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.

Crab Apple

It’s the Taurus new moon and I am weeping. I am weeping because what has been buried has come to the surface.

Crab apple – for the person who feels there is something unclean and evil buried within them. As a survivor of abuse, this speaks to me deeply. My apprehension and my hope for this pregnancy have both been the same. That I will be healed. That it will be hard.

I know and believe in my heart, that our souls are always seeking to heal. We always seek resolution, walking similar paths hoping to find a different destination. If we are not conscious of this we can fall into the same hole again. If we are too cautious we will never find what we are looking for because we avoid the paths entirely.

Narcissistic abuse plants an evil seed within. The narcissist gets inside your soul and violates what you hold most sacred and dear. It’s a flaying of original innocence, that holy knowledge of our innate goodness we carry within us. Everything that is beautiful and pure they will make twisted and ugly.

You will become complicit in your own abuse, as you do more and more for a glimpse of the sunshine of their approval before it swiftly disappears behind a cloud, and hate yourself for this self-degradation.

What to take from a woman initiated through the womb?

Take the beauty and joy of her pregnancy. Take her admiration for her changing body. Take her reverence for her sexuality. Take her self-respect. Take her rest and make her work hard. Take away any sense of safety, within and without, so that all that’s left is the changeable face of a monster that must be pandered to and appeased. Take her newborn bliss. Take the sanctity of breastfeeding. Make it wretched. Make it disturbing. Take the first few years with her beloved child so that all she sees is danger everywhere. So that the sound of a man’s footsteps makes her gasp.

Pregnancy is a time of accumulation and absorption. When you cannot bleed with the moon, the energy grows and builds within the womb. This is why postpartum is so fragile, as the months of accumulation are shed in one go. There is a power and a weakness in the mother heavy with child. I feel it keenly. As my gait changes and with the force of the child moving. You can feel every single limb. You need so much more from others to be able to do this. You are able to give so much less. As your stomach capacity decreases your heart capacity increases to become this bottomless well where you could chug down all the love and not be satiated.

I feel it. The point where, if somebody chose to – they could perpetrate evil.

So I find myself nearly every day under the apple tree. Christened by the blossom and marvelling at the amount of bees, such a relief. Feeling the strength of the child, another relief. When I was sobbing this morning my husband suggested we go to the garden and I once again found myself under the apple tree. It’s been a long time since I’ve been this triggered. It’s been years. My body remembers and his body remembers. “I wanted to make a crab apple essence today…” I say once I have purged all the sadness and the sobs have subsided. To capture the magic of this spring and have it as medicine forever.

Then I read the words – for the person who feels there is something evil and unclean buried within them. In my vulnerability I’ve been letting this tree bless me over and over without even knowing.

I can see now how I’ve been instinctively trying to return to Eden.

Crab apple. For restoring that sense of innate goodness and holiness that lives within every person. For the one who has seen the darkest side of human nature and is forever changed. For the one who carries the shame of what was done to them. Like the apple blossom of spring scattered in the hair, the sweet scent carried on the breeze, both bringing joy and delight, we reclaim our original innocence. We do not need to be ashamed. We can enjoy the sensual delights of the season we are in and the sweet promise of harvest.

No one is coming into the garden to punish us.

Rosehip

There was a girl who loved everything but ran from everybody she had ever loved. Everybody who wasn't bound to her by blood. In everything else she was a steady daughter of earth and hearth, grounded in her home routine, her favourite walks and books. It is easy to love a place, a tree, a story.

For as long as she could remember she had found human relationships difficult, and many times found herself standing there mute and staring as another person became frustrated and angry about some thoughtless or unloving behaviour. Her thoughts like an ocean roar as her spirit flew away somewhere else.

Other times she would quiver and bolt like a purebred horse, instinct sending her out into the night with her tail streaking behind her. Her goodbyes sudden and abrupt. She would sit in the garden and watch pairs of butterflies dancing and circling together in union, watch couples who had been together for many years and think 'I am more like the solitary moth that is lured in by love's light but can't quite stay, is gone in the morning'

She loved to study and in her more enlightened moments it was clear to her that human love is where we experience the separation and reunion that is our soul's forgetting and remembering of god.

The separation can feel like a barren winter where we cannot feel our beloved. We find them again in spring and pledge our forever love at Beltane. We bring life to the land and bear children of fruit, corn and berry by Lammas. What happens as Mabon comes and life and love draw away into the dark?

The girl loved to make medicines from plants and trees and giving away these jars of wonder to other humans as a simple expression of love. She knew that it was not enough to study plants, for in that practice you would never truly know them. The medicine was in the stories the plants could tell you about yourself.

The day she gathered the rose hips the sweat was streaming down her face and she remembered the other girls in times past. They had gathered the hips in wartime, a labour of love to make a medicine to nourish the people who were full of grief and fear.

The first step in making rosehip syrup is to put your hips in the freezer and defrost them before the process of mashing and boiling and straining. The freezer mimics a frost and ripens the hips further making them more suitable to become medicine. You must strain out the hairs that irritate the throat and creepy crawlies that turn the stomach. You add the sugar. What you have left then is syrup, pure summer's light full of vital nourishment, to carry as your lamp through winter.

Babies cry to learn that they will be soothed. It is in the separation from and return to the mother's love that they learn what it means to be in relationship. The first few years of separation and repair will tell them what to expect from love, and the medicine is not in the prevention of hurt but in the mending. In making syrup it is the withdrawal and return to warmth, the frost that brings the sweeter fruit.

As the girl made her medicine she realised that in every experience of separation from the beloved we have a chance to pick out the grubs of the worst moments that still turn our stomach to recall. We can strain the hairs of all unloving behaviours, theirs and ours, anything that is not real, and add the sugar to preserve what is good and true. Forgiveness like cheesecloth wringing us out patiently, we allow love to filter through.

It is not something that can be studied, we must get our hands sticky and become intimate with the flesh and seed of human relationship. Synthetic vitamins are like the media's artificial portrayal of love and society tells us we need both. The truth is that real nourishment of heart and body comes from the sweat of our labours and the work of our hands.

For relationships, like the earth, cannot be in perpetual summer. As mothers, daughters and lovers we will feel the sting of separation and error. Instead of standing still like stone or bolting we will work with our hands getting right down to the seed. We will walk through the winter with the medicine of our perception and preservation. We will keep offering the sacred dose to ourselves and others, knowing that these small acts are potent medicine.

All we can do in love is believe that it is real and hug that belief to our hearts like our syrup jars, offering it to all until spring comes again.