The Elder Tree and St Anthony

“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.

Hawthorn

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.

Mantell Fair- “am I not here who am your mother?”

I am in the Physic Garden in Cowbridge, and I am praying.

Lady’s Mantle, friend to women and midwives. Named for the mantle of the Blessed Virgin, who gathers us all under her cloak of protection. Birth work often blends with death work… when I light candles for babies who have passed and for their mothers who grieve for them, I imagine the little souls being held in the goddess’s radiant cloak of stars. I hadn’t expected to see this herb today, but it was also I who started the conversation with her with my prayers. Lady’s Mantle, like the Virgin of Guadalupe, says; “am I not here, who am your Mother?”

I will often put Lady’s Mantle in tea blends for women who have experienced loss, who have seen too much blood or who are longing to bleed. The secret of this plant is that she can do both - the compassionate mother who knows just what her daughter needs.

The leaves of Lady’s Mantle glisten with her tears bright as jewels, the tears of a mother who understands. Alchemists believed this dew was a sacred elixir. Like Mary Magdalene in the gospels who weeps and weeps, feminine tears are the water of life and renewal. I think of sacred sexuality author David Deida and how he describes the radiant beauty of a woman openly crying. The key is feeling safe enough to be open.

Often I will speak to an expectant or new mother and she will say; “I’ve been crying” and I will tell her good, this is good. Women come to my home to be wrapped in rebozo cocoons as tears slide down their faces. When we are feeling vulnerable in the childbearing year, other women are the mantles that we crave to have wrapped around us. I remember my mother telling me as I held my new baby to my breast;

“It’s the mothers that don’t cry that you need to be most worried about”

Motherwisdom. This is the dew that I drink from the leaves of my mothers and grandmothers, from the women around me. These are the mysteries of the womb. With the divine power to create also comes deep sorrow, in the next moment that sorrow becomes joy again, and around and around we go on the journey of the heart.

“Our dear Lady’s Mantle give her tears between the dawn and the dew. Kneel before her between your courses, sip them up with your tongue, and a child she’ll bring to you” goes the folklore.

And I kneel, and I drink, and I bless my forehead, womb and heart.