An Intimate Journey with Heron

'Her Wild Wings', 2012

It all began with Sheela-na-Gig, as many of the best things do. Before her I hadn't thought much about herons. I remember my friend Jack telling me once that he had been walking along the riverside at Richmond and had come across a crowd of people all looking up into a tree. He asked one what they were doing and they replied, “Shhhhh, there are pterodactyls nesting there!”. And that is herons; even from our perspective where birds are so completely 'other', herons are even more 'other' than that. And yet they have become trusted companions and allies on my journey through life and have moved beneath many of my most powerful experiences.

And so it is with Sheela-na-Gig who was my way into the mysterious world of the heron spirit. I remember that during my first year of priestess training I didn't think about her much. I loved her image, challenging as she does so many taboos. For those who are unfamiliar with her, Sheela-na-Gig, in Gaelic Irish Síle-na-Géige, is usually found depicted in stone carvings in churches and other buildings, particularly in Ireland and Great Britain. She has the drooping breasts of an old woman and holds open her exaggerated vulva, challenging our preconceptions about the risk of being revealed and around sexuality and age. She is often carved over doors and windows and was said to ward off evil spirits, although some have suggested that she represents female lust as 'sinful and corrupting'. Others believe that carvings of her are the remnants of a pre-Christian fertility or Goddess religion but really no one knows. Truly she is a being of the hedge, challenging our boundaries and our edges. And, for all those things, I loved her but she was always fixed, made of stone like the carvings that depict her. Just writing this I have realised that herons are a bit like that; so still that they appear like statues, and then shocking us when they suddenly move. When I felt Sheela-na-Gig move she was like a tsunami; a great wave of feeling, teaching me to breathe into and out of any pain that I was in, teaching me not to turn to stone. And heron is her bird.

The heron is a hunter of the edge places; fresh or salt, clear or muddy, edges that are neither water nor land. Like Sheela, she is a liminal-dweller, a watcher in the between places, and she guards the gateways between life and death. In Irish Gaelic her name is Síle na bPortach; portach meaning 'bog', and port a place of refuge or a haven. She is our protective wing and our place of safety in those misty in-between places that unsettle and frighten us so deeply. She is sure-footed and wild eyed, showing us the way, and she has a beak that can cut through our self-deception like a rapier. I once wrote a fragment of a poem about depression that called on heron for her ability to walk surely through the seemingly unsure places of the mind and the heart...

I know the safe way through the fen

Because I have so often fallen
Into the maddening mire of mind

that calls me on false paths home

                                                      

Now, I am heron-footed;
stepping surely on the boundary

between madness and creativity

She is my haven, my portach, my rest

('On the Sweet Track', a fragment, 2011)

                                                       

                                                

After my 'tsunami moment' with Sheela-na-Gig I saw herons a lot. My mum and dad were elderly and unwell and I was spending much time travelling to their house by train. Often I would see herons by the trackside and each time they reminded me of Sheela and prompted me to breathe and to remember that no moment, no matter how distressing, is frozen in time. I learned to let emotion move through me, rather than attaching to it and becoming subsumed; heron knows how to pick her way through those watery places of feeling and I was grateful to her.

Kathryn Price NicDhàna, in her wonderful article on 'Sheela-na-Gig and Sacred Space', notes that in Celtic mythology the heron, the crane, and the stork, are interchangeable and that the word corr is often used to describe all three. Most usually translated as crane, corr is said to be a female guardian of the Underworld and a companion of beings who bridge the space between life and death, most often old women. I was powerfully shown the truth of this when I was visiting Carmarthen in 2002 with a group of priestess sisters. I was reflecting deeply on reclaiming the dark aspect of the goddess Rhiannon at the time and had found three dead baby birds who had sadly been knocked out of their nest in the local village when the gutters were cleaned. They had been left on the pavement and, as small birds are companions of Rhiannon, I saw this finding as a message about her connection to death, rather than just being the Love Goddess that she is often portrayed as. I decided to gather up the dead babies and take them to the river where I released them into the quickly running water as a blessing on their journey. The next day we visited Rhiannon's waterfall and I found a stone with markings that looked like a heron's foot, reminding me that I was working with the goddess's death aspect. That day, the children found a dead mouse and, having been inspired by my story of the baby birds, made a 'shroud' for it from a large green leaf tied up with grass and launched it from the top of the waterfall as a sort of 'burial at sea'! I'm not sure why we so often think that children have a problem with death...

In 2004, my dad suffered a stroke and began a slow journey of recovery during which it seemed to me that he inhabited a shadow world between living and dying. He had always been a sensitive man and often heard voices in the hospital telling him jokes, which seemed to keep his spirits up. Eventually, he was moved to a rehabilitation unit and one day I was sitting on the side of his bed when he said, “Oh, you've turned into a heron!” By then I had been working as a priestess in the liminal spaces for some years and found his vision deeply affirming. From that time I began to more consciously walk the heron path.

But heron comes to show the way

through misty marshes of the mind

The edge of love, the edge of fear

The connection we were born to find

And when Crone Mother finally calls you
to rest and change in dreaming womb
I will rejoice that you are with Her

But always feel you left too soon

             I call to you my joy, my father

             as priestess, to the Blessed Isle

            As daughter call you ever homeward
             to stay with me for just a while

(From 'Northern Star: for my father', 2004)

In the winter of 2010 I was renting a small house in Glastonbury, Somerset. It was a time when my creativity felt as dry as dead leaves but I enjoyed the little house just on the edge of the Somerset marshes and loved hearing owls calling at night. One day, feeling particularly stuck, I went for a long walk and was amazed to see a huge bird flying towards me. At first I couldn't work out what it was but then saw that it was a heron. Seeing its wide powerful wings something unlocked inside me and, having never really drawn before, I began to draw and paint herons; something that I love to do and, in reality, the only thing that I have ever been able to draw! Somehow herons are just in my blood.

'Heron's Winter Dreaming', 2010

'Heron Guards the Gateway', 2011

'Heron Sleeps with Standing Stones', 2011

In 2011, I met Will and began living part time on his boat in which we travelled the Kennet and Avon Canal and River Thames. My story with Will is one for another day but it was a time when I was able to more deeply connect with herons in their natural environment. We would see them every day; sometimes hunting in the shallows, sometimes flying on their wide ungainly wings; always hauntingly, perfectly 'other'. Although I loved Will and the boat, it was a period of bone-crushing despair; journeying both with the challenges of life on the water, which was hard but beautiful, and with his debilitating mental illness, which was a trap for us both. Clinging to every glimpse of her storm-winged beauty, heron taught me the power of patience and of knowing just the right moment to strike for quicksilver morsels of happiness amidst the grinding heartache of trying to get Will some care in a world that seemed to have lost its compassion. Each time I went to the boat I would put on a heron pendant as a symbol that I was stepping into my 'water gypsy' self and, often, I would find heron feathers on the riverbank. When I finally found the courage to fly myself free I threw my pendant into the deepest water I could find, needing to sever my attachment to the river and its heron dreaming, and offered a heron feather and some woad-dyed wool to our fire until they were ashes. Heron knows about letting go.

'Heron Offering', 2013

'Woad-dyed Wool for the Ancestors', 2013

I asked heron to show me how to hunt my freedom and she answered but she is never easy and it remained a path that needed careful negotiation and sure-footedness through many mires. There were many tears; hers is the path of deep emotion. In 2014 Will died suddenly and I was privileged to help midwife his beautiful soul into the Otherworld; another story for another day, but a reminder that heron, guardian of the Underworld, continued to work her strange magic in my life. Somehow, she was part of the enchantment that drew us together and she was part of the enchantment that set us both free; like the Crone whose energy she carries, she asks a lot of us. Will once told me that he had never really noticed the herons before I was there; that I made the river beautiful for him.

He left just as the snowdrops came

He could not hope to hope again;
Could not bear to let 
the fragile spears break through
his frozen faith, for life to rise,
a spark to catch,
and then to let him fall
and fall again,
as winter turned to spring
He felt unseen,
yet heron saw him fly away,
kingfisher caught his soul
and made it fire, set him free
and silver salmon mother swam him home...

(For Will, 2014)

There are times when heron has appeared when I was least expecting her. Once when I had an opportunity to do some smithcraft and she appeared from the fires in the bracelet that I was making; perhaps the heron feather that I had offered to the fire on the riverbank was emerging from the flames...

'Heron Forge', 2013

...and once in 2012 when I made my own drum. As part of the making we used our hands to cover the drum hoop with red ochre, so often a symbol of life in death and a substance which I had used to mark both my mum's and dad's bodies before their burials. Having painted the hoops, we stretched the deer skins we had chosen across the frame and, somehow, my drum skin became marked with red ochre. The marks looked to me like an old, old woman, both in profile and looking straight at me and, for some reason, I thought of heron. 

'Heron Grandmother Drum', 2012

That night, lying in the yurt, I had a dream that an ancient ancestor, a grandmother of the Heron Tribe, beautiful with deeply wrinkled skin, storm-grey eyes, and hair falling in long grey plaits, came and looked me straight in the face. It felt like love and a challenge and even now when I close my eyes I can see her. She is my teacher and yet, like heron, she often disappears into the river mist. And she is always silent. When Will died and we walked in procession after his coffin I knew that the Heron Tribe were with me; they are the death-walkers and they know about Life.

'Storm-wing Heron', 2012

And finally for now, in December 2014, my drum-making sisters and I all had sacred tattoos carved on our skin. Some had chosen their designs before we met for a weekend of deep journeying together but I decided to wait for inspiration. The symbol that came was an antlered heron foot, which has deep meaning for me and continues my journey both with the heron spirit and with She~Who~Is. These are just fragments of a story that moves through my life, through every breath, and deep beneath my skin. For now, I will say that I remain sure-footed in walking the heron path. I will trust her to show me where to put my feet. I am grateful.

'With Grandmother Heron Drum', 2012

'Antlered Heron tattoo', 2014

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

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.