Bewitched by the Blackthorn Being, part II ~ sacrifice & service

"Beloved, gaze in thine own heart, the holy tree is blooming there..." W.B. Yeats

I absolutely adore this stunning blackthorn pattern by William Morris, which was first sold by Morris & Co. in 1892. It is mostly the work of John Henry Dearle, as Morris was reaching the end of his life during its design, but it contains many of Morris's signature themes, such as daisies and entwined leaves.

I can see so many aspects of the Blackthorn Being here; owls, with shades of Blodeuwedd, foxes, stags, the presence of serpents in the snake's head fritillary which form the eyes of the Mother of the Woods; she is serpent-eyed indeed. In the Irish legend, 'The Pursuit of Diarmaid & Grainne', the deer goddess, Sadhbh, becomes pregnant as a result of eating sloe berries, the dark fruit of the blackthorn. Her son is born with a lump on his head, which contains a snake. Later, the snake is killed in sacrifice to save another man, underlining blackthorn's sacrificial service in mythology.

Since I wrote about blackthorn the other day, I have been reflecting on this sacrificial aspect which feels to be part of her purifying medicine. She is a great stabiliser of emotion & a bringer of hope & joy, a healer of depression. She does this by taking in negative, stagnant energies which are not her own; scapegoating herself, just as the, primarily Welsh, 'sin eaters' once did for the newly dead. How appropriate then that she was believed to be one of the trees woven into Christ's crown of thorns; the crucifixion as the ultimate scapegoating, sin eating for the world. Sacrifice and service. 

Blackthorn too seeks to transform despair into hope, death into life, just as winter transforms into spring. Indeed, the Buddhist practice of 'tonglen', or taking and sending, does much the same thing; breathing in the negative as a thick dark smoke and allowing it to settle in the heart chakra before breathing it out as transformed light. At its most powerful we are not working with only our own suffering but the suffering of others, whether of body, mind, or spirit, seeking to transform it as a gift, and a relief, to them. With our breath we can offer others a breathing space, an opportunity to also, at last, 'breathe out'. This turns on its head our usual human urge to avoid discomfort and seek out only what makes us feel good. Sacrifice and service. In this way we awaken compassion in ourselves for the suffering of others, whether human or non-human. Might we do this for humans with whom we vehemently disagree, as well as for those we love? Might we offer our heart breath to the victims of the badger cull, to trees cut down? 

But, of course, what we do for others we also do for ourselves, and vice versa. Pema Chödrön describes this as "breathing in for all of us, breathing out for all of us". It may be that we are too deeply entwined in our own emotional, spiritual, or physical, journey to feel that we have anything to offer to others. I have written about this before; the sense I have that some of us who feel a great deal are also feeling for those among us who are too overwhelmed, numbed, or disconnected to feel. This is the path of the serenydd, which I hope to write about more this year when I can find the words. Here is the path of the wounded healer, offering healing from our own pain & turning what seems like poison into medicine. Sacrifice and service. 

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal
of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, 

and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on."


Mary Oliver, ‘Wild Geese’


And this is the gift that the blackthorn also offers us; physiologically, as all trees do in breathing in carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen, but also spiritually in the power of her deeper prayer. She is so often regarded with suspicion and fear, as all beings associated with death are. That is because we have cut death off from life. Still, she keeps breathing for us and offering us her medicine.

And of her association with death, blackthorn is a tree of the 'warrior's journey' helping us to face our own dying, perhaps the bravest journey of all. But she also teaches us how to be fully alive. She is a wise, wild teacher to anyone who has an enduringly negative or pessimistic attitude, interpreting their life story through the bad, rather than the good. Blackthorn reminds us that the stories we tell ourselves about our lives matter, that we can re-frame them & change everything. I dislike intensely the 'New Age' view that we are somehow to blame for the terrible things that happen to us, just as we would not blame a blackthorn if she were mindlessly cut down. There are many with power in this world who do not use it well but it is good to be reminded that we have some power. On a day when we are feeling particularly compassionate we might choose to breathe in their suffering. Again, blackthorn teaches us that we don't need to rid ourselves of our 'thorns', or let go of our protection against what wounds us, in order to offer healing to that which wounds.

As for our own power to interpret our stories, I once read, I think in 'New Scientist' magazine, an article which talked about the disturbing trend for aid workers seeped in our cultural way of thinking to go to other parts of the world where natural, and other, 'disasters' had occurred and think that they were being kind by persuading the victims to take anti-depressants, of course encouraged by pharmaceutical companies who were keen to increase the market for their wares. But the issue was the assumption that the people who had experienced the death of loved ones, the destruction of homes and livelihoods, would be depressed. But often this wasn't so. They may have been in shock, desperately grief-stricken, angry, horribly sad and distressed, all entirely appropriate in those circumstances, but they had ways of framing their experiences within a worldview that we can scarcely even imagine. Anti-depressants just weren't the sort of medicine that were needed.  Indeed, our propensity to medicate perfectly valid human reactions to experience is to be questioned in our deepest core. It might be also be suggested that, increasingly, natural disasters due to climate change are caused by the rich Western world disproportionately effecting the poor elsewhere, and that, rather than seeking to truly offer healing, we wish to numb victims in order to avoid seeing, or engaging with, the pain that we ourselves have caused. Even medicine becomes the tool of oppression in the wrong hands; a colonisation of the heart. Unfortunately I have been unable to trace the article but there is an equally interesting, and more recent, article here on similar themes.

In our culture happiness has become a tyranny, but in so many ways victimhood is becoming equally attractive. The inauthenticity of emotion is a disease; the denial of grief, when there is so much to grieve, the burying of anger, when there is so much to rage against, and the refusal to see beauty in spite of, and because of, our grief & anger when there is so much that remains beautiful. Grief AND gratitude is increasinly the wild edge that we must walk upon. As in so many fairy stories, we perhaps need a jab from the sharp thorn to wake us up to reality and then the medicine of her petals to help us forgive it. There is so much that needs to be re-written and re-framed.

Tony Benn comes to mind. He said;

"There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought, over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up." 

A true warrior of the blackthorn speaking truth to power! No one said that it was meant to be easy. That's why we need to befriend the dark and the beings who understand its medicine, lest we should slip into a fairytale of denial or depression.

Interestingly all of this is a conversation that often arises here in the hedgehermitage, most recently today even before I had fully thought about blackthorn in this way. There is always a reason why our attention is drawn to a sister or brother being at a particular time and blackthorn is so rich with medicine and meaning. There is a lot to share, but of course it is personal too.

Returning to this lovely pattern, Morris & Co. tell us that, "the face of the Mother of the Woods in the wine red version gives life to the tree & the forest ~ a sort of a Morris 'green man'". They also note that, "sometimes children are afraid of the Mother of the Woods, kindly though she is, & so it's possible to place the daisies in the centre to 'ofset the crone'. I'm not at all sure that that's but I wish them much luck!

References:

Previous piece on Blackthorn ~ https://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-blackthorn-being-and-vashtis-great.html

William Morris Blackthorn pattern images, Wiki Commons.

William Morris Blackthorn tiles information ~ http://williammorristile.com/textiles/blackthorn.html

Blackthorn folklore ~ https://www.druidry.org/library/trees/tree-lore-blackthorn

Sin Eaters ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sin-eater

Mary Oliver, 'Wild Geese' ~ http://rjgeib.com/thoughts/geese/geese.html

Buddhist practice of tonglen ~ http://awesomemindsecrets.com/healing-meditation-tonglen/

Pema Chödrön, 'How to Practice Tonglen' in 'Lion's Roar' ~ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.lionsroar.com/how-to-practice-tonglen/amp/

'The modern epidemic of sadness destroying heart and soul cannot be solved with anti-depressants', Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, International Business Times,  23rd February 2018 ~ https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/modern-epidemic-sadness-destroying-heart-soul-cannot-solved-anti-depressants-1663346