Hair and Braid Magic

When did women lose the braids, when did we stop singing prayers into each other’s hair, weaving with clever fingers? The grandmothers knew this to be ritual as they readied themselves for the day strand by strand, then unwinding their hair and releasing as the sun set. A tighter weave for protection, and action. A looser braid for peace, rest and receptivity. Scraps of ribbon inviting abundance or clarity. Women’s magic is the most simple of all, woven into daily life as the heart of our communities, as mothers and daughters and friends. What are you sweeping from your home, what are you stirring in the pot, praying on your beads, braiding in your hair? This morning I was gazing back like Lot’s wife and feeling myself about to become immobile as stone. My hair was not pliable and soft then, was hard and scratchy as if to say “don’t come too close”. It was bound and could not be unbound and I hung my amulets from it and felt its reassuring weight. Today I am holding my grief in my hair to keep me moving and as night falls I will unwind it and shed a tear and sing of mother mountains and a woman who was beloved by them.

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.

Selkie

I put my selkie pendant on that morning and found myself fully clothed in the sea. “I will swim, and I will fly, sing the songs the sea has brought me” my daughter sings as she floats on her back, hazel eyes open to the sky and hair flowing around her. Witch eyes, turning green with sea air and salty tears. “The seaweed looks like elderberries, mama” “that’s right.” I ask her if she remembers the story I told her of the women who put their seal skins back on and slip home into the water and would she like to go home with the seals one day? She remembers and says I want to stay with you, but I would like to ride a dolphin. “Maybe I should offer you back to mother sea anyway, return her daughter to her” she giggles and wriggles and says “say more things, mama” I lick my lips and taste salt, remembering the monthly cravings for it and the debilitating pain I inherited from my mother. In the tales they say the selkie woman pined away for the sea, for she could not thrive on the land. It seems like I come from a line of pining women, who can become immobile with the ache… maybe the craving is the thirst to slip back into the dark deep whence we came. Taste salt on our lips once more. Later we leave the sea to eat welsh cakes and I drink tea. Mother and daughter on the rock. I had been trying to learn the sea song for so long I wrote it down and brought it with me. We are given so much and sometimes all we have to give in return is a song.