to talk about healing.
Healing is painful. Always.
Healing is a surgeon's knife. Healing is chemotherapy. Healing is looking inwards and fighting your demons.
If you don't hurt, you are not healing.
One of the truisms in EMS is that we love screaming patients. Screaming patients have an airway. Screaming patients can still feel the parts of themselves they've hurt. Screaming patients have the energy to scream. Screaming patients can probably be fixed.
The quiet ones? The ones who look at you, with eyes falsely calm from shock, and say, "I think it might be bad." Yeah, they're likely to go really sour, really fast.
The same with mental healing. Grief heals. Fear heals. Anger heals. Guilt heals. Shame heals.We, as organisms living on this planet, are gifted with all these ways to know when we aren't being treated right. All these mechanisms to help us fix our circumstances. The trouble is we spend a lot of time trying to pretend that we can change reality without going through the healing process. We pretend we can just stop feeling these uncomfortable things. We don't use them to solve problems, we just randomly strike out. We've been told that these feelings are somehow bad or weak. That only the positive emotions are allowable.
Like scalpels, the dark emotions are capable of destroying, of course. However, I have never seen anyone who truly experienced healing without feeling all of these. Consider that diseases that destroy the ability to feel pain are some of the most feared in human history. Without the ability to feel pain, one is vulnerable to injury and infection.
I have heard people say things like, "Oh, I don't want to be angry. I want to heal. Anger just makes you bitter."
Anger stops you from getting into another bad situation. Maybe you need to be angry for a while, to protect yourself.
I have heard people say, "I don't want to be afraid anymore. I want to heal."
Yes, of course, no one wants to be afraid all the time. Maybe it's time to learn what is truly dangerous.
Healing's season is Winter. Like Birth and Death, it happens best in the dark and the quiet, with trusted loved ones close by. The sick room is the domain of the Old Woman. One way or another, it is she who ushers you from one state to another. She is unruffled by body fluids and is not concerned with your dignity or hers. Weep, moan, scream, or rage. It's all one to her.
Sometimes the end product of our time spent with her is Health. Sometimes Birth. Sometimes Death. We can deny her, when she comes to help us, but it would be unwise to do so.
To ask for "Healing" can be a bit like asking for "Spiritual Growth". Be specific, because She tends to give you precisely what you ask for.
I've been thinking about this post a lot since I first read it. Healing and health are most definitely what you have pointed out: two different entities. Often, I think people do not know what to ask for in the way of health. Our culture is so caught up in illness and defining it's particulars that less attention is given to defining health or thinking about the way one can be healthy. Healing can be a brutal business. Being specific saves heart ache. Beings specific in one's language keeps the Universe from playing puns on a person.
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