Last year’s hawthorn left me this week into the heart and hands of an old client, turned colleague and friend. I gave it to her because I know what it is to leave a place you love, and hawthorn is the medicine for that grief that seizes the heart, that longing for what has been and can never be again. The longing for home that we Welsh call hiraeth, the way our heart has learned to beat with the land and now the separation hurts us deeply.
In the old tales the women keen and wail in the streets, tearing at their hair and clothes. My writing is my keening, my lament that so much beauty goes unseen, my grief that it takes an enormous amount of pain to see with virgin eyes again…
Last year I chose to leave the neath valley, where the dark mountains loomed up and overshadowed me, those benevolent grandmothers of stone shielding their bedraggled little jenny wren. Breathtaking and imposing. After all, “every angel is terrifying”, says the poet Rilke.
I walked the land guided by herons, fairies, rivers and snakes and after two years knew it intimately. This is where the mugwort grows, down a hill so steep you cling to the fence for dear life. They say you must give offerings to the spirit of the plant but sometimes the offering is the journey itself. Wild roses, nettle, clover, self-heal, elder. It takes courage to move on. Courage to trust you will find them again.
Last year’s hawthorn came from that dear valley, at a time when I was sick and lonely and learning to inhabit my body. In the absence of people I befriended spirits. I found a man who could hold space for the wild catharsis of my heartbreaks. This year I am slower, vaster, deeper. My contentment has softened my face and widened my hips. My grief has changed, as everything changes. I am learning a new land.
This year the medicine I am seeking is for something that never was. The hope that from a honeymoon a soul would bloom. A hope washed away by Beltane in the red waters of the chalice well. There is blood that comes when you have been praying for it, blood that does not come when you knew or hoped it wouldn’t, and blood that comes unwanted. The three blood mysteries of joy, glory and sorrow.
Earth mother brings forth her gifts of blossom in the unlikeliest of places, unbidden, often unappreciated. Just like mother earth, I have two children I birthed to two men who did not deserve the gift; my conceptions were like roses bursting through concrete. Like the hawthorn trees next to the junkyard whose flowers I cup in my hands and praise their beauty.
Often seen planted in a row, hawthorn was used by farmers to mark the boundaries of their land. In folk magic the hawthorn also marks the boundaries between the world that is seen and unseen. Spend some time near a hawthorn tree and you might find yourself stepping into that other world, the world of spirit and fairy. In a culture of disembodied spirituality, hawthorn reminds us that place is the portal. It asks us to remember that the heart is our true home. Heaven is indeed a place on earth, not somewhere in the sky with an unseen god. Home is in the flowering, the fruiting, the dying back, and the budding again.
The idea of a virgin womb, or awakened womb, is the ability to give birth to the holy child over and over. Through our craft, our relationships, our families, our missions. Through loss and sorrow. Through pain and abuse. It is the sudden clarity in a dark moment that only love is real. That to bring forth life from our heart and wombs can always only be good. That the world is the place to birth our love, send it out with a mother’s farewell, and tend it when it returns to us battered and bruised. To renew it again.
We overcome loss and allow ourselves to believe again. Our heart takes risks in loving and rooting, knowing what could happen.
The radical innocence of that.
