Fox at Easter

'Night Fox, Night Girl' by William Yates (permission awaited)

3am. I am awake

alive to the night

that bears me into day

dawn vigil in my church of lucent walls

candles call, a bloom of flowers,

to praise the Paschal light.

And yet fear stalks me

I am woman-bound,

dare not prowl the dark,

raise my haunches to the moon

for fear of men who wait and watch

and while and wile the night.

Fox take my prayers

howl grace notes to the night

sing praise songs to the wild

of countryside and Bankside

in your certain stride you hold

my Liberty, Libera me.

4am. My senses keen

I bind my heartbeat to the witches' briar

weave protection from my fear

with thorns of green and guile

open the door, scent the air

my hunger gives me paws.

Four foxes call me out

they trail and track and pad-push

the boundaries of night

and fright, I am woman-wild

I will not be denied. I am amber-eyed.

My defiance has claws.

5am. I step into the church and howl a silent prayer.

I am fox-blessed and alive!

A Personal Exploration of Easter

'Supposing Him to be the Gardener', Cross Bones Jesus by Barry Parman

I have always had a tense relationship with Christianity. I don't come from a religious family, although I enjoyed church on the rare occasions when we did go because I loved my dad's beautiful singing voice and rejoiced in my mum's equally loud but tone deaf singing. My main memory though is of always feeling that I was doing something wrong that I didn't quite understand. I went to Sunday School every week and sometimes to services at the Pentecostal church, which I loved because of the passion of the Welsh pastor, but my first truly spiritual experiences were ones of connection with nature; of feeling the grass growing and all life breathing. In my teens I went along to my local free church every Sunday, mainly because my best friend's family went, and noticed that often people there weren't very kind but felt superior to others because they had been 'forgiven' by God. In my early twenties, just before getting married, I visited a local vicar with my fiancé for 'marriage lessons' and he told us that, if we argued and couldn't reach agreement, the man should have the final say. After that not only did I not think much of church but I was angry. And, as far as I was concerned, that was the end of me and Christianity. Although I still loved going into churches, I had by then discovered the Goddess path and put institutional religion behind me.

Then, in 2012, I began to sever links with my Goddess community and, feeling heart-sore, I sought out a new place where I could connect with people of Spirit. Southwark had already become important to me and so I found myself in Southwark Cathedral and made a quiet home there amongst its pale~as~moonlight walls and gently beautiful services. I liked its connection to my beloved Cross Bones graveyard (of which more another time), I liked its politics, which I had heard were radical for the church and therefore in stark contrast to St Paul's which had recently evicted the Occupy Movement from its steps, and I liked the anonymity that attending a city cathedral can bring. I still wouldn't call myself a Christian but I felt at home and I still do; as a woman of the Goddess and a hedgepriestess of Afallon, I feel no inconsistency in lighting candles to Mary as an aspect of the Sacred Feminine, nor to Jesus who I am sure would be considered a heretic were he to walk into most Christian churches today. There was much that resonated with me there.

But I have always wanted to remain respectful to the religion which had unwittingly given me a home and have avoided Easter services, finding nothing for me in the concept of a blood sacrifice demanded by an angry God as atonement for supposed sin. As Philip Carr-Gomm says in his essay, 'The Fertile Christ' in Mark Townsend's 'Jesus Through Pagan Eyes' (1), “The story of Christ currently requires two images of his death and rebirth, but in practice it is the image of his crucifixion rather than his resurrection that is used as the central icon of the faith...it is his agonising death that occupies the centre-stage...”.

Through my many years of following the Goddess path, I already acknowledged Easter as a festival of the Germanic goddess Eostre/Ostara and of the rising of spring energy and a return of the light after the long, dark months of winter. There is only one primary source for this goddess and that comes from 'The Reckoning of Time' by Northumbrian monk and scholar the Venerable Bede (673 – 735), who said that, “Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated 'Paschal month' and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate the Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance..” (2). Later in the 1880s, Jacob Grimm wrote in his 'Teutonic Mythology' that the Anglo-Saxon name 'Eostre' is related to an Old High German adverb 'ostar', expressing movement towards the rising sun. He claimed that he had found evidence of the worship of a goddess named 'Eostre/Ostara' in oral tradition and said that “her meaning could be easily adapted to the resurrection day of the Christian God” (3). The 'Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture', published in 1997, says that, "a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn is supported both by the evidence of cognate names and the similarity of mythic representation of the dawn goddess among various [Indo-European] groups” (2). Whether she is an ancient goddess carried through oral tradition or a more modern invention makes little difference to me. I sense Goddess~as~Life moving through all that pulses green and newly unfurls its tender wings or petals at this time of year and celebrate the daily changes of life as it rises.

And so I had comfortably settled into celebrating the Sacred Feminine and the changing of the seasons at Spring Equinox and had chosen not to involve myself in the Christian Easter Festival. And then, this year, I visited Southwark Cathedral just as Lent began in February and saw German artist Angela Glajcar's 'Within the Light'. This was a large-scale installation made of several lengths of translucent white glass fabric hanging one above the other, some tattered like feathers, above the choir stalls. The light within the cathedral is one of its great beauties and 'Within the Light' was designed to reflect this light as it changed throughout the day. I found that this soft-winged beauty touched something within me and challenged my preconceptions about the heaviness and darkness of the 'blood-soaked' Christian Easter festival. Canon Gilly Myers' extraordinary sermon reflecting on the Lenten installation can be found here. I resolved to spend the season exploring Easter through my own spiritual understanding to find out whether there were ways that I could respectfully include myself in the life of the church at this important time of year. This has been a very personal exploration, and one which will continue, but here are some of my musings over the Easter period.

I am not the first person to equate the dying and rising Jesus with other gods, such as Dionysus, Tammuz, and Osiris, many of whom have similar festivals in the spring. In this way he becomes a vegetation god, a sort of Green Man or Green Christ. Coming from a land which is so green and fecund at this time of year this image resonates deeply with me. One of my favourite images of Jesus is an image which hangs at Cross Bones Graveyard, 'Supposing Him to be the Gardener' by Barry Parman, which depicts Christ as antlered, crowned with thorns and flowers, and holding armfuls of lilies. In her essay, 'The Lily Cross and the Green Man' (1), Mara Ede-Weaving talks about a medieval mural in a small church in Godshill on the Isle of Wight which depicts Jesus crucified on a flowering lily. She sees this as symbolising both Christ's sacrifice and that of the Green Man, who offers his own body in a seasonal cycle of growth, harvest, disintegration, and renewal. In the stories of both the Green Christ and the Green Man we can find the trust that we ourselves can be cut down, lose everything, and return. They are a reminder that Life wants to live (an energy which I see as the indwelling spirit of Goddess in all things), and of non-attachment to a particular 'shape' that our life might find us in. Last night, in the midst of struggling with this piece of writing, I dreamed of Hastings Jack-in-the-Green festival. This is ostensibly a morris dancing event which takes place every year around May Day. It begins with the 'Jack'; a frame covered in greenery, crowned with flowers, and wearing the mask of the Green Man, being 'danced' through the town, and culminates with him being torn to pieces in a wildly joyous frenzy and his highly prized green leaves being distributed amongst the crowd. This again symbolizes the sacrifice of the Sacred Masculine so that the seasonal cycle can continue; we let go so that we can rise again, we trust that life will hold us and bring us back to renewal. And so it is with the story of Christ on the cross if we choose to embrace its symbolic meaning.

Hastings Jack-in-the-Green

Victorian author and druid, Owen Morgan, believed that the “core of all true religions was the worship of the life force – in the macrocosm the sun and earth, in the microcosm, the male and female genitals; in both the activities that give rise to new life – were the foundations of all religious symbolism...in Pagan as well as Christian traditions” (1). And within this is the image of the masculine as an energy which rises, falls, and rises again, in contrast to the feminine energy which remains constant. Philip Carr-Gomm points out that, in all variations of the ancient story in which a god is sacrificed for his people, “the god represents the moment, the finite, while the goddess represents the cyclic and eternity'” (1). It is this right relationship between the masculine and the feminine which brings the renewal of life, rather than atonement for sin.

Which brings me to the place of the Feminine within the Easter story. For many years, I have equated the time between Jesus' death on Good Friday and his rising on Easter Sunday with the journey of the dark/new moon, which disappears for several nights before reappearing as a tender, newly reborn crescent; life from death. The date of Easter has come to be determined by the moon, with Easter Sunday falling on the first Sunday after the full moon on, or closest to, March 21^st. In this way Easter becomes a lunar festival in contrast to the solar festival of Christmas. Often the sun is equated with the Masculine and the moon with the Feminine and I have found Easter a powerful time to explore Christ as both. In her poem, 'A Prayer of Approach', Revd. Rachel Mann writes...

                                   Christ our Sister, unite us in your holy bleeding.

                                  As you took spit and dust for healing,

                                  take our hands, cracked and huge as washerwomen's,  for God's work (4)

It is also a time when we can reflect on the role of women in Jesus's story. Jesus often used feminine imagery in his description of the Divine, particularly describing God's wisdom in female terms, and there are many examples of the importance of women in the gospels. Jonathan Merrit's conversation with Mary Demuth, which can be found here, tells us more about Jesus's radical relationship with women and it was this radicalism which led to the historical Jesus being persecuted, and eventually executed, by the authorities of the time. Malcolm Guite, in his sermon in Southwark Cathedral on Easter Sunday 2015, spoke of Jesus choosing to reveal his resurrection from the tomb to Mary Magdalene before any other. This was at a time when women were rarely listened to, or respected, and yet a woman was chosen to carry such an important message to the rest of humankind. As Malcolm Guite said, Jesus rose at Easter but this was also a powerful rising of women, both socially and spiritually. If only the early Christian church, and wider society, had been willing to listen, then or now.

In the role of Jesus's mother, Mary, we can perhaps bring together the themes of the Green Christ and the role of women. In the Christian story as it has been given to us Mary is shown only as a helpless witness to the suffering and death of her son. Although it is important to reflect on the suffering of women and mothers it is possible to explore a more empowering role than this. In the Bible women's roles are often shown as passive ones. In many of the ancient stories, such as those of Isis and Osiris, Calliope and Orpheus, Rhea and Dionysus, Dumuzi and Inanna, it is women, and often mothers, who dismember and/or restore the bodies of sacrificed gods. This echoes shamanic initiations across all cultures and, in this way, women take on their roles as mentors and initiators of the male mythic journey. I am reminded of the maenads, priestesses of the god Dionysus, who accompanied him in his wanderings and were said to rip apart wild animals in the abandonment of complete union with primeval nature. It is best not to underestimate the power of the female! We can think of Mary as a similar initiatrix if we are able to free her from the shackles of churchianity and allow her to take her place amongst other divine women. And in freeing her we are also able to liberate the historical Jesus and the mythic Green Christ to spread their message of radical love, deep compassion, connection to nature and to the wounded healer within. He becomes the Fisher King and the Feminine holds out to him the Grail of wisdom and healing.

I have come to no conclusions from making my journey through Easter this year and these will not be ways of thinking that resonate with everyone. For myself, I feel that there is much more to uncover but I have followed many roots and paths through the hedge and have found much beauty. I am lifting a prayer that these explorations will move me closer to the Spirit of what moves through men and women and there will be much more to find.

Dirt and Dog Daisies

Photo: Natural Resources Conservation Service Soil Health Campaign

I once went to a workshop led by the American writer and activist, Starhawk and she taught us a chant that I have never forgotten. It began...

“Humble yourself in the arms of the wild, you gotta lay down low, and humble yourself in the arms of the wild, you gotta ask her what she knows...”

We are taught that what is low is worth less, that somehow we should aspire to more than to be, or connect with, what is low. We live in a hierarchical, dualistic world and we are not much used to looking down. We are taught to look for our 'higher' selves, to aim high, to value the highs and ignore the lows. The word 'humble' is defined as, 'having a low or modest appreciation of one's importance', 'of low social, administrative, or political rank', and 'causing someone to feel less important or proud'. Synonyms for humble are meek, deferential, submissive, unassertive, lowly, working class, plebian, proletarian, poor, mean, ignoble. Its roots are in the Old French h(umble), from the Latin humilis, meaning 'low', or 'on the ground', and in the word humus, 'of the earth/ground'. The root is also linked to the words 'human' and 'humane'; we are so deeply of the earth and our kindness and gentleness of being is linked to this connection ~ to our being 'humble'/of the 'humus'. To be truly human we must be brought down low and, rather than being the place of denigration and humiliation that we have been taught, it is a place of tiny wonder and wild energy.

The earth that we walk on (and best barefoot) is called the 'pedosphere', or what William Bryant Logan in his book, 'Dirt' calls 'the ecstatic skin of the earth'. This is the outermost layer of our planet, creating the surface of the Earth, along with the rock-bones of the lithosphere. We tend to the think of the soil as something that is 'just there', occasionally in the autumn aware of the fallen leaves that create further layers, and yet the soil is a living, breathing organism in constant movement. Bryant Logan prefers the word 'dirt', because in using that word we are really moving into the depth of things, away from 'soil', which feels cleaner and more hygienic somehow, into the processes that we don't really want to think about; into the realm of filth, grime, and shit. There is always somewhere lower to go! Soil is something that we might use, dirt is something that we would rather avoid. For Bryant Logan “'Dirt' is a good word. It goes straight back to the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. Like 'love', 'fuck', 'house', 'hearth', 'earth', 'wrath', and 'word', it is short and strong. It leaves a taste in the mouth.” My mum, to my constant disgust, used to call margarine, 'fat'. I think that she would have liked the word dirt. I was squeamish back then. I know better now.

Bryant Williams points out that we don't really know very much about dirt. If you look up humus it will usually be defined as, 'deeply altered, black organic matter, an integral part of soil organic matter' and yet it is also acknowledged that humus is in reality extremely difficult to define. Even the soil scientist, Hans Jenny said that, “humus is imperfectly understood' and Dr James Rice has said that, “It is very possible that no two humus molecules are or have ever been alike”. We are used to thinking about pristine and pure snowflakes in this way but not dirt. When we talk about soil we are not discussing a 'thing', but rather huge and constant processes of growth, decay, feeding, digestion, excretion, and communication. Lierre Keith, in her book 'The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice, and sustainability', explains that...

“One tablespoon of soil contains more than one million living organisms and, yes, every one of them is eating...a square metre of topsoil can contain a thousand different species of animals. These might include 120 million nematodes, 100,000 mites, 45,000 springtails, 20,000 enchytraeid worms, and 10,000 molluscs.

All those tiny creatures live in and around humus, which is a combination of humic acid and polysaccharides. “No one knows how humic acid forms, but once formed it acts like a living creature” writes Stephen Harold Buhner”.

And she reflects that, “Animals like me were just consumers, hitching along for the ride. I couldn't photosynthesise – turn sun into mass – nor could I turn that mass back into carbon and minerals. They could and they did and, because of them, life was possible. I was made humble.”

The soil is a million creatures who have organised themselves into a mutually dependent and supporting system over millions of years and they are the basis of terrestrial life on this planet. William Bryant Logan writes that, “radical disorder is the key to the function of humus. At the molecular level, it may indeed be the most disordered material on Earth...neither humus nor humans are humble at all. We are audacious, like nature herself. We are wet, fecund, protean, dangerous. When we start to comprehend this we know something worth knowing...”

Or perhaps we just need to redefine the meaning of the word humble for, in our connection to the earth, in our humanness, we become a wonder. When Francis Bacon, the 17^th Century philosopher and scientist during the 'Age of Reason', said "[nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets” he had clearly not counted on the unruliness of the very earth beneath his feet, nor on the innate rebelliousness of her people.

In discussing dirt I hope that I have begun to reveal the importance of language in our connection to ourselves, to our own power, our sense of wonder, and to our connection to the world around us. Often our understanding of a word will cause us to discount the thing that word has come to describe, and so it is with 'dog'. One of my favourite wildflowers, which is sometimes brought low by being described as a 'weed', is the dog daisy. The term 'weed' has no botanical significance and merely denotes a plant that is considered undesirable in a particular situation, or which has grown in the 'wrong' place. However, I would suggest that we have a greater ability to withstand some plants in the wrong place than others. The value that we put on nature is insidious, causing us to tolerate some living, growing beings and to attempt to control or obliterate others. How we make these judgements is subtle and often language is a large part of that, hence those who wish to kill foxes labelling them as 'vermin' even though they are not legally classified as such.

Photo: wildseed.co.uk

The dog daisy, also known as ox-eye daisy, common daisy, moon daisy, and white-weed. is a widespread flowering plant native to Europe. It is a flower of meadows and scrublands, and often of 'disturbed' areas such as wasteland. It is our largest native member of the daisy family and brings stunning beauty to forgotten places; abandoned land, roadside verges, railway banks, and wasteground. It's Latin genus name vulgare means 'common', as does its English name 'dog'. It is loved by butterflies, particularly the meadow brown, and by bees and hoverflies. Medicinally, has been used to treat whooping cough, asthma, and 'nervous excitability' and to heal external wounds, bruises and ulcers. The dog daisy is also sometimes known as the 'Maudlin daisy', having been associated with Mary Magdalene, that most denigrated of women. Other flowers linked to 'dog' and its implication of worthlessness, are the dog rose, and the common dog violet which, having no scent, was considered 'only suitable for dogs'. Always those things which grow wild and in their own way, or which have no obvious use to humans, are considered by some to be 'lesser' and that mindset often transfers to the 'people of the commons' too.

It is time for us to reclaim what it means to be low, and connect to the power of what it is to be truly the people of the earth. With the wonder of dirt and humus in mind, we need to reclaim our 'mother tongue' and find new synonyms for the word humble; wild, radical, unruly, connected, alive, applying those words to ourselves and to all beings, green and otherwise, who have been dragged down by judgemental and controlling language. And, for inspiration, all we need to do is look down.

“Humble yourself in the arms of the wild, you gotta lay down low, and humble yourself in the arms of the wild, you gotta ask her what she knows...”

Further reading:

'Dirt: the Ecstatic Skin of the Earth', William Bryant Logan, 1995.

'The Vegetarian Myth: food, justice, and sustainability', Lierre Keith, 2009.

Cathedral

Angela Glajcar's 'Within the Light' installation for Lent, Southwark Cathedral, 2015

Today's piece is a poem written in Southwark Cathedral during a poetry recital by Carol Ann Duffy, on the same day that the General Synod of the Church of England voted against the ordination of women as bishops. Carol Ann Duffy was angry and swore loudly, her words echoing off the pale walls. For me, it was a moment of power and deep beauty and I was glad to be in a place that could withstand the anger of women and not crumble. Of course, since that time the church has voted to allow women's ordination and Libby Lane became our first female bishop in January 2015, several thousand years too late some might say but better now than not at all. I am reminded often that there are edge-walkers in all religions and that in Christianity there have been, and are, many.

I do not always have an easy relationship with the Christian church, or with any organised religion, and yet Southwark Cathedral has become a beloved place of peace and spiritual sanctuary. Often I struggle in churches, finding their opulence incongruous and bloated in a world in which so many don't have enough food to eat. Resting close to the river and growing out of the soil of the Borough, one of the poorest areas of London, it might be assumed that the cathedral in Southwark would have the same affect on me and yet it feels that Southwark knows her place and that her place is with the poor and the vulnerable. She is my rest and my mother source and I love her. Here is the poem written when filled with that love, and with the anger of women....

Carol Ann Duffy at Southwark Cathedral

I come, dressed as crow.

Am sensuous. Black as chaos.

And full of poetry. To this

“most human” place of moon-grey stone

and sun-fire gold, forced summer,

where Mary bends to soothe

her broken child and beggars

sit on cardboard boxes,

hold out hands for Fools' Bronze in the rain.

But we are warm in this candlelit communion of words.

We are all poets here.

And you are raven, dressed in black and blood

red jewels where claws of Bridie's wolves

have marked rhyme into your skin,

are angry at the church who won't let women in.

Outside, the Goose Girls whirl and wild the wind

in skirts of autumn leaves and lure their lovers in

with goddess eyes and stolen gin.

We are all priestesses here.

I love this moon-milk place,

where I could dance, save for these pews,

make spirals, spin away

the dust of two thousand years, make history new

with black feathers.

But still, poetry comes, cracks through

the walls with words, to let

the soft subversive paws of prayer song in.

Jacqueline Woodward-Smith, 20^th November 2012, Southwark Cathedral

Boundaries and Blodeuwedd

Hedgerows are the living boundaries of our landscape. They create an invaluable habitat, rich in pollen, nectar, fruit, leaves, and berries, and provide essential resources for a range of bird, mammal, insect, and invertebrate species. Hazel dormice (one of our rarest small mammals), shrews, bank voles, hedgehogs, stoats, badgers, bees, butterflies, spiders, bats, and a range of birds such as tits, yellow hammers, wrens, robins, chaffinches, and whitethroats, find food and shelter in their green embrace. They also act as windbreaks, help prevent soil erosion, and form 'wildlife corridors', which species can use to move from one isolated habitat to another. The more diverse a hedgerow, the more species it can support and so our ancient native hedgerows, containing green and growing hedge plants such as blackthorn, hazel, hawthorn, dogwood, oak, ash, wych elm, wild cherry, elder, birch, crabapple, blackberry, honeysuckle, rowan, traveller's joy, and field maple, are to be treasured ~ although they have suffered a marked decline as field sizes and monoculture farms have increased. It is telling that, in a recent study, it was found that bumblebees foraging in hedgerows would rather stay on the side of a busy road than on the side of a field farmed using modern methods.

There are around 28,000 miles of hedgerow in the UK, many of which are considered to be ancient or 'species-rich'. Aside from their trees and creatures, they also support a rich diversity of wild flowers; common mallow, dog rose, red campion, hedge bedstraw. bluebells, bugle, common vetch, henbit deadnettle, common woundwort, cow parsley, cowslip, foxglove, dog violet, garlic mustard, dandelion, meadow crane's-bill, ragged robin, meadowsweet, nettle, dog daisy, self-heal, teasel, meadow buttercup, yarrow, yellow rattle ~ even their names are a meditation and a prayer.

Hedgerows hold many echoes of our far-away history. The first hedgerows were created in the Neolithic Age, 4,000 to 6,000 years ago, some still date from the Bronze and Iron Ages, and many more were created during the enclosures of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. It has been estimated that many of the hedgerows thriving in our countryside today are more than seven hundred years old, having been planted in the medieval period. Many are built on older banks, ditches and earthworks.

Not all of that history is kind and the Enclosure Acts led to the ending of many traditional rights to mow hay & graze livestock and to open fields and commons being divided up by hedgerows and fences and taken from the people to be held in ownership by the few. It is a deep grief to me that we have been divided from the land in this way and that our wild, anarchic hawthorn, so deeply connected with the otherworld and faery lore, has been one of the most common trees used in hedgelaying and therefore used against us to keep us from our beloved earth. But all of that history matters if we are to understand where we have come from and are truly to be the 'people of the land'. And I like to believe that the hedgerows, rather than taking the land away from us, have retained just a little bit of wild that we might otherwise have lost. Boundaries, whether physical or psychological, are difficult and tricksterish things and these wild edge places are never going to do what they are told or be what they were intended to be.

Hawthorn blossom

Which brings me very beautifully into my second 'B', the Welsh goddess Blodeuwedd, who certainly carries that shapeshifting trickster energy within her, and if I was asked to choose a 'Goddess of the Hedge' it would most certainly be her. When I first heard the Wild Feminine calling to me it was through her story and she has been a constant companion and deep teacher since. Like the history of the hedgerow, her story as it is presented to us is not an easy one and, just as the hedgerow has been used against the people of the commons, she has been used against women.

The story of Blodeuwedd, whose name in English means 'Flower-Face' (also an ancient Welsh name for an owl), can be found in the fourth branch of the Mabinogi, a collection of Welsh mythological tales written down by monks in the 13^th and 14^th centuries but which carry within them a much older oral tradition. In the tale she is created out of nine flowers; the oak, broom, meadowsweet, bean, burdock, nettle, chestnut and, my favourite anarchist, the hawthorn, as a wife for Llew Llaw Gyffes, who has been cursed by his mother to never marry a human woman. In order to gain kingship over the land, Llew must marry a woman as representative of the sovereignty of the land. However, like a hedgerow, Blodeuwedd, with her dual nature of flower and owl, is not so easily tamed. Although she marries Llew she falls in love with another man, Gronw Pebyr, and they plot to kill her husband leading to a train of events in which Gronw himself dies and Blodeuwedd is turned into an owl as a 'punishment'; “You will not dare to show your face ever again in the light of day, and that will be because of enmity between you and all other birds. It will be in their nature to harass you and despise you wherever they find you. And you will not lose your name - that will always be "Bloddeuwedd (Flower-face)." ('The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Will Parker). A fuller version of her story can be read on the Welsh & Celtic Myths and Legends page here.  

It is possible to write a whole book about the layers and depths of meaning contained within Blodeuwedd's story. However, for now, I am mostly interested in her role as a 'boundary keeper' and in how we have so often made attempts to tame her. When I first mentioned my new devotion to Blodeuwedd to a Pagan friend her immediate reaction was to say, “Oh, well she is a warning to women about our unfaithful nature”! Even then I found it hard to believe that this was all that the wildly spinning vortex of petals and owl feathers that was the Blodeuwedd I had come to know was about.

In our culture we are very used to thinking in a fixed and dualistic way, with everything being either/or, good/bad, dark/light and this is how we create our boundaries of mind. A healthy and living boundary must be permeable, allowing new ideas in and allowing old ones to fade. This is the same whether we are talking about the boundaries that we use in our own lives to keep ourselves safe or a boundary in a field, which would be a poor one indeed if it didn't allow a dormouse or two through! In our dualistic way of thinking we find it very easy to label Blodeuwedd's 'flower self' gentle, sweet, non-threatening, and 'good', whilst her owl self is considered dark, murderous, frightening, and 'bad'. Like the domestic apple we have tried to tame Blodeuwedd and make her manageable but this interpretation shows little understanding of the nature of flowers or owls. If we are truly people of the hedge/edge, then we will certainly not leave it at that.

First, let's consider the nature of flowers. Of course, we humans find them very beautiful and, as they bloom throughout the year, they carry us along on an enchanting tide of smell and colour. And the enchantment that we feel is a clue to the purpose of a flower, which is to 'enchant' or to lure pollinators. Blodeuwedd is indeed 'the honey to the bee' and flowers, just like the goddess created from them, are not there just to be pretty. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants, employing any means at their disposal to ensure that the egg is united with the sperm. Indeed the blossom of the hawthorn, one of the primary beings of the hedge and also one of the flowers used to create Blodeuwedd, are said to have the smell of a sexually aroused woman and have the reputation of being an aphrodisiac in Arabic erotic literature. We have only to look at the art of Georgia O'Keefe or Judy Chicago, both of whom used flowers to represent female genitalia, to see a different aspect of what a flower might be. Perhaps, in exploring the deeper nature of flowers, we are beginning to break down the dualism that has controlled Blodeuwedd's story and see through some tiny gaps in our richly fertile hedge?

So to the owl, Blodeuwedd's second nature. In the story her transformation into an owl is explained to us as a punishment for her betrayal of her husband and certainly owls have a challenging reputation in many cultures. In some African tribes, owls are linked with death, bad luck, and evil. These same associations exist through Native American, Mesoamerican, and Arabic mythology. However, in the West, the owl is more often seen as a bird of wisdom, whilst retaining some associations with death and bad luck. Many of these 'darker' aspects are also associated with femininity and with women, as is wisdom which in Christianity is given the feminine name of 'Sophia'. Maria Gimbutas traces the veneration of the owl as a goddess to the culture of Old Europe, which refers to a time between the Mesolithic and Bronze Age periods from roughly 7,000 BCE to 1,700 BCE. My own fondness for owls was increased when it was pointed out to me how low they fly when they are hunting and I have come to think of them as our own 'hedge-riders'.

Owl Face/Flower Face

And so we see that, if we are hedge-conscious, it is impossible to pin anything down to one meaning. In the hedgerow, which was once devised to control nature and the people of the commons, there is also a song of such chaotic, joyously disordered, and wilful wildness that it, and the people who love it, can never be controlled. And in the goddess, who was conceived of by monks to give us dire warnings about the treacherous nature of women, is a being of wanton beauty shining with nectar and looking at us with the wise, deep eyes of an owl (and maybe with a sharp talon digging into our flesh). Both teach us of the edge, in ourselves and in our society, between what is domesticated and tamed and what is wild and unbound. I pray that we will all ride that hedge with our wild wisdom intact and that our thoughts will always allow through a dormouse or two.

Meadowsweet

If you would like to support, or just know more about, the people who are working to celebrate and protect our hedgerows please click on these links...

http://www.hedgerows.co.uk/

http://www.hedgelink.org.uk/

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...

Hedgerow/Hedgetemple - Blogging from A to Z

(Yns Mon/Anglesey, Spring 2011)

Some may have noticed that I haven't written anything on my blog for some time; it has been a deep journey through the dark months and, once I have tasted winter on my tongue part of me goes to a place that doesn't have the words for much. But now it is spring and the empty pages of what~could~be~written are calling, sometimes even shouting. And so, to get the words flowing again, I have signed up for the 'Bloggingfrom A to Z Challenge'. The challenge is now in its sixth year and the idea is to write something every day, except Sundays, for the whole of April. This means twenty-six posts, one for each letter of the alphabet.

Most participants on the challenge also choose a theme and, this year, I have chosen as my theme 'Hedgerow/Hedgetemple'; two words that make me vibrate with a sort of nameless pleasure so I thought that this would be a good excuse to explore what those words mean to me. Without sharing too much now, I will say that I have always had a fascination for the 'edge places', those places that can't be defined as one thing or another; the marshes, the fens, the shoreline, the riverbank, and always the hedgerow. Certainly hedgerows are planted by humankind as markers but they become places of such rich biodiversity and mystery that it is hard to define them at all, standing as they do on the boundary of the tamed and the wild. Maybe too they allow something of the untamed that was enclosed when we began farming in the Neolithic 4,000 to 6,000 years ago to thrive again, even in a small way.

The hedgetemple, is similarly hard to define and is more a sense of 'beingness' than a defined thing or place, an attempt to allow a sense of belonging between people on diverse spiritual paths but who share a love and reverence for all that is wild and green and who reject the constraints of more organised groups and religions. I can only say that, for me, the word itself, and my exploration of what it means to me, has been a deep healing.

I have no intention of attempting to define or pin down what the words hedgerow and hedgetemple mean in the days to come and, at this moment, I have little idea of what will be written but I hope and expect that there will be wonders; that a leaf might be lifted, a little hollow peered into, or an edge revealed, to allow just a little bit of magic to shine through. To the hedge!

Tomorrow, I will begin with A is for Activism, Apples, and Afallon...