Tag: Plants

New Shoots and Rerooting

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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.

Lenten Rose

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If only life was so simple.

Like you I try to hide my face and my tears
for my boy-god and my longing for some kind of miracle.

I did not plant you, but I grew up alongside you
and have known you for almost forty years.

So close you were invisible
and I never asked
your name.

Hellbeborus, ‘to kill, to injure, food.”

You are dark green evergreen life and bones.

You remind me of cartilage creaking in my bad knees
when they are not tracking right like the sound
of a rocking horse or a rocking chair
or the fall of a doll’s house.

Memories creak and my attempts to forget them.

If not for my knees I would run forever,
until skeletal – the perfect rose.

Like you I am happy to stay in place
repeating the same patterns and the same cycles
yet the world will not have it that way – it likes to break us
and remove us from our habits and our homes

to journey by candlelight or dead starlight
to the land of the King of Bones

whilst the sound of spring flowers
opening is the sound of something happening.

The lampshade over my face disguises my identity.

All I want is to stay another forty years, repeating the same patterns
over again, but I hear another king is trying to build a road
to Annwn from the bones of his enemies.

This poem addresses the hellebores in my back garden. It is partly based on frustrations with minor health problems. I have recently been diagnosed with rosacea (facial redness) and it has made me feel even less like showing my face in public. After cutting down my running over winter, as I’m increasing my mileage, my anterior knee pain ‘runner’s knee’ has returned. After hoping strength training had cured it, it is holding me back from attaining my goal of returning to 30 miles a week. The boy-god I speak of, also the King of Bones, is a guise of Gwyn, my patron God, a King of Annwn, has been appearing to me in as I write about Annwn before the creation of the world, long before humans and medieval tales.

Review: Creatures by Greg Hill

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Creatures by Greg HillGreg Hill lives in Wales. He was editor of The Anglo-Welsh Review and contributes regularly to Welsh literary magazines. I’ve followed his blog for a while and was delighted when I heard about the release of his first full length collection of poetry in print; Creatures.

The title alone creates intrigue. What kind of creatures? The epigraph replies; ‘All creaturely things… Plants growing, / Roads running, / Rivers flowing, / Places that sing.’ It is clear from the outset this collection is about an animate landscape where every being is a creature, alive and sentient.

The first ekphrastic poem is based on the picture on the cover; Fidelma Massey’s sculpture, ‘Water Mother,’ who dreams thoughts of water into being. Here, the ‘cosmic ebb and flow’ of thought and water is contained in the poem. Analogies between living water and perception recur throughout the book. In ‘Cwm Eleri’ the poem’s tight structure fails to contain the river, which slips from grasp like time. In ‘Myddleton’s River’ water-ways link London, Wales and the underworld, forming a conduit for complicated alchemical processes of mental and physical transformation.

The contrast between our immediate perception of creatures and those aspects of their being impossible to grasp is central. A jackdaw sitting happily in the hearth becomes ‘an image… a token of wildness… like a jigsaw piece from another puzzle;’ a homely and familiar event made strange. Greg writes that as a heron dips out of sight ‘a part of me fell out of the sky with it,’ lost ‘except that something / settles in the flow of these words.’ We can never completely grasp our perceptions. Only through words can they find permanent representation.

Several poems present roads, paths and boundaries as living entities and how our understanding of them shifts once they are crossed and they slip into memory. If we try to return, the roads are ‘dull,’ ‘dusty,’ ‘empty.’ Our former selves are shadows, unfamiliar reflections. ‘Strange border guards’ usher us ‘from what / we neither know nor recognise.’ These haunting and complex poems demonstrate how choices shape our relationship with the landscape and hence our memories.

The mysteries of the Bardic Tradition and its creatures are explored in novel ways. ‘Awen’ depicts a shepherd lad inspired to speak poetry by a spirit ‘like a forest god’ who is elusive as the words he inspires. Four episodes from the Mabinogion are covered. I was fascinated by ‘A Scaffold for a Mouse,’ which depicts ‘Manawydan living in a dream / landscape with the life / conjured out of it like a flat plane.’ Through his ‘firm grip’ on the mouse, ‘a small thing / for a great purpose,’ he breaks the ‘powerful magic’ of Llwyd, awakening ‘form to its true nature’ thus freeing Rhiannon, Pryderi and Cigfa.

This collection depicts a relationship with the creaturely world that is on the surface simple and direct yet beneath mysterious and disconcerting. Each time I return to these poems I discover new meanings and thematic relationships within the whole. I’d recommend this book to anybody who likes poetry with lots of depth and has a love for nature, myth and creatures.

Creatures can be purchased through Lulu here: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/greghillpoetry

Greg Hill’s poetry site is here: http://greghill.weebly.com/
Greg’s blog, Hill’s Chroicle can be found here: http://hills-chronicle.blogspot.co.uk/

Gwyn Portrait, April’s End

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The huntsman has ridden all night, following the brilliance of the spirit roads- the shining tracks that criss-cross the island of Britain. Instead of returning home he remains here for dawn, listening to the idiosyncrasies of each bird’s song, watching dew form on blades of grass, on petals of hawthorn blossoms and may flowers.

He is and is not the mist, riding through damp meadows over hills, mountains and moors on a pale horse accompanied by a hound of the same complexion. He is and is not each sun-lit cloud he travels with, the touch and whisper of the wind.

He cannot stay here long, for this world we see as the land of the living is not his. He must return home to Annwn, the Otherworld, to prepare for a battle that cannot be won. To fight for a maiden he shouldn’t have loved, shouldn’t still love… in bluebells and forget-me-nots, emerging greens and white and yellow flowers he sees her colours.

For a moment he is possessed by memories of their passion, and the crimes it drove him to. A glimpse of his blacked face in a reed strewn pool shows no amount of war paint can mask his guilt, which he must live with for as long as there are people to sing his songs.

He searches for a sign. What is Judgement Day? When is it? Although he knows the language of the trees and plants, the tracks of every wild creature and the flight of birds, these questions are beyond his power to divine. When the worlds end, will Creiddylad and I be together again?

May Flower, Penwortham

Mary of the Marsh

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Enduring years of disconnection,
incredulity of stars,
anger beneath the heavens,
she scathed the priests and walked alone,
drifting among chapels, knowing she didn’t belong,
her robes of night fell on soft rushes.

They say she walked along the marsh.
They say she walked out to the river.
They say she looked out to the sea.

In the damp, dark parishes
paradise was never hers,
she walked amongst the outcasts and the sick
healing wounds that should never open,
seeing what shouldn’t be seen,
her robes of night fell on troubled waters.

Mary of the lepers,
Mary of the marsh,
I saw you running to the river,
I saw you running to the sea.
How you longed to sail away…