Yarrow

Last year yarrow taught me about feathery soft boundaries, as I became a student of love, going right back to the beginning. I had so much to learn, but I knew in my heart there was a way to love somebody without losing yourself. I recently used the yarrow gathered from my old village to nurse my husband through the flu as I myself was needing nursing, but his need was greater.

Duty is not as delicious as other words I may use to describe my life, but it has its own kind of beauty. Without our duty to each other, there would be no family, no relationship, and our obligations weave us together to keep us all protected and cherished. We become a mycelial network, where love is distributed as the vital nutrient.

The village where the plant grew was the same place my seed self had been planted in the soil and nurtured by mountains and waterfalls. I was heartsore to leave but the brave yarrow at the gates of my new home welcomed me and reminded me the earth is my true home wherever I am. This year she spoke to me through a dream, because for me so often love has led to public humiliation, and yarrow is the plant of courage. A soldier’s plant for the wounded warrior of the heart.

In summer you’ll often see the poor shorn sides of the road after the council have mowed it, with the plucky little yarrow bobbing in the wind amidst all the devastation. The only survivors. “I’m a survivor” I remarked to my mother the day before I wrote this piece. Those words could have come from yarrow itself.

Also known as “woundwort”, soldiers would use it to staunch their wounds in battle. I can just imagine amidst the bodies, the wounded, their lifeblood soaking into the soil, the worst of what humans can do to each other, yarrow springing up feathery and fearless as always.

There were once three bright souls in the ether and one wanted to learn about love. “I want to be broken by love, a martyr for love, I want to feel my human heart break into a million pieces. Then I want to crawl and drag myself back to the battlelines again.” The second soul said, “I can do this for you, for I have chosen to cover my bright soul in a cloak of darkness and be the aggravator and punisher in the world of duality. I will set the stage.” The third soul said to the first one “You’ll break for me, I choose you both, it is agreed.”

When they leave their human bodies and meet again, it will be like actors leaving the stage and going for drinks to celebrate the success of their closing night.

On earth, there was a woman as prickly as a horse-chestnut with all the same sweetness inside. When she felt threatened her body would shake and her spirit would float away to disembodied heights. There was a man who was very patient, for he had a need of the sweetness, wanted to take it home to warm his hearth but in his grounded wisdom knew that precious things take time. The woman was like a wild thing, would lash out with spirit hooves and snapping teeth and he tried to stay very still. Life had not taught him to be afraid. Her eyes were panicked white, her coat gleaming with adrenaline sweat. She only forgot her fear when talking to the plants or when held in the laps of very wise women.

The earth, like human bodies, moves slowly. She could not say when it occurred, only that in the year it took the yarrow to recede and send out its leaves again, the horse-chestnut woman cracked open in the tenderest of hands. On a sunny day she carried the yarrow flowers back to the home of the patient man, who had left for work that morning grinning at her through the window. She now knew that separation and union, like forgetting and remembering, are two halves of the same coin. She remembered her soul’s story and the promises she had made in the ether. A bright soul in a human body made of soft leaves and white flowers.

Sweetened Mead

Last night I had a dream that she handed me back the lavender bag I’d made for her and I held it to my nose and inhaled its sweetness. “but I made it for you,” I protested and she replied “you need it more right now”. In the morning I cried in the kitchen because I wasn’t done healing and I had to help him heal now and still I chopped the onions and stirred in the cayenne pepper. Feeling unmothered I walked to the meadow and the ladybirds showed me how to cling on no matter how hard the wind blew and the butterflies showed my spirit how to be light again and the oak tree took on part of my sorrow and I realised we are all healing each other all the time, passing love back and forth like sweetened mead.

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.