“One thing I love most about elder” I said to my husband as we walked and gathered, “is the flowers are upright in a cup like this, like champagne in a glass. When they become berries they will be heavy and will hang pointing downwards instead”
In the elder tree I see a woman. Her flowers a bridal bouquet, celebration fizz, the carefree body of maiden spring, aspiring towards the sun. Then heavy with blood and wisdom, she hangs closer to the earth with a drooping body, a full womb that has grown many babies, and breasts that have fed them.
And yet the maiden can be heavy and the crone can dance. We often grow lighter as the years go on, our physicality in contrast with our spirit. The day we picked the elder is the day I lost my silver earring. The day I shared what was in my heart with my husband, let him see the shadow of my pain.
What I am most deeply afraid of is that after all that has happened to me, I won’t be able to handle any more darkness. I create so much beauty because I am so intimately acquainted with the ugly. Sometimes it’s the woman who has given birth several times who is the most afraid, who remembers the ego death and the stripping.
I attended a talk recently by somebody who denigrated women’s experience of spirituality through the body and the audience clapped for the irrelevance of their own mothers as I sat there bleeding on the full moon. I simply got up and walked out, back to my home that smelled of drying elderflowers, more determined than ever to keep birthing my craft.
What I know to be true is the closer I follow the rhythms of the seasons and the human body, the more real and profound life becomes. When you experience miracles every day, you don’t need to go about trying to manufacture them.
The earring I lost that elder day was precious to me - I am somebody who wears the same amulets and talismans every day, who finds comfort in the tangible. I’d paced up and down the farm in the hot sun many times. “Tony, Tony, come around, something’s lost that can’t be found” so the old folk magic phrase goes. A few days later walking home I had a feeling he wanted something in return, so impulsively I said “if you find it, St Anthony, I’ll give half it’s value in donation to the food bank”
Less than five minutes later my gaze was directed to a spot I’d searched before, and there the earring was. Miracles are knowing that it wasn’t me who found it. Reading about St Anthony this morning, I discovered that he particularly loves “donations that help hungry people”. The gift is when the weaving reveals itself in these small moments.
You are never alone. The earth is teeming with trees and animals and spirits that are here to love and support you. We give and we receive - lost things are returned to us and we gather flowers in our baskets. In return we make medicine and feed the hungry. Talk to your mother elder, ask her to help you to dance between the light and shadow, to see where our pain and our love intersect. The place where there is no ideology, just the awareness of what is holy.
