The last month has been a deep delving into old-new territory. Things feel familiar and strange at the same time. There was some travel. I flew to England. I spent a few days in story with wonderful teacher and story master Martin Shaw and new friends on the same path of searching within myth time for meaning. I watched the partial full moon eclipse with them by a fire and didn’t write an update here, too much in the shadows to share. I wandered for a day on the moor in Devon and had what I think was an initiation with Hawthorn that I’m still digesting and wondering how to share. I went to an academic conference and shared research I did a few years ago on Wilton Abbey and the women that read there in the 13th century. I recently had an important realization about the relevance of this side of my work. A discussion in July with an evolutionary astrologer Sabrina Monarch which led to a discovery about my life mission: not speaking for the flowers but bringing the past to the present. Maybe speaking for the flowers also brings the past to the present in a way. I’m nurturing forgotten connections, often feeling I’m in direct contact with plant ancestors when doing so, and this, like academic research, takes some time and processing. Then I went to Montreal for a few days (the city! the botanic garden! the market! the heat! the poutine! the nine breathing bodies in the hostel room!) and got the shingles.
So now I’m home in Vermont with the shingles, feeling the burning under my skin, deep in the nerve system, and how it reflects the ripening time out there: this fire inside of reds and yellows and oranges that has come to the surface. I feel like my illness is also the culmination of the eclipse time when I was working with my shadows and focusing on what I wanted to release: here is the proof on my skin, blisters of what I want to be free of, my own dis-ease in the world. There is anger there, diffuse, at the way the world turns, at the men in charge, at the way I am seen, at the damage done. A first harvest of this, erupting. I like working with illness this way. How do my symptoms reflect what I am feeling? How do they reflect what is happening in the world? It helps to bear the illness not to take the symptoms too personally, and to understand how our understanding of the symptoms is a part of the healing. I’m taking Saint John’s wort tincture made by a neighbor, a mushroom tincture made by a local herbalist, Swiss Echinacea tincture, and an antiviral while slathering my sores in Saint John’s wort oil (made before I left and left outside while I traveled) and calamine lotion. Let me know if you want to know more about my protocol that seems to be doing me well! A good mix of allopathic and herba medecine, after an urgent visit to the doctor, though I do not wish this tingling painful curse of secret stocked virus on you.
Lughnasadh is the Celtic festival of the ripening time, when everything is at its most green. It celebrates the god Lugh, of the Long Arm, the Shining One, god of the spear and the sun. The Romans associated him with Mercury, who appropriately went direct this week. We are now called to move forward boldly with our skills. I had a fire last night to outwardly burn what needed to go, old remnants of words written long ago and some herbs saved through the seasons to give to the fire and purify our purging. Life is quick and flowing now. The monarchs are out and they never rest. The robins have placed three more pale blue eggs in their nests, and the bird song is crystalline in the forest. I saw a doe with two fawns across the pond, flicking flies away with the whites of their tails. Life runs quickly now, and I’m in it and I don’t know how to catch it. I don’t try. It’s warm and fast and busy and buzzing. I feel in this sanctuary here, where you can still hear the world the way it wants to be heard, where the silence isn’t silence and the stars still sing as they are born. And I’ve been drinking the richest raw milk and fermented things and sleeping, and dreaming of the gifts I want to offer the world.
And yet death is also here, perhaps never so present as during the peak of the harvest. Lugh’s grandfather was Balor who lived in the underworld. While I was away my old rabbit died, after fourteen years of companionship, and it’s hard to be without him now, my old friend who was so true. The eclipse time is one of leaving. In the forest I found Ghost Pipe clusters and a deer skull with some teeth still in place. I could wriggle them but not get one to come out. I don’t know how to read the signs of this death. I can only stare. And the shingles burning makes me think of my own certain demise, our brightness that will one day burst into darkness and go back to the earth, or maybe the stars. So the wheel comes around again, and we know that we are living bright and special days of leaves and flowers and sounds. And I am grateful and tend to the fire inside. The new moon is a special time for this tending, after the dark moon and the dying. I made a wish on Jupiter who came out first and bright last night, and saw a long-armed shooting star who took my wish on. I like thinking of Lugh and the Lion as bright bearers of this month’s intentions.
Blessings to your fires of summer! Please get in touch if you are interested in following the cycles of the year with me. New offers are a two-hour class on plant communication and flower essence making and individual creative coaching with the plants. I’d love to talk to you about them and you can make an appointment here. You can also support me on Patreon where I offer plant inspired poetry and flower wisdom. I’d love to roll into autumn with you, with whatever you are releasing or calling in.
May your wheels keep smoothly turning and your harvests be fruitful!