Honesty – The Sanctuary of Vindos

I.
You are the plant who tells the truth
(as if other plants are fickle).

Your flowers are purple.
Your leaves are amplexicaul.
Your seed pods are known as siliques.

Their stubble reminds me of a dice game.

I count them – no ones, twos, threes.
I see some fours, fives, sixes,
sevens, eights, no nines.

To count in nines is just too terrifying.

II.
I was brought up to tell the truth thinking
it would lead to praise, to handclaps,

not to snotty sobbing no tissues
can stem, no pillow can smother, no word.

I did not know that truth is ugly and unflowerlike.

That your long long taproot reaches into the underworld
where the dark moons of your seeds fall and fall
and fall and fall and fall and germinate.

III.
Lunaria, you are like the moon,
waxing and waning, the call of magic
that attempts to assemble all the parts of my soul

in the dark tower of your being before the time of your fall.

The dark nun, the dark magician speaking
our truths in our tears and blood,

learning discipline and devotion
to the truths before our eyes.

V.
In your presence
we are held by our God
who is the darkness of the edges
all around us even when He is asleep or dead
haunting the shadows of the inbetween places in leafy dapples.

VI.
There are two sides to your coin, to your money pennies, to your bets.

You pose the question of how many nuns are in the void,
how many spirits of Annwn can dance
on my fingertips.

As many
as the seeds
that will fall in my garden
this year and grow and germinate

beneath the soil and beneath my skin

as I strive to make a study in honesty
through the seasons
every year.

‘This is a point in our lives where we decide (or are forced) to throw the anchor down, to live in one place, have a teacher, dig in.’
– Martin Shaw

The word ‘anchorite’ or ‘anchoress’ comes from the Greek, anachoreo, meaning ‘to withdraw’.
– Mary Wellesney

I am not quite an anchorite.
I have not yet been buried alive.
Not with Christ. Not even with Gwyn.
I do not live in a cell twelve metres
by twelve metres with servants
to bring my food, remove my waste
and feed me books in exchange
for insights from a tiny window called a squint.

I have not yet given up all my worldly possessions or ambitions.

I like to run and might have been one of the nuns
who ran away like Isolde de Heton from Whalley Abbey
in the 1470s but not for forbidden children or men

but simply for the desire to roam however far
my walking, running or cycling legs will carry me
through the labyrinth of this land following the streets
that lie on older streets, on pilgrim’s paths and padways
and Roman roads and horse paths and deer paths.

The horses in me bolt from their stables when kept in too long.

They run with the hounds before the wolves and ravens,
the owls with their crazy eyes mad on psychedelics,
the portents from the stars and our gardens.

Honesty is here and all the pavement plants.

I am told I must be ‘a guide to the soul.’

I fear my revelations will be mundane and suburban.

They will include words like ‘cloths’ and ‘washing’ and ‘washing up’
but also honesty, Lunaria annua, enchanter’s nightshade,
Circaea lutetiana, ivy, hedera, yew, Taxus buccata.

In a vision I am a hell-hound prowling around my anchor.
I am the anchoress who howls and where my head is I do not know.