Meadowsweet

The day the red hen became broody was the day I thought I might be pregnant. Two sisters in earth’s garden creating life under the light of the full buck moon. My red moon baby, my spinmother child. Her light illuminated and withdrew, I did not bleed. There had been many messages through the women around me for months beforehand, women who were sensitive to spirits. The messages were saying the same thing - “I am coming, mama. I know my name. This time, instead of reading lines you must count the moons, like all the women who came before you.” 

I have two older children and I cooked the roast that day while imagining what it might be like with a baby. Remember, I told myself sternly. You have it easy now. At first they are in the sling, close to your heart. When they are older they can sit in the high chair and play with the wooden spoons and you will pray they don’t get fed up before you are done. I shared with my husband my inner experience and he said “yes, but I’ll be there to help too.” 

It was then that I realised I was talking like a general preparing his troops for war, because everything I know about motherhood I learned in the trenches. “Nobody is coming” was my inner monologue in those days. “Nobody is coming and that’s okay”. Because it has to be. I pay for those years now of course, with chronic symptoms that flare and vitality that needs to be carefully distributed.

I spent the next day with a secret smile on my face and with cries of joy saw that after the heavy rains had come the meadowsweet. “Meadowsweet, likes wet feet” I sang like a mantra on my way back from the postbox. Last year the meadowsweet had stirred and held me through all the conflicting feelings of becoming a bride, and this year it was midwifing the fear and hope of new life. Or was it the fear of my own calling that was becoming louder every day and harder to ignore? Plants were the first doulas, everything else came after.

In my heart, I know what seeds I am planting in the womb. I know the intentions I am nurturing. Maybe the sun was too bright that day, I thought that maybe my body was already tired from a little growing life, my head began to pound and I was so worried the pain heralded bleeding.

Meadowsweet with its scent like almonds and honey, the holy herb of St Hildegard of Bingen. Modern headache tablets are white and bitter from trying to isolate and synthesise the one ingredient to alleviate pain. Meadowsweet shows us that our sweetness lies in our complexity, our holiness is in our wholeness, any attempt to reduce our magic to one ingredient will leave a sour taste indeed. The removal of our pain will never be instantaneous and is never the ultimate goal, but we can ease it with the gifts that our mother provides, can allow the plants to soften us into it. Then we can share it with the world as our own unique medicine. Not synthesised, but raw and real.

We are women in labour, birthing our creations into the world. Where are we afraid to surrender and release? Where are we afraid to dip our toes incase we get wet feet?

I wish sometimes my past wasn’t so complex. I wish my journey as a mother had been less dark. Life, like radical innocence, bursts from the riverbanks in a white froth of meadowsweet. Like the crashing of the waves on the shore, renewing and washing away anything that is not love.

Migraines take you to another dimension, a plunge into the shadow world, every time a small death. The pain persisted. My fingers began to crack. I shivered, cold in my bones. I knew, like women always know. The hen deserted her eggs and my husband gathered them for us to eat. They call it phantom brooding, a practice for the real thing. Six days after expected, as I drummed for a woman on the other side of the world and initiated her into her womb healing path, the gates of my womb opened.

I remain, as ever, a servant of the mystery.

And so it is.

St John's Wort and the baby oaks

The day I gathered the wort was the day the cat killed three mice and I had to test drive my car after yet another repair. The day the sun was hiding and I had anxiety that had no place to go. I felt shy, being along a popular walking path - but that is where the plant was, so that’s where I found myself.

Many herbalists will advise that the flowers of St John’s wort are to be preserved for midwinter, when we can take out our jars of sunshine and apply the medicine at the darkest point in the year. And yet midwinter is the rebirth of the sun, a time of hope. At midsummer, around St John’s day, when we gather the flowers, as blazing as the sun may be it brings with it the promise of the darkness. The darkness is implicit in the turning of the wheel. This is as good as it’s going to get - it’s all downhill from here.

It seems to me that depression is often a fear of movement. How does midsummer feel to those of us who feel safer in a cosy nook, whose response to feeling exposed is often to freeze or hide? What is it about the sun that illuminates and reveals the shadows? We are afraid of being seen, perhaps of ending up like poor St John whose flaming dedication to love and truth, to revealing the shadows in the world, lost him his head.

When I learned about the indigenous practice of swallowing the sun, it took me back to my childhood where I would open my mouth instinctively and swallow down the sun’s rays. I had forgotten until that moment. When you’re depressed they ask you, how long since you lost interest in the things you used to love? For a lot of us we lost these things in childhood, when we did something magical for the last time, although we didn’t know they were the last time.

When gathering plants, pay attention to how you feel and what is growing alongside it. For the feelings will reveal what the medicine is, deeper than what you can read in a book. It’s common, for example, to see plantain alongside nettle, the remedy for the injury side by side. I gazed in wonder at all the baby oaks growing around the sunshine herb. It is surprisingly difficult to grow an oak if you’ve ever tried, needing to judge when it's had enough shelter and nurturing and can now be transplanted outside. That is part of the reason they are so magnificent. Something so delicate and fragile growing into something so strong and enduring. Yet here they were, thriving with the help of St John.

St John’s wort, for the anxiety that comes from being seen. For reclaiming joy and childlike wonder in the things you used to love. For the person who feels fragile as a baby oak but whose core is solid and unwavering.

With love.

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.