hth | Virtue: Fertility

FERTILITY

I think that fertility was included on this list of virtues because we want to be sure people understand that the joy of creating and pleasures of the physical world were considered positive goods to our ancestors and are so again today, in spite of the Western intellectual tradition of glorifying spirit at the expense of matter. I applaud that goal, but I think we have the cart before the horse, here: "health, wealth, and wisdom" aren't virtues, they're blessings, gifts of the gods to the people of the gods, and what the DP calls fertility encompasses both health (a robust appreciation of the body and its capabilities to experience pleasure) and wealth (participating in and benefitting from the underlying generative power of creation).

If we view our bodies, our pleasures, our fullness, and our talents as gifts and blessings, then that has to dictate how we respond to them. Only a fool would scorn a gift from a superior, be that your President, your boss, the drighten of your warband, or a god. That means that virtue and good sense both require us to receive our health and wealth in a spirit of gratitude, and to take good care of them. If we view them as blessings -- that is, as positive and beneficial gifts -- then we need to celebrate them as well as take care of them.

Indo-European lore also teaches us that a gift deserves a gift. The right return gifts for the blessing of our fertility is kind of a fun topic to think about. If I am blessed with the ability to bear a child, then my gift might be in raising her well, or it might be in taking respectful care of my body so that I don't devalue the gift by having children I don't want or can't care for. Either, if done mindfully and with a spirit of stewardship for the gods' gifts, could be an honorable response. If I have a talent for music or writing, not only am I honor-bound not to let that ability rust on a shelf as though such gifts weren't of any value to me, but my gift in return to the gods might be to dedicate myself to work that is life-affirming and in the service of virtue, rather than to whatever violent, divisive, or misogynist drek is currently marketable.

Sometimes it's intimidating to be whole-heartedly thankful. There's an enormously powerful capitalist machinery dedicated to making us feel inadequate, to convincing us that we aren't quite okay until we re-create ourselves through a long series of projects and expenditures. It takes courage to thank the gods for your fat ass and your flat hair and your not-perfectly-white teeth, and to mean it. And of course some people have much more substantive health problems and disabilities that make it even more difficult to be sincerely joyful to have been blessed with the bodies they are in. A lot of queer people -- probably almost all, at one time or another -- have struggled with the feeling that their range of sexual feelings and experiences is more of a mistake or a burden than a blessing. A lot of artists find it difficult to step away from their own critical perspective of their work and see it as the manifestation of something divine and valuable within them.

The ability to act in spite of those fears does take courage. But perhaps gratitude itself is a virtue, one that sprouts up from underground and makes courage irrelevant by taking away the threat itself. A person who is attuned to how full the world is of beauty, laughter, growth, kindness, eroticism, and abundance might not be scared to count their own bodies and their own creative presence in the world among the world's wonders.