Chamomile (The Wise Woman's Folk Herbal Series)

Chamomile was the first herb I fell in love with aged 14. I just need to open the jar and smell it to be a maiden again, to be engulfed in earthy sweetness in an increasingly sanitised and artificial world. “Matricaria chamomilla”, what a name! Meaning Mother - what more powerful name could you give anything, I wonder? What higher compliment?

In those days it was about saving our pocket money to spend in the hippy shop, buying ear studs in the shape of pentacles, memorising the Witches’ Rune. Bags of chamomile like honey and innocence and the magical world of the Divine Mother. Like a fairy song beckoning these wild daughters down a winding path covered in wildflowers… promising that there is a way through rebellion into belonging, there is a way back through this madness into something sweeter, something more real and true.

We sipped our tea and talked about the wise and free women we’d someday be. Like the woman behind the counter who sold us the herbs and jewellery. Oh the injustice, to be “in the broom closet”! To hide my Wicca books and spell books, from my family or from God, I don’t think even I knew. Maybe the delight was in having something just for myself, something about myself that only I knew. On warm days we poured rinses of the flowers through our hair and dried it in the sun to make it shine brighter. We would hold hands and dance and take portraits of each other, a budding sisterhood that ended like so many do in betrayal… but I kept the herbs and the poems.

How do I see her now?

Chamomile to soothe the skin, calm the belly, bring up the mucus. To usher the sweet dreams, relax the nerves, caress the delicate yoni. Like a true mother she has many hands with which to heal. Like a doula, she is for women and babies. And as my doula, she has been by my side through it all.

She is a gateway

She is a portal

She is an ancient flower garden whose scent leads us back home

Ahava

Jenny xxx

Look What They've Done

It began with eroding trust in community midwifery, an ancient lineage of women supporting women supporting women, chosen by the village for their skilled hands and divine guidance. Unsafe, unclean, ignorant they said, scared of anywhere women could be and men could not…

Then you could only be a midwife if you went to their training schools, studied under their rules, wore their badge, swore allegiance to them. Insurance only granted for one path of medicine, one way… monotheism and monomedicine. Doctor as God. Diligently erasing the sacred, the autonomy, the precious bond between women like a natural forest is razed to the ground.

It’s progress. It’s safer this way. Trust us.

My own grandmother in the sixties after three home births, told by them she must go into hospital for number four as at 29 she was considered geriatric.

My mother, two abusive hospital births and one home birth only achieved by ignoring everybody else in the room.

I think the world is waking up to the fact that we’ve been sold a damn lie, with the induction wards rammed with everybody there for their “safety”, isolated from family like animals in a testing facility, left to languish in a climate of fear and misinformation and I’ve been saying for years now -

Women are in an abusive relationship with the NHS.

Like a domineering partner who cuts off all your other relationships so you only rely on them, then has you reduced to gratitude for the scraps of support they throw your way.

I’ve been holding space for stories of abuse for years now and the words that fall from my lips are now “shocked but not surprised”. How else to contain the outrage and simultaneously the deep knowing that this is happening everywhere to women? That these stories are not unusual but they are also horrific?

This morning I feel heartbroken that the only option right now for women in Cardiff is a high risk consultant ward or birthing alone. The smoke and mirrors game “they” are playing with women. And undoubtedly somebody will read this and make a comment about staffing and being grateful, to which all I can say is… trauma bonding is real.

All empires must eventually fall.

Ahava

Jenny x

Just A Woman

I'm just a woman.

Just a magical being through which souls seek birth and rebirth.

A highly intuitive converser with other realms and dimensions.

A sensitive barometer reflecting back to you your level of integrity.

Is it my fault you don't like what you see?

Just a woman.

A primal goddess, devoted wife, loving mother, vengeful destroyer

My sensitivity is a gift, if you will use it. I sicken or blossom, rage and wail or sigh in ecstasy in accordance with how you treat me. A bundle of life force energy. Shakti.

My heart holds a thousand poems, my tongue a thousand ego lacerations. I command respect like a thunderstorm, a tornado... a nun.

Just a woman.

Lately I feel like a gorgon, like my gaze could kill a man - can't meet my eyes. Babies think if they cover their face the mother can't see them.

Just a woman. Arms full of blood and roses. Eyes full of tears.