Angelica Archangelica
I planted the Angelica the year before he landed in my womb, knowing she wouldn't flower until two years later. She grew sturdy and I waited with anticipation for them both. He came though and I grew, and she grew.
In tincture form she was prized amongst midwives. These days it's the doulas and mothers that nestle her in amongst the things that may be needed for birth. If a placenta is slow to come, she will send the energy needed for it's release. In the old days, she would have saved lives. These days, she can help avoid an unpleasant experience in theatre.
On an energetic level she supports the final transition the woman needs to make. The medicine wheel of birth spirals round and round as the woman journeys through the blood mysteries at each stage of her birth journey. Angelica is that final push from maiden to mother. Where the placenta has fed and sustained the baby in the womb, now the breasts must take over.
If there is any reluctance in fully embodying that mother role, the placenta may not come.
Last summer I was abed with my babe in the hot July sun, only able to manage watching the horses across the way as I fed him from my body under the apple trees. Without watering, many of the plants did not survive. My husband preoccupied with me, my children with the new trampoline...
This spring, babe in sling, I stood amongst the planters and raised beds and observed what had come through my postpartum neglect and what hadn't. Some things had to be replaced. Where the raspberry hadn't made it, several small babies had. One Lady's Mantle happily transferred to where the other one has been. One thing was for sure - the Angelica stood tall and proud, she had thrived despite me.
I sometimes think that is the essence of being a mother. Our children are so wonderful precisely because of - and simultaneously in spite of - who we are and what we did.
I teach my daughter that manifestation follows two simple rules, firstly we state our desire, then we release any internal resistance we have to receiving it. It's fifty percent us and fifty percent the universe. We must initiate and do the internal excavation, only then we find the universe will do the heavy lifting.
When it comes to something we deeply desire, we often encounter huge internal resistance - because what we seek involves relinquishing control. We say we want a baby, and we fight the experience of pregnancy and birth. We say we want a relationship and then we kick and push against the compromises that are required of us to love and accommodate another.
Nostalgia in the digital age is it's own particular kind of poison. My grandmothers of the past would have had maybe two photos of themselves - a childhood one, a wedding one. Like the six of cups in the tarot we can gaze into the goblet of the past and dream that it was better, we were more beautiful, more free, more fulfilled.
I want to stay the woman with the large belly amongst the hay fields, the one twirling in the garden, wild and free. I miss the version of me that was more naive and more certain. I miss who I was before the rivers of blood soaked through my white nightdress.
As the Angelica essence works it's way through my energy body, it comes to me... I have been fighting this experience of mothering for a third time like it wasn't me that prayed for it.
It seems to me that I take the Angelica today and the fabric of time parts. Ten months earlier I get out of the bed and forcibly birth my placenta, as the fear of keeping it in becomes greater than the fear of getting it out.
I land.
