All of God’s Children

Joe Bandel
4 min readApr 25, 2021

As I begin to share my story it seems I need to keep going back further and further into childhood. I never realized how powerful and magickal my childhood was and how I was gifted with a strong connection to the earth and to all living things right from the beginning.

I was lucky to have this connection until I lost it, and then spent years trying to get it back. Sometimes you never miss something until its gone! How can I even begin to share how important this connection is!

How can you be a pagan, wiccan or druid without a connection to Gaia and all living things? Many people don’t even know how to begin forming such connections…

First, the animals and all living things never turned their backs on God or Goddess. They never lost that connection with the divine that flows through all things. They remained innocent and pure. It is we humans that turned away from the Source of all life and love. It is we humans who have lost our way. Somehow we need to find our way back.

Growing up on a farm allowed me to be deeply in contact with animals, trees and nature in a very powerful way. The family farm was a power spot, an energy vortex, and it magnified and enhanced things good and bad as all power spots do. Growing up in a power vortex does things to a person.

The old farm house, barn and out buildings were about 1/4 mile away from the main road and the driveway was 1/2 mile long and winding. It was an old territorial road in north central Minnesota and was used in historical times by pioneers and Indians. I found ancient stone arrow heads and things like coins and a small lace iron that had fallen off wagon trains in the sand of our driveway. The ruined foundations of an old one room school house could be seen about half way up the driveway. Supposedly in the little field across from it there used to be a graveyard, but they dug up the graves and moved them to a new location down the road. I often wondered how you moved a graveyard.

Two creeks converged at the south east corner of our farm. One from the west and one from the north. The southern edge was swampland and in the spring the roads often washed out and the floods would create a lake nearly a quarter mile wide and half a mile long that reached up to the buildings and the pine trees. The northern edge of the farm bordered on 40 acres of state forest and the nearest neighbor lived a half mile away. We were isolated from others and I grew up playing in the woods, fields and among the animals.

The farm itself had poor soil. During the ice age a glacier had pushed gravel and boulders in front of it and deposited them right there. So we had a very nice gravel pit, lots of stones in the fields and the soil was mostly swamp and sugar sand. Generations of farming had piled many of these boulders along fields at the edge of the forest and my sister and I used to spend hours and days playing among them. Of course more always showed up in the fields after every rain. I’ve often wondered about that as well. How do rocks show up after it rains?

Pine trees and willow brush are the only things that really grow in such conditions and we had plenty of both. The only wild animals that really lived in the woods were red squirrels, rabbits and quail. Not enough food for much else. But there were beaver in the creeks and they liked to build dams. . . Each spring we needed to burn the swamp to kill off the brush so that we could mow the swamp grass for hay and part of it was used for pasture. The cattle and horses had their favorite watering holes.

Since we were a dairy farm the cows had to be brought up to the barn for milking every morning and evening and that was my job, along with the dog. In today’s world how many people know what it is like to be outside in nature every day in the morning and evening? Year round, in good weather and bad weather? How many have seen the beauty of a sun rise or sun set and how the mist covers the ground with fog?

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