The Wilding Tree ~ a poem

Today, I met a wilding tree

that hid in green until her apples shone

and shone for me and called me there

called me onwards to the sea, a wilding me

walked on, in drifts of hemp agrimony

and wild carrot flowers unfurled in ordinary beauty.

Crow feathers marked the way,

enchanter's nightshade lined my path,

And cuckoo pint in shadowed green

made poison berry-bright the boundary

between me and the wild.

My wild, that answers to the prayer

of nettles for a kiss of skin

of blackberries for a tongue

the salt sea for a wound to sting

and start the healing song.

And I walk on, autumn-lipped with elderberry

dusty-bloomed with sloe, and willowherb

who draws her bow to set her seed-kin free

And then the sea, spun silver by the summer grey,

washes the memory of green away

with seagull-feathered spray

that salt-sings and wings the day to wild.

I rise, answer to the ebb and flow,

and on I go, returning to the green

where woodpecker feathers bless the way for me

and ivyed wrens cleave the wood with song,

and I go on, lifted by a surging tide

find haglets, rose hips, hazelnuts

that rain from squirrel-high.

This day of green and salt

has called me home

the sandstone hill, the silver spring below

the memory of badgers,

bone-blessings from the crows

My love is here, the kettle on

outside, the wilder me is spun

the wilding tree shines on.

(Jacqueline Woodward-Smith, 11^th August 2016)

Woman Walking Wild: Bear Mother

                                                          

(Image: 'Bear Mother: You Are In Her Belly', Aoife Valley - used with permission)

I am not good or brave or strong. This week, I have felt lost, confused, ungrounded, seeking the strong Bear Mother curled in my belly and not finding her. Tonight, I followed a thread and I remembered fairytales. Now I see that I am on a quest; silence, love, transformation, swan feathers, and nettle stings. I can do this. I was born to do this. My heart is wild and I am in awe of her ability to push through the wildest tangles and brambles and thorns of feeling, but beside her I feel small and vulnerable. But I can do this. I am not good or brave or strong but the Bear Mother is all these things and has been my companion for many years. I rarely call her consciously but, sometimes, and often when life challenges the ability of my heart to keep on beating, I just find her there with her musty scent and sure paws. Sometimes she takes me to dive in the holy river of the sacred. Sometimes she helps me to hunt herbs for my healing or teaches me to dream in the shadow places of tears and deep magic. Sometimes she comes when I am feeling strong, walking boldly upright in my Woman self, looking the world in the eye, and I feel her weight leaning against me in support and solidarity. Sometimes she comes when I have a need to connect deeply with my earth. It's then that I find her curled sleeping in the dark cave of my belly and I sink into myself and into her with a grateful outbreath. And sometimes she comes when when I am raw, stripped to the bone by my determination to live a wild life surrounded by the not-wild, when I can find no place for what moves within and am wandering lost without a map to follow. Often I stumble and, knowing that my belly is hollow and empty and not the place for her, she splits herself open so that I can crawl inside her still warm body, become bear, rest. Often there is blood. 

                 

(From the film, 'Send Word, Bear Mother', http://www.bearmother.com/)

The Bear Mother is the oldest of the old. She was one of the first beings to be worshipped by our far off ancestors, possibly as far back as the middle Palaeolithic period, which lasted from 300,000 to 30,000 years ago. She is revered in the North American, Northern Eurasian, and circumpolar regions, particularly amongst the Sami people, the Ainu of Japan, and the tribes of Celtic Gaul and Britain. The Ainu call the bear 'kamui', which means God. In each area the bear is recognised as a supernatural messenger and walker between the worlds, traveller amongst the stars above, below, and within. Cave Bear skulls have been found in a cave at Saône-et-Loire, France arranged in a circle and marked with red ochre. They are believed to be between 45,000 and 75,000 years old and to date from the time of the Neanderthals. It is believed that even the more 'modern' beliefs of our own Northern ancestors date to a “common ancestral belief-system of Asiatic origin dating back to the time ofthe Magdalenian period of 20,000 years ago”. Bear tracks appear in the rock carvings of the Altai people of Northern Norway from as long as 6,200 years ago. When we walk with Bear we too become the oldest of the old. We become once again the people who carry the red ochre. We become real and our ancestors are beside us.

But the one who is truly always beside us is the Bear Mother. She has touched my life many times. In 2007 my mother, who had been very ill, was not expected to live through the night. Her spirit chose to remain and she stayed for another few months before she left. I was relieved that she was still alive and, once the turbulence of that time had settled, I expected to carry on with my life as before but I found that I was agitated and couldn't settle back into my everyday life. I realised that I had been so convinced that my mother would die, and only a few months after my father’s death, that I had stepped partly into the Otherworld to hold her hand as she passed and had never quite returned. A few weeks later, I found myself in a little crystal shop in Glastonbury, Somerset, and there I found a bone pendant carved with the image of a bear mother holding her cub in her arms. I couldn't afford her but I felt her call and so I let the wild part of me in and she was mine. I wore her for several months and came back to myself but she wouldn't stay. Instead she has travelled to several friends, and friends of friends, who have had need of her. Some have received deep healing and become well again. Some have received deep healing and have died. Always she has come back to me and I trust that this time she will. I don't even have a photograph; for a creature so powerful and so big she knows how to slip unseen between the cracks of healing.

I have written before of the painful journey that I had with my partner, Will, and of the healing that Heron brought me, but there was also a whiff of Bear. When I was at my most ragged and raw I went to a drumming circle to celebrate Winter Solstice. It was all that I could do to get myself there at all and I was sure that I would feel cut off in my broken state. There were five drum journeys that night and in each one the Bear Mother came and curled up with me, wrapping around me a sanctuary of stillness and safety. In her warmth something in me was healed. It was enough.

She is not always, what we would think of as, kind and she can be a fierce mother. She is an ancestress, a mother life-giver, and even now we talk of 'bearing' children. In Eastern Lithuania, a woman immediately after childbirth is called 'Bear' (Meška). The saying ''licked into shape' comes from the belief that, during hibernation, bear mothers would literally create their young by licking formless flesh and fur into bear cubs before emerging with them in the spring. Sometimes, she has done this to me too; pushing me to be more, try harder, walk wilder, shaping me, when I would rather just lie down and give up. I am a wilful and defiant woman and sometimes she has to 'cuff' me. She is not to be trifled with, this Bear Mother.         

                     

'Bear Mother and Cubs', Anna Hyatt-Huntington (Wiki Commons)

And now, when I have undertaken a brave quest to find a new and wild life and I am all love, silence, and transformation, the Bear Mother has returned curling into the cave of my belly and has drawn me down into the deep dreaming of her holy story, and of my own. I lost her, remembered fairytales, and she came back through words and tears. I am not good or brave or strong but the Bear Mother is with me and I am blessed.

                                                   

(Wiki Commons)

And here, as a special treat for us all and for anyone who knows their bears to be, 'made of ice and river-wood and the bones of otters, full of pebbles and pine resin and the lost songs of bees', is a story of beauty and power from the wonderful Tom Hirons, first published in 'Earthlines' journal and shared here with his permission. Thank you, Tom.

 https://coyopa.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/the-bear-outside/

Bibliography:

'The Significance of the Bear Among the Sami and Other Northern Cultures', Brandon "Kál'lá" Bledsoe. http://www.utexas.edu/courses/sami/diehtu/siida/religion/bear.htm

'The Language of the Goddess', Marija Gimbutas, Thames & Hudson, 1989.

'The Great Bear Mother', Jude Lally https://ilikelichen.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/the-great-bear-mother-by-jude-lally.pdf

In Praise of Goosegrass

(Image: AnRo0002, Licensed under Wikipedia Commons)

A few mornings ago my love and I saw a small spring wonder. We were sitting in his living room, drinking tea no doubt, when the rose bush just under the window began to quiver. He crept up to the window, peeked out, and exclaimed that there was a tiny bird pecking insects from the stems of the plant. We were entranced, enchanted, enraptured. “What do you think it is!?” he asked. We decided that it was 'one of those little brown ones'...

The things of the hedge are often unobtrusive and easily overlooked. When they are birds they are often 'those little brown ones', when they are plants they are often 'one of those green leafy things'. And thus they keep their commonplace mystery. So it is with goosegrass, which is one of our most omnipresent 'green leafy things'. The ubiquitous nature of goosegrass is clear from the range of 'folk names' that it has attracted during its irrepressible journey across our wild places; cleavers, clivers, catchweed, sticky willy, sticky willow, robin~run~the~hedge, stickyweed, velcro weed, grip grass, clabber grass, coachweed, cleaver wort, goose hair, gosling weed, hedge burrs, milk sweet, poor robin, loveman, stick~a~back, sweethearts, savoyan, scratchweed, barweed, hedheheriff, robin~run~in~the~grass, mutton chops, everlasting friendship, amor de hortelano, ladies' straw, eriffe, gia maria, goosebill, grateron, hayruff, kaz yogurtoto, and zhu yang yang. Quite a presence for such an unprepossessing green being and yet, when I point it out to people they have rarely heard of it or noticed its existence.

My own first memory of goosegrass is within the last ten years; it may be that I had noticed it before but, without a name to pin it there, it had slipped through my conscious mind like mist. What I do remember is that I was walking through the a quieter part of Avebury stone circle and that around the bottom of a small and twisted tree were some unobtrusive little plants with beautiful whorls of leaves that were sticky to the touch. I don't even remember who told me what they were but, whenever I see goosegrass now, I always think of that moment in Avebury stone circle. That they were close to a stone cottage that I often daydream about living in has only added to their place in my 'folk-telling' of the land. When I think of goosegrass I think of that little stone cottage with its blossom tree and there are always white sheets blowing in the wind on a washing line. That, for me, is goosegrass; a symbol of what is simple, common, in the best sense of the word, and feels like home.

The scientific Latin name of goosegrass is 'galium aparine' and it is an herbaceous annual plant, which means that it completes its life cycle, from germination to the production of seed within one year before dying. It is part of the Rubiaceae family of plants, which is known as the coffee, madder, or bedstraw family, and has 13,000 members species, ranging from trees, to shrubs and herbs. Being part of the same family as the coffee bean, the seeds of goosegrass can be dried and roasted and used as an excellent low-caffeine coffee alternative.

So, where can we find goosegrass? Probably all it needs is to look down when we are walking in

woods, hedgerows, and waste places, and also in our gardens if we allow the wild its place there. It is described by herbalist and naturopath Lucinda Warner as “one of the first spring allies to appear” and is often found close to those other inhabitants of forgotten corners, the stinging nettles. How they make the wasteland green! Goosegrass has creeping stems, which can be 3ft or more long, and which branch and grow along the ground and through other plants. They are born explorers and can be especially recognised by the tiny hook-like hairs that grow from their stems and leaves. These give them their 'sticky' feeling to the touch and also enable them to climb and attach their seeds, or burrs, to animal fur which helps their dispersal. In the early spring to summer they produce tiny star-shaped white flowers and the plants provide food for the larvae of many butterfly species.

(Image: AnRo0002, Licensed under Wikipedia Commons)

Goosegrass is native to Europe, North Africa, and Asia and is naturalised “throughout most of the United States, Canada, Mexico, Central America, Southern America, Australia, some oceanic islands, and scattered locations in Africa.” (1) Plants may not be able to move according to the perspective of most humans but the sticky burrs of goosegrass have managed to move a very long way. In many places it is considered to be a noxious weed, although that of course just means that it grows where we haven't decided to put it and often refuses to leave when asked! Which brings us to goosegrass's relationship with humankind.

Goosegrass is both an edible and a medicinal plant. When cooked it has been compared to spinach, although it is said to have a slightly bitter taste and so is better in soups and stews rather than eaten on its own. It is also possible to eat the leaves raw, although cooking removes the tiny hooks, and there is a report from Mulcheney, Somerset of someone who remembers nibbling the raw shoots of goosegrass as a child before feeding the whole plant to their ducks. (2) It is a plant that is much prized by geese for nibbling purposes and many of its related names may come from this link, or from its goose-foot shaped leaves.

Medicinally goosegrass is a gentle diuretic and lymphatic tonic, which cleanses the system after the stagnant months of winter. As a poultice or wash, its juice and pulp has been used traditionally to treat skin ailments, minor wounds, and burns. Its pulp has also been used to alleviate poisonous bites or stings. In 1653, Nicholas Culpepper said that;

“It is under the dominion of the Moon. The juice of the herb and the seed together taken in wine, helpeth those bitten with an adder, by preserving the heart from the venom. It is familiarly taken in broth, to keep them lean and lank that are apt to grow fat.” (3)

(Image: Flowers, AnRo0002, Licensed under Wikipedia Commons)

(Image: Burrs. Rasbak. Licensed under Wikipedia Commons)

Goosegrass can also alleviate anxiety, as it has mildly sedative affects, may lower blood pressure, and tea made from its stalks and leaves can remove obstructions from the throat. There are also reports that it is helpful in treating cancer. It can also safely be used for the long-term treatment of animals and is especially helpful for cats suffering from feline urinary tract disease (3). An excellent article on the nature of goosegrass and its healing abilities by Lucinda Warner of 'Whispering Earth' can be found here. I love her belief that goosegrass, as one of the first green beings to appear in the spring, is perfectly placed to cleanse our bodies after the winter and also encourages us to play, and to begin moving our bodies again, through the many traditional games that involve chasing others and sticking goosegrass onto them. She particularly mentions, 'how many cleavers can you stick on someone's back before they notice'! There are also many folk beliefs involving throwing goosegrass at a young woman to see whether they stick; if they do then she has a admirer, if they fall then her hopes fall with them, although in some traditions the fallen plant is said to spell out the initial of her love to come (2).

A further use of our unobtrusive green companion can be guessed at from its Latin name, which translates as 'milk seizer', and physician and botanist Dioscorides (40 – 90 CE) reported that Greek shepherds would gather together the stems of goosegrass to create a rough sieve for straining milk. Carl Linnaeus (1707 - 1778), one of the founders of modern ecology, wrote of the same use in Sweden and the practice has continued into modern times. The plants were also used to curdle milk in cheese making and it was believed that contact with them would convey their healing properties to the dairy products. Its roots can also be used to create a permanent red dye and, like all plants of the 'bedstraw' family, its dried leaves were traditionally used to stuff mattresses, particularly as its hooks meant that it could be shaped into a stable mat that would provide uniform thickness. Mary is said to have used goosegrass to make a bed for her newborn child. 

Like all beings of the hedge, goosegrass is rarely noticed but holds much magic. We would do well not to underestimate these little green plants that we so often don't know the name of. Oh, and the 'little brown bird' turned out to be a chiffchaff...

(Image: Chiffchaff. Ken Billington/Licensed under Wikipedia Commons)

References:

1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galium_aparine

2) http://www.plant-lore.com/587/cleavers/

3) http://www.anniesremedy.com/herb_detail215.php

Activism, Apples, and Afallon

In 2001 I began my training as a Priestess of Avalon in Glastonbury. The name 'Avalon' comes from the older Welsh 'Yns Afallon' meaning 'Isle of Apples', the word 'afall', meaning 'apple' or sometimes 'fruit'. It is often hard to trace the meaning of apples through the many religions and folk tales in which they feature due to this previous, more generic, translation and yet the apple has become a powerful companion on my spiritual path with She~Who~Is (the name which I have come to use for 'Goddess'). In many traditions, the apple is both a mystical and forbidden fruit and so it seemed to me to fit very well with my new found path of the Divine Feminine, which carries with it a sense of being outside the teachings of more conventional religion. Despite no longer thinking of myself as a Christian, I felt in deep kinship with Eve, who bit into the apple of wisdom, and with the serpent/snake, who is so often a symbol both of the Goddess and of women. And yet always there is more to these symbols than meets the eye if we can be brave enough to stay on the journey.

Even in researching for this piece of writing I have discovered, to my joy, that several ethnobotanical and ethnomycological scholars, such as Carl Ruck and Clark Heinrich, believe that the apple in mythology is a symbolic substitution for the psychedelic Amanita muscaria, or Fly Agaric, mushroom, beloved of reindeer and shaman alike, and in this context its association with 'knowledge' takes on a wilder and deeper meaning and draws together several seemingly disparate spiritual threads for me. But more of that another time. For now, back to the apple.

Although many of us know of the apple as a symbol of 'sin' and the expulsion of humankind from the Garden of Eden, there are also passages in the Bible, particularly in the Song of Songs (my favourite!), where it becomes instead a metaphor for both sensuality, beauty, and love. In secular art, the Roman goddess Venus is often depicted with an apple, although the Latin words for apple, 'mālum' and evil, 'malum' are almost identical. Apples are also intimately associated with 'fairyland' and with death (there is a tradition amongst boatbuilders that it is unlucky to build a boat out of apple wood as it is more often used for coffins), and Avalon is often also thought of as the 'Isle of the Dead'. All point to a different state of being and a journey to the 'otherworld', which links us back to the trance state induced by the Fly Agaric mushroom. Some of these meanings are threads of different traditions that have been drawn together without a great deal of historical evidence and yet much of it feels right from a more spiritual standpoint. At the very least, we can say that truly the symbolism of the apple runs deep through human culture!

And yet, what do we mean when we talk about 'apples'? Even when we think of our familiar fruit there are several deep roots which we can choose to follow into an intangible and misty~magical place. The apples that we would recognise come from the deciduous apple tree 'malus domestica' which, as is clear from its Latin name, is a cultivated form of its wild ancestral grandmother 'malus sieversii'. Some believe that it was the earliest tree to be tamed. When I first began on my priestess path I innocently imagined the apples of Avalon to be the large, red ,and juicy fruit that I bought in my local supermarket and yet, if I came across a gnarled little crabapple in a wood, my heart would skip a beat. Soon I came to associate Avalon with these wild, often misshapen (to our modern eyes), and sour little apples. I love that these older, wilder fruits, which are so important to so many cultures, are often too bitter to eat. In imagining the sweet and delicious fruit of the domesticated apple in all our stories we are unconsciously implying that something is only of value if it is palatable to us. Knowledge is indeed sometimes a bitter fruit to swallow and can teach us a deep humility about our own place in the scheme of things.

And so it was bitter indeed when I learned, in perhaps the last five years, that the spiritual group that I had attached myself to was not the convention-defying, patriarchy-challenging, community that I had imagined and was instead one which advocated the de-wilding of much that I have come to believe is the true dwelling place of Divinity; the wild edge, the outcast, the anarchist, the heretic, the rebel. As we have seen, there are many sorts of apples, both wild and domesticated, and all have their place. Many prefer the seeming abundance of a well managed orchard, and they are beautiful, but in many cases the fruit growing in them has been managed almost out of existence; homogenised, with little resistance to disease, and many of us no longer trust those wild, gnarled and bitter, little apples that might come our way. It is telling that, in many managed orchards, crabapples have to be planted amongst the cultivated trees as the latter have become sterile, producing very little pollen, and no longer attract the bees and other pollinators needed to keep them fertile. It is dangerous indeed to align ourselves too powerfully with what is managed and tamed and all groups need their wild dissenting voices in order to remain healthy, fertile, and alive. In a truly wild orchard, which is managed by Goddess~as~Nature, there is room for a worm or two to make its way through the sweet flesh without threatening the health of the whole, and for diversity and change to have their place, as they should in any healthy ecosystem. I wish my old community well. It is no longer the place for me, or for many of my sisters.

I once took a friend to visit the apple orchard in Glastonbury Abbey. I took him there because I loved it so much and I had expected him to love it too. To me it was a little bit of wild nature in a town which so often falls prey to the commercial side of spirituality. It was, and is, my place of connection with what~is and yet I was shocked that his reaction was one of almost disgust. He found the number of apples rotting on the ground wasteful and bemoaned the 'laziness' and lack of care of those who he felt should have been managing it. What I had found beautiful he had found ugly. For me, these windfalls (even the word is beautiful) are what bring the magic, what invite Grandmother Rot to move through, as she should, and provide food for birds, butterflies, and countless other creatures, in the process. Wild attracts wild. When we become too domesticated we become fragile, when we align ourselves with the untamed on the edge of things we allow ourselves the opportunity to become stronger, more able to meet life's challenges, we become less afraid of letting Spirit truly flow through us. It isn't always easy but it is wild...

And so, in staying close to the roots of things, in following the path of the apple, I have severed my links with my former spiritual community and even with Avalon, which I have come to see as a younger, more domesticated, version of the wilder and older Afallon. 'Afallon', coming from the Welsh language, is resonant with the oldest indigenous tongue of these lands and connects me more deeply with the path that I have chosen and the land that I love. I have followed the serpent-path and have bitten into the fruit of knowledge. I have been cast out of the well-managed Garden, and I have never felt more connected to She~Who~Is, nor to my path as, what I have now come to call, a Hedgepriestess of Afallon. I might have twigs in my hair and mud on my knees but I am happy and open-hearted in a way that I have never been before; sometimes we need to be tamed and become feral in order to understand the preciousness of what it means to be wild. I am grateful.

'Avalon Spring Dawn, 500BCE', used with the kind permission of Richard Fraser http://www.richardfraser.co.uk/

And, in that spirit of open-heartedness, we come to my final A for Activism. Freedom allows the heart to expand and increases our ability to love. All activism, which is much needed in our frightened and beleaguered world, must come from this place of wild love. In this way we may prevent ourselves from experiencing the burn-out which besets many activists and, in our determination to stay soft-bellied and close to the earth and the roots of things, we may avoid the trap of becoming the thing which we are working to change. It feels right here to celebrate that Jesus, when liberated from the dogma of the institutional church, has become a powerful symbol of the Occupy Movement. Robin Meyers, in his book ' Saving Jesus from the Church' (New York HarperCollins, 2009, quoted in 'Jesus Through Pagan Eyes, Mark Townsend, 2012), describes Jesus's connection to Spirit as, “pure, unbridled, reckless compassion”. It is this 'reckless compassion' that we can call upon in our activism, and in our everyday lives, if we are able to break free from the chains of domestication. We are all afraid. I know that I am and yet, the more that I can connect to what is wild and edge-dwelling in nature and in myself, the more I am able to be brave in spite of the fear. The 'apple' has taught me that, and the Goddess who sings in its wilfully wild and bitter flesh calls me on...