“Can you hold your tongue for a year and a day?” My patron God, Gwyn, challenged me.
“No,” turned out to be my answer, “no – I cannot.”
No coincidence that this year I have been connecting more deeply with aspen. Because of the talkative rattling of is leaves it is known in Welsh as coed tafod merchen ‘tree of the woman’s tongue’ and coed tafod gwragedd ‘tree of the wife’s tongue’. Similarly in Scotland it is known as ‘old wives’ tongues’.
The English, ‘aspen’ derives from the Germanic asp perhaps relating to its snake-like bark or to snake’s tongues. Its Latin name, Populus tremens, refers to its leaves which are said to quake restlessly as it provided wood for the cross Jesus was crucified on.
An ominous tree, associated with prophecy, until recently it existed at the peripheral edges of my vision. Small stands in local woodlands, on the edges of roads and paths, just one considerable colony at Fishwick Bottoms.
I’ve spoken to it in passing and sat beneath its leaves and listened to its chatter. I’ve journeyed to it, met the King and Queen of the Aspens, learnt that it was the favoured tree of Orddu, Orwen and and their ancestors, the Witches of Annwn who have become spiritual guides for me in the traditions of the Old North.
Orddu showed me that the woodland in Pennant Gofid, ‘the Valley of Grief’ was an aspen wood that had been there since the end of the Ice Age. We walked together as she pointed out the fungi and buzzing flies in areas of decay. Afterwards I learnt that aspen supports numerous detrivore species of fungi, up to 155 on a rotting log and saxoproxylic Diptera favour the microhabitats created by decaying sap under its bark.
Aspen is usually a sociable tree that grows in colonies yet Orddu introduced me to a single Talking Aspen she and her ancestors sat under to read the prophecies from its leaves. I was instructed to sit beneath it with her mother, Orwen’s skull, to listen to the wagging tales of old and dead witch’s tongue.
I was shown, in autumn, how the Witches of Annwn fly as birds of aspen.
“In winter, when the aspen is silent,” Gwyn asked me, “can you hold your tongue?”
“No,” turned out to be my answer, “no – I cannot.”
Like old women, old wives, old witches, this middle-aged nun of the aspened suburbs and wife of the King of Annwn cannot hold her tongue.
Aspen needs to tremble. Tongues need to wag. Words need to be typed. I need to write for the sake of my well being, for my Gods, for those who find inspiration in my work in spite of giving up all hope I will make a living from it.
Over my period of silence I’ve found a new way forward as a shamanic guide providing one-to-one shamanic sessions in my local community and am planning to start a shamanic circle here in Penwortham in the New Year.
Step by step my Gods and spirits are showing me my path as a nun of Annwn. Part of this is reclaiming my relationship with my abandoned creativity and embracing it as a way to health and healing for myself and others.
*Information about aspen in this document comes from ‘The Biodiversity and Management of Aspen Woodlands: Proceedings of a one-day conference held in Kingussie, Scotland, on 25th May 2001.’
‘Gwyn ap Nudd who are far in the forests for the love of your mate allow us to come home.’ ~ Speculum Christiani
Going away. Coming home. These two processes every spiritworker needs to master.
I was away for such a long part of my life, never fully in my body. Struggling with disassociation and derealisation stuck somewhere between the worlds.
Then Gwyn ap Nudd came into my life and taught me to journey to Annwn and, perhaps more importantly, how to come home. Since I met Him I have been striving to lead a life that combines the shamanic and ecstatic with being present in the here and now with the myriad beings on the land where I live.
With more difficulty, particularly since becoming a nun of Annwn, I’ve been getting to know myself a lot better – my body, my mind, my habits.
I thought that I was getting better. That I’d begun to become more aware of my cycles of driving myself too hard often when operating under some delusion such as that I’m going to become a recognised philosopher, poet, author… then realising I’m being unrealistic and burning out and dropping out.
I thought I’d cracked it but somehow similar delusions crept in around what I might be capable of as a nun of Annwn and aspiring shamanic practitioner. After my shamanic initiation and marriage to Gwyn I came back ecstatic with ambitions of running online discussions and shamanic journey circles and hit the ground with a bump when I came upon the same old barrier of lack of interest in the Brythonic tradition and was further derailed by the consequences of my mistake in reviewing a book by Galina Krasskova.
It’s taken me over two months to come back to myself, back to reality, to my limitations as an autistic person and introvert and to realise I would never have been able to hold space for group discussions or run shamanic journey circles due to my difficulties with reading and communicating with large groups and the huge drain upon my energy that these things take.
I’m fine one-to-one or with small groups of people I know and who I don’t need to mask with such as my fellow monastic devotees. But I’m not the warm smiley front-of-house meet-and-greet person who knows intuitively what each person needs and how to put them at ease fit for leading large groups.
Once again I’ve landed with a bump and a crash but as always I’ve had a wonderful God who is now my Husband to hold me through it. I’ve had the support of my mum, the land I live on, and members of the Monastery of Annwn.
I’ve finally come back home into a state of stillness and presence wherein I can stop beating myself up over my mistakes and accept who I am.
That being a nun is not about striving to be a celebrity (‘Sister Patience TM’) but leading a life of prayer and meditation centred on devotional relationship with the Gods and the land and the ancestors and journeying to Annwn to bring back inspiration and healing for one’s communities.
Accepting I am enough rather than trying to strive beyond.
Not easy. Not glamorous. But this is where and who I am. A suburban nun. At home in Penwortham with a wonderful God who dwells in my heart and countless deities and spirits and plants and creatures all around me. With Gwyn’s help I’m beginning to master the art of coming home.
I didn’t go to Tyburn to ‘go to Tyburn’. (1) I went to London to attend an introductory weekend as a prerequisite to a three year shamanic healing course. But I ended up staying in a hotel in Tyburn as it was relatively cheap. When I visit a place I like to do a bit of historical research before I go and have a map of the land past and present to help me connect with the spirits and this what I found out.
The Tyburn Tree
The dark but now absent centre of this place is the infamous Tyburn tree. It was the King’s Gallows from 1196 to 1783. It has also been known as the Elms, the Deadly Never Green Tyburn Tree and the Triple Tree (because it was a wooden triangle on three legs – a ‘three legged mare’ or ‘three legged stool’). The triangular traffic island where it once stood mirrors its structure.
All manner of criminals were executed there by being hanged, drawn, then quartered. Many of the victims were religious people of the Catholic faith – friars, priors, abbots, monks and hermits, who resisted King Henry VIII’s separation of the Church of England from legal ties to the Catholic Church and papal authority of Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries.
The Carthusian Martyrs, 18 monastics of the Carthusian Order from the London Charterhouse, were executed between 1535 and 1537. As a result of the Lincolnshire Rising, the Pilgrimage of Grace and Bigod’s Rebellion over 250 rebels met their deaths again including large numbers of monastics. Many were northerners, such as the bowbearer of the Forest of Bowland, and people from my home county, Lancashire, joined the rebellions.
This had meaning for me as a polytheistic monastic because these Catholics were standing for the freedom to practice their religion and to continue to lead monastic lives. The anglicisation of the church and dissolution of the monasteries removed much of the mysticism and sanctity from Christianity in England.
Tyburn Convent
In 1901 the Tyburn Convent was established near the site of the Tyburn Tree with a shrine to the Tyburn Martyrs. This order of Benedictine nuns was founded by Mother Marie Adèle Garnier as the Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmartre in Paris in 1898. When the nuns were forced to leave due to restrictions on monasteries in France they made their home in London.
What is unique and beautiful about their tradition is their perpetual adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. What this entails is that, at all times, day and night, at least one nun is kneeling before the eucharist worshipping Jesus’s heart.
Mother Marie is ‘honoured and remembered’ for her ‘ardent love of Christ’, ‘her heroic love of God and neighbour, her spirit of prayer, divine contemplation, rich mystical and spiritual doctrine, humility, obedience, patience, simplicity and purity of heart, and above all for her spirit of total self-abandon to the Holy Will of God, which she declared to be her unique good.’ (2)
This is one of her prayers –
‘O blessed portion! Lot worthy of envy! My heart is ready, O Lord, my heart is ready! Here I am, speak, act, inflame me, unite me to Yourself!
O Mary, O my tender Mother entrust me to Jesus, love hidden in the adorable Eucharist. Henceforth make my life become a repeating with you: I look for nothing other than Him… I know only Him alone…
Jesus, my soul is thirsting for You so unite it to Your Heart that no longer may I be able to live without You.’ (3)
When the nuns make their act of consecration they speak a prayer that has been spoken in their communities since Pope Leo XIII consecrated the world to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the 11th of June 1899.
‘Lord Jesus, Redeemer of the human race, look down upon us humbly prostrate before Your altar. Yours we are, and Yours we wish to be; but to be more surely united with You, behold we freely consecrate ourselves today to Your Most Sacred Heart. Many, indeed, have never known You; many, too, despising your precepts, have rejected You. Have mercy on them all, most merciful Jesus, and draw them to Your Sacred Heart…’ (4)
The Sacred Heart and Healing
I had never come across the perpetual adoration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus before. It resonated deeply with me because over the past few years my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, has revealed His heart to be the Heart of Annwn, which He inherited from His mother, Anrhuna, the Mother of Annwn.
My personal practice has increasingly involved devotion to the Heart of Annwn. Keeping the heart beat by drumming and chanting. Meditating, journeying on and recording the stories gifted to me about Gwyn’s Sacred Heart.
Before I set off to London I was instructed by my guides to make a pilgrimage walk to the Tyburn Tree and the Tyburn Convent. I was told I must take ‘purity, grace and the pain of the dead’ in a small obsidian spearhead I was gifted by a fellow nun of Annwn and leave it as an offering.
I did this on the first day in the early evening after I left the course. I was disappointed to find the stone and three young oak trees put there in 2014 to mark the site of the Tyburn tree had been removed. I can only guess this was done because people were hanging about the site or leaving offerings. In spite of the rush of traffic and people I paused and spoke some prayers then made my offering at the foot of the London Plane tree on the island.
I went to the Tyburn Convent and paused to pay my respects to the Tyburn Martyrs and shared my gratitude for the work of the nuns and gained a sense of release and peace and of our unity in the adoration of the Sacred Heart.
When I got back to my hotel room, although I didn’t have my drum, I played the beat of the Heart of Annwn on my knee, sung one of my chants, again imagining my offering of song as uniting with the devotion of the Tyburn Nuns.
My weekend course, The Shaman’s Pathway, with Simon Buxton of the Sacred Trust, was profoundly moving and deeply healing. Whilst the first day was more introductory on the second day we practiced ecstatic union with our spirits, healing each other, and the culimination was a powerful group healing ceremony in which I was honoured to take the role of drummer.
In the following of my heart, in alignment with Gwyn’s heart, the Heart of Annwn, I feel healing has taken place and I have received confirmation I’m on the right path in pursuing the three year training to become a shamanic healer.
Birch. From the Proto-European bhereg ‘to shine, bright, white.’ Bedwen in Welsh. Beithe in Irish. The first letter in the ogham alphabet. I haven’t been drawn to working with ogham much but the associations between birch and new beginnings have long resonated for birch is a pioneer tree. Always the first to colonise new ground, leading the way for other trees, larger woods.
There’s a particular narrow strip of birch wood I like to visit, on the side of an old tram road, next to what was once a gas works, now a new housing estate. In spite of this the trees seem to dance. It’s a place where unique fungi associated with birch can be found such as birch polypore and fly agaric.
I made a new beginning this year and am prompted for aid to turn to birch. I’m drawn to a forked birch whose twin trunks remind me of the two things I’ve been inspired to bring together this year: flowers and feathers, horticulture and shamanic healing, grounding and soul flight.
I spend some talking and listening with the birch and am shown a vision of the wind blowing birch catkins into the future and told that I must ‘dream on.’
Dream on, dream on… I realise I must dream bigger… that these two aims must serve my larger dream of becoming a nun of Annwn – a guide of souls.
Following a session with my spiritual mentor overnight I’m gifted the idea of soul guidance one-to-ones then, in divination, the butterfly image for it.
On the new moon I make the launch and pray to birch for aid chanting her name. In vision I become one with her, beautiful, strong, ready for the sap to flow.
In this month’s Way of the Buzzard Mystery School journey circle the topic is ‘preparing new ground’ and we are working with birch, rowan or alder. The birch calls to me again and I receive some transfomative insights – ‘a nun of Annwn is a pioneer species’. I must ‘prepare new ground for others’, for ‘a new woodland’, ‘move forward’, ‘root deep’, and ‘not turn back’.
I realise it’s time to step fully into my role as a nun of Annwn. Rather than returning to a secular job and remaining stuck as Lorna Smithers to give myself fully to my calling from the Gods and put everything into becoming Sister Patience. To making the Monastery of Annwn a reality both online and in the physical world.*
Pioneering with birch I have begun using my monastic name for all communications aside from financial and legal. Most of my community know now – there is no turning back.
*This has become possible because my mum has offered to help me out financially if I run out of savings before finishing my shamanic healing course in three years time. I was hoping to find paid work in horticulture but ran into the same barriers for a horticultural project officer job as for conservation due to the limitations with my autism around people management and multitasking. I also realised a physical job in a plant nursery or as a gardener would not last due to my knee problems as I can’t kneel for long and at forty-two am not getting any younger. I was thinking about cleaning again but knew longterm it would have a negative impact on my mental heath. So I asked my mum for help and she agreed rather than see me stressed again. I will be continuing to volunteer in horticulture as a way of giving back to land and community.
In the middle of winter new shoots begin to show – snowdrop, crocus, daffodil, bluebell. I’m not sure if this has always been the case. But for the last six or so years one of my mid-winter rituals has been looking for new shoots.
New shoots have been showing in my life too. I’m starting to recover from the disappointment of In the Deep not being publishable and have come to terms with the fact the veto on my becoming a professional author is for good.
Before the winter solstice I attended a beautiful in-person workshop called Bear Moon Dreaming with my spiritual mentor, Jayne Johnson, in which she led a small group through shamanic journeying and dancing into connection with bear, the moon, and into the depths of the winter landscape and hibernation. In it I became one with the Water Country and Gwyn as Winter King giving gifts to the people.
Afterwards I realised I couldn’t live my life online anymore. Spending most of my day writing at my laptop and living through this blog has not been healthy.
Around the same time the forum for the Monastery of Annwn got deleted by the member who set it up without consent of the rest of the membership. I was shocked and angry but also a little relieved as I had been spending too much time online doing admin*. When I journeyed on what to do about it I found the monastery hanging by a thread in the Void and with my guides and other animals had to drag it back to the Forest of Annwn and reroot it. This became a metaphor for both what the monastery needs and I need too.
I spent the last moon cycle praying and discerning my future course. I received two answers and the first was that I needed to return to outdoor work. Previously I had been working in conservation and done a little horticulture and since then had been continuing to grow plants.
I have slowly been developing a relationship with Creiddylad as a Goddess of flowers with whom I have been working to improve our garden and the wildflower area in Greencroft Valley where I have volunteered since 2012.
So I have started volunteering with Let’s Grow Preston and Guardians of Nature with the hope this will lead to paid work. I feel horticulture will sit well with my vocation as monastics traditionally labour several hours in their gardens.
My second answer was to train to become a shamanic practitioner. This fit with my having been journeying with Gwyn for over ten years to bring back inspiration from Annwn to my communities and with my practicing core shamanism with the Way of the Buzzard and more recently with Jayne.
It’s something I’ve considered in the past but have been put off because I don’t feel good enough and have doubted whether I have it in me to be a healer.
Yet Gwyn has made it clear I must take this step and has assuaged my doubts. In relation to my presupposition, ‘I don’t have a healing bone in my body’, He reminded me of the time I had a similar thought, ‘I can’t grow things because everything I touch dies’, yet then got good at growing plants. He told me healing is a skill that lies within me and it is time to manifest it.
He also explained ‘it is like the transition between bard and vates’. I’ve been ‘the bard in the meadhall’. Giving up drinking has been for the purpose of clearing my head so I can hear the voices of the subtler spirits. Only I won’t later be becoming a druid but a nun of Annwn – an entirely new vocation.
Thus the new shoots push up through the surface and I see how to reroot. By getting my hands back in the soil through horticulture and working towards becoming a shamanic practitioner to heal both myself and others.
I will also be continuing to blog here about my journey and sharing devotional material as service to my Gods and for my patrons and wider readership.
*It turned out this wasn’t a bad thing as it has given us the chance to start looking for a better forum and share the administrative workload more fairly.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 