A letter to love
Midsummer, and the forest is vivid with life. Alban Hefin, the longest day, light and expansiveness bristling in June air. Scents wafting on the breeze, rich birdsong orchestrating the abundance. Brittany has a dense concentration of ancient megaliths and parts of the Carnac alignments are arguably linked to the Summer Solstice, particularly the nearby Crucuno stone rectangle which contains several geometrical allignments. Our ancestors left definitive temples to the sun at Stone Henge and on Callanish (which also tracks complex lunar patterns) and in the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney. Sun and life expanding into the world. The time of the fire element, the triumph of all green and growing things.
We are barely home from a month in Ireland. I’ve been immersed in interior work and letting my body rest after the drama of hospital just before we left home for the trip. It has been a deeply lunar month, a month of retreat with time to write and journal, time to think and be.
At Sally’s barn, a course in Celtic spirituality that allowed me to dive into symbol and story, to follow ancient myths that teach us still, immersing in the stories of Culhwch and Olwen, of Blodeuwedd, stories of our oneness with the world we inhabit, the fluidity of all life as we dwell in a particular arrangement of stardust for a little while as these particular, precious conscious bodies each of us calls “I”, knowing as Walt Whitman put it in ‘Song of Myself’ that
every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
A herbal course stretching my sense of healing. Wholeness not as perfection, but calling, celebrating imperfect bodies that allow us to experience this extraordinary world, as exquisite as it is terrible.
How do we hold meaning in these precarious times?
How do we listen to plant allies and to the land, keep knowledge embodied, make wisdom communal?
Reading David George Haskell’s How Flowers Made our World, over and over he stresses how flourishing and relationship go hand in hand:
The innovators did many things, united by a theme: Flowering plants turned “I” into “we”. By intensifying relationships with other species, they made success a community affair.
How do we give attention to what matters?
Not the noise, not the fake urgencies, not the calls to manufactured ‘peak experiences’, to green consumerism still wrapped in plastic, to exhausting ourselves on a hamster wheel.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
writes Mary Oliver in the poem ‘Wild Geese’
At Reagh, a birthday under a fat gibbous moon that lights the sky to midnight. A few days later, sitting under a full blue moon in a magical garden. Unlike the twelve moons associated with a particular month, we have no seasonal name for the blue moons that will arise when a quarter has an extra full moon. She’s a wanderer, a translator between worlds,
blue moon
threshold moon
enchanted moon
second blossom moon
gift moon
wandering moon
Whoever we are, whatever moon we sit under, what threads through is attention. Always what matters in the quietest of times or the most turbulent of times is relationship, which rests on sustained listening, deep observation, embodying what we have learnt in heart and gut. Attention, love, devotion – these things are inseparable. What we care for tells us who we are.
At Reagh I make a flower essence of cramp bark (guelder rose) using the leaves and flowers. The biliary colic followed by a diet so careful to avoid fats (good ones too) in any appreciable amount began as clenching and spasm, pain and tension. Cramp bark whispers: you do not have to contract forever. She is a herb who suits terrains where tension has become chronic armour, where pain comes in gripping waves, the nervous system braces reflexively, the body holds on too hard. Soften. Yield. Open.
The thread between the inner work and the world, the thread between the deep blue moon and the bright noon sun of Summer Solstice.
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
– William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 2.
Attention, devotion, love open us and in opening we have more space. The spaciousness of midsummer. Not to be poured out and exhausted again, but to find that in giving to what we love we are also filled, made more that the sum of our imagined individuality.
Like flowers, making life a communal affair.
with Alban Hefin blessings,
Together we make a little alchemy
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