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.

Lavender

Lavender came into my awareness several times over the last few weeks, asking for her own love letter. What would a herbal be without me? She seemed to say. Even a herbal that is so far half poetry half patchwork.

It’s true, said I, that you have been a good friend to me, but we have not journeyed together deeply enough yet for the words to flow. Have you ever made a challenge to a plant spirit? I should have known better.

It was raining and I was restless. There is a feral part of me on days like these, in certain moon phases, in the rise and fall of my inner tides, that longs to tear my skin off and howl with the electric currents running up my spine.

As a young girl I was sure that everybody could tell I was an animal pretending to be a human, betrayed by body hair, scent and blood. I remember being arrested by a bottle of Femfresh in the shower of an older woman that I knew, horrified with the sudden awareness that my worst fear was true, this was something I was supposed to scrub away. A relief to give birth to my first child and feed him with my body, to know that I had been right all along about my animal nature. Comfortable in my skin for the first time.

And yet…

There are some days the skin feels tight again and begins to erupt with feathers and patches of fur. And on this particular day nothing was going right, my teeth felt too sharp for my mouth, my fingers wringing together like claws wanting to grasp onto something. I sat next to my husband in the car and sobbed and sobbed. Only a hundred years ago he could have had me incarcerated with hysteria.

The things that are “wrong” with me make quite an extensive list. These days I measure out my energy like a precious elixir. As I am tempted to pray for death in between the throbs of my head the ancestral spirits and the plants whisper stories in my ear.

The pain is the portal to my best work, and I can even now hear the spiritual gurus in their cunning voices saying “see? You don’t want to get better. There has to be a reward to make illness worth it otherwise we wouldn’t create it.”

Maybe they are right. In the depths of trauma therapy I began to become concerned that all of this was to try to make me a balanced and healthy person by the standards of patriarchal society. Was therapy a ruse to tame the wild spirit? After all, to be “healthy” in therapeutic terms was to be able to go back to the place that mentally tortured me and be able to stay calm and tolerate further abuse.

Apparently most people when they get a cut will put a plaster on it and move on. I seemed to enjoy making artwork with the blood first. This was a problem for a society that likes everything to be neat and tidy, that sees women’s emotions as pathological.

As with all advice on anxieties and disorders there is always this imperative to be calm. In theory I agree with discussing things rationally, although the word is often used as a way to dismiss women’s intuition. Rationally feels like eating a sensible balanced meal when you want to gorge on what your heart desires.

Some well-meaning person giving advice on staying calm, and I have been this person, will say - “have you thought about trying lavender oil?” the very phrase conjuring up ideas of sanitised spas, white towels, and tidy women taking you somewhere cleaner and blander. Your emotions are uncomfortable for me. Please be calmer.

But calm does not equal regulated. I have been terrifyingly calm when I wish I could have screamed. Sometimes it makes me shake and sweat in remembered fear.

Lavender is feral, and she is not the Femfresh of mental health. Have you seen her? Spilling over the pot in which you contained her, pruned back only to come back thicker and muskier. Tied to bed frames for protection like a fierce lioness protecting her cub.

The lavender bags made from the garden when the lavender is taking over again. I am secretly thrilled when plants take over, no matter how inconvenient. I hope one day they do.

I was sobbing in the car and the only thing I could think to do was to take the lavender bag I keep on the gearstick and crush it between my grasping fingers and inhale her scent. Reminding me of who I was.

I stood in the rain in my thin summer dress and let it soak me. Return, return, lavender seemed to be saying. Not to a place that is calm and lifeless but to a place that is wilder. My husband placed his coat on my shoulders. It was only later I became aware of, at the moment did not have the words to say - meet me on this mountain and only then will l let you lead me down again.

The first advice I was ever given from another doula was - you have to meet a woman where she is at. Whatever extreme emotion she is gripped by as her body opens up as an otherworldly portal, you need to show her that you can handle it by meeting her there. This is women’s work, the work of grandmothers who cackle and say “that’s life, dearie.”

This is what lavender does, as she embraces you and your wild nature. In her arms you are able to release and regulate. So I found a place on the damp earth where the wind blew hard and I danced with the butterflies.

Lavender comes from the French lavande, meaning, to wash. Not in a chemical stripping of everything that makes us deliciously womanly, but a sacred anointing that reminds us that we are both divine and human.

Jean-Yves Leloup wrote that humans are the bridge between animals and angels and the spiritual journey lies in illuminating the places where they intersect. I have found this to be true. Lavender deeply regulates us, not by making us calm but by witnessing our pain and weaving the wild with the holy.

Later that day, while serving another woman with a drum beat and a stream of light, with the spirit of the jaguar in my lap as I sang of bloody thighs and crone eyes with my crown chakra spinning. I wed the animal to the angel and walked myself down the mountain.

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.