The wind is wild today. It slams cold into my face up at the hill fort and harries the trees, making the beech, with all their fresh, young, and oh so green leaves, tremble. The oaks are slower, calmer, not so hasty. Their leaves are only just uncurling, amber drops unfurling, cautious.
And I stand with my back to my tree and I think how young and fragile-strong it feels. How all alone. It? Not him? And I wonder. Is this just another projection? Have I got it wrong again? Is this my self-tree? And for the first time I notice another, on the other side of the track - larger, wider, more solid. And he (for this one, surely, is he?) doesn’t stand alone like my tree. Other trees bustle around. Young beech saplings crowd around his roots. And the thickest ivy (as thick as my upper arm) sticks like a vice to his trunk. I tentatively tug it but it’s clinging tight. And again it bothers me. But then I figure he probably likes it like that, really. But then again, if you’re a tree, what choice do you have?
There are bluebells everywhere.
The scent sends me back, thudding through time, to Gaunts House. I had gone to write about retreating, was only able to spare a few days – how ironic. And I was restless, a bit lost without the flurry of deadlines and the thrum of the city. And so I walked, mind-fretting – and came across a bluebell wood.
And cried, if I recall. And sank into it. And that was a point at which I could have taken my life in a totally different direction because, I realized, I didn’t need anything. And I meditated a lot and did yoga and helped out in the garden, planting stuff, and didn’t really talk, just smiled, and it was good. But then I went home and ego said ‘Be normal! Be successful! Be a good cog!’ and soul shrank back again, shy as bluebells.
Anyhow. Every walk in the woods is a medicine walk for me. Things appear on my path and talk to me. A while back it was all death and decay. Bones, skulls, a broken wing nearly every step I took. So I picked them up and adorned the small wooden hut with them – an offering to Baba Yaga. And I laid low, hoping the Morrigan would fly past.
Today, however, it was all runes. Twigs and branches in shapes of the runic alphabet. Futhark. Tree messages. Chatty.
And what did they say? What did they say?
They said…
Protection. The Spiritual Warrior’s battle is always with the self.
And they said….
Flow. The River. The Self. Conjunctio; the sacred marriage.
And then they tried to say something else but the SP bounced on them and scattered them to the wind.