Llyn-y-Fan Fach, Brecon Beacons, Wales
Llyn-y-Fan Fach, Brecon Beacons, Wales
They think she lives alone
on the edge of town in a two-room house
where she moved when her husband died
at thirty-five of a gunshot wound
in the bed of another woman. The curandera
and house have aged together to the rhythm
of the desert.
She wakes early, lights candles before
her sacred statues, brews tea of yerbabuena.
She moves down her porch steps, rubs
cool morning sand into her hands, into her arms.
Like a large black bird, she feeds on
the desert, gathering herbs for her basket.
Her days are slow, days of grinding
dried snake into power, of crushing
wild bees to mix with white wine.
And the townspeople come, hoping
to be touched by her ointments,
her hands, her prayers, her eyes.
She listens to their stories, and she listens
to the desert, always, to the desert.
By sunset she is tired. The wind
strokes the strands of long grey hair
the smells of drying plants drift
into her blood, the sun seeps
into her bones. She dozes
on her back porch. Rocking, rocking.
At night she cooks chopped cactus
and brews more tea. She brushes a layer
of sand from her bed, sand which covers
the table, stove, floor. She blows
the statues clean, the candles out.
Before sleeping, she listens to the message
of the owl and the coyote. She closes her eyes
and breathes with the mice and snakes
and wind.
Pat Mora1
Just the other side of the full moon, a few days after summer solstice, the sun finally shines. It’s been the coldest and wettest spring in living memory, the temperatures barely rising above 10 degrees Celsius all the way through June. Friends in California and Brazil tell of land ravaged by record droughts, but here in Donegal the rain and wind have been ceaseless. What would we do, if summer never came? What would we do, if the old reliable cycle of the seasons failed?
We don’t worry about that now, just breathe long sighs of relief. The trees are finally in full leaf, the grass is long enough to need cutting. We throw off our sweaters and are fallen upon by biting insects desperate to make up for lost time. A friend’s bees swarm; the next one will be ours, and the hive is sun-warmed, waiting. Can we imagine a day when the bees might not swarm? The branches of the ash trees sweep the surface of the river, green enough now to obscure the budding fuchsias on the far bank. The ancient elder scrapes up a tired blossom or two, and the fields are tangled into a tight weave of weed and grass. The verges of the lane are teeming with blue geraniums and red clover; cow parsley pops up everywhere, and vast swathes of fragrant meadow-sweet are starting to bud up, down by the river. The brambles are flowering, clambering over all the drystone walls, pushing through cracks, and I’m dreaming of blackberry jam and autumn pies. The swallows have arrived and are building a nest in the turf shed. What would we do if the swallows didn’t come?
Summer is here. How can the world contain so much life? Water tumbles down the waterfall, across the stepping stones, rushing by and tickling the feet of the grey heron fishing on a stone downstream. The long winter’s sleep is over, the capriciousness of spring is past, and the world shouts out its fullness. This world is so full of gifts. This abundance! Can we bear to see it die?
It is dying, nevertheless. We know it; we seem to be resigned to it. Our institutions reflect the truth of it. According to a recent article in the Guardian,2 words for elements of nature have been systematically removed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary: ‘almond’, ‘blackberry’ and ‘crocus’ made way for ‘block graph’ and ‘celebrity’ in the 2007 edition, and instead of ‘catkin’, ‘cauliflower’, ‘chestnut’ and ‘clover’, today’s edition of the dictionary, which is aimed at seven-year-olds, features ‘cut and paste’, ‘broadband’ and ‘analogue’. Travel and nature writer Robert Macfarlane called it:
. . . an alarming acceptance of the ideas that children might no longer see the seasons, that all childhoods are urban, that all cities are denatured, and that what exists beyond the city fringe or the edge of the computer screen need not be named . . . We do not care for what we do not know, and on the whole we do not know what we cannot name. Do we want an alphabet for children that begins ‘A is for Acorn, B is for Buttercup, C is for Conker’; or one that begins ‘A is for Attachment, B is for Block-Graph, C is for Chatroom’?’3
A recent book by Michael McCarthy, former environment editor of The Independent, is entitled The Moth Snowstorm. It powerfully and evocatively summarises what has taken place in the United Kingdom, almost without people noticing:
It’s the loss of abundance itself I mourn . . . people over the age of fifty can remember springtime lapwings crying and swooping over every field, corn buntings alert on each hedge and telegraph wire, swallow aerobatics in every farmyard and clouds of finches on the autumn stubbles; they remember nettle beds swarming with small tortoiseshell and peacock caterpillars, the sparking pointillist palette of the hay meadows, ditches crawling and croaking with frogs and toads and even in the suburbs, song-bird speckled lawns and congregations of house martins in their dashing navy-blue elegance . . . but most vividly of all, some of them remember the moth snowstorm.
What McCarthy calls the ‘moth snowstorm’ refers to the times when, driving at night on a dark road, you would see so many moths caught in your car headlights that it resembled driving through a snowstorm. No longer. ‘The country I was born into,’ McCarthy writes, ‘possessed something wonderful it absolutely possesses no longer: natural abundance . . . Blessed, unregarded abundance has been destroyed.’4
Who will ensure that what is left of the Earth’s abundance isn’t destroyed? Who will stand up for the Earth, if not the women who are of it and mirror it? We women are so full of gifts, containers for so much life. We are part of the Earth’s abundance – what is left of it. An abundance which is still there, in the wild places – but only just. Still now, even in the bleakest of bogs, on the saltiest and rockiest of shores, there is abundance if you know both how to see it, and what to do with it.
The wild and exposed south-west coast of Lewis to which we moved in 2010 had no fertile fields, no hay meadows, no lush gardens, and few opportunities for food foraging – but it had its own great treasures, which I gradually came to know. On that wildest and rockiest of all headlands, and around the shallow freshwater loch at the bottom of the croft, grew a profusion of wildflowers. Plants which once were used for dyeing: tormentil, bog asphodel, marsh marigold, butterwort, lady’s bedstraw, various lichens. Plants which had herbal medicinal uses: bogbean, self-heal, eyebright, sundew, dandelion, plantain, sphagnum moss. Seaweed galore: kelp and bladderwrack to fertilise the garden, and beautiful red dulse, packed with vitamins and minerals, to eat. Flowers to feed the hive of honeybees that we cherished, out there at the end of the world, on the farthest edges of their possible habitat.
When the land offers up relatively little, you come to treasure what gifts it gives, and during the years we spent on that croft, I came to know the plants intimately. I knew when they would appear, and in what sheltered pockets: sundew in June, down by the burn that fed the loch; self-heal on the verges of the road in July; wild thyme out at the rocky place, hidden in cracks of the cliffs. Each morning and afternoon, as I roamed a land empty of humans with only the dogs by my side, my walking was teaching me. As time went by, more and more plant-strangers became friends, could be greeted by name as I passed along my way; now each day I walked not through uncharted territory, but through a brave new world of magic, medicine, folklore and food with which I was growing unexpectedly intimate. I harvested carefully, dyed the fleece from our own sheep, made herbal tinctures, gathered and dried seaweed for use in the kitchen. In short, I became a ‘weed wife’.
‘Something has happened this year . . . Those of us who have loved the plants since childhood and dreamed of a cronehood stalking the fields with a basket, kitchen windowsill a stained glass apothecary of sunlight falling through bottles of herb-infused oils and tinctures – a Church of Weeds – have heard the hedgerows calling, clearer and more insistent than ever before.’ So wrote my artist friend Rima Staines in the summer of 2013 in a post on her popular blog, The Hermitage,5 and when I read it I shivered a little, because that was exactly what had been happening to me. In my case, the newly arising plant-longing could be traced back to an old yearning, stemming in good part from a figure from the folk tradition of a land half a world away: the Hispanic folk figure of the curandera. A curandera is a traditional Hispanic healer, herbalist and all-round Wise Woman, and I became acquainted with her history while learning to fly in the south New Mexican desert in the year 2000.
I was inspired by the figure of the curandera in good part because a poem that I read during that time by one of my favourite poets – New Mexican poet, Pat Mora – slipped right into my heart, lodged itself there and never left. When I first read it I felt a jolt of recognition: a very definite ‘Yes – that is it; that is what I am supposed to be’. This image of the Wise Woman, connected to the land and its plants, communing with the desert and its animals, was something that translated perfectly.
The Wise Woman – the bean feasa, the ‘woman of knowledge’; the bean leighis, the ‘woman of healing’ – is a key figure in Celtic folk traditions. There has always been a thriving tradition of powerful local female healers in Ireland6 and Scotland, and their remit included but then transcended the practices of herbalism which they shared sometimes with male healers. In mediating people’s relationships with the Otherworld, the role of the Wise Woman incorporated elements both of spiritual guide and modern therapeutic psychologist. The power and authority of these women derived from their close association with the native Otherworld, and the knowledge, wisdom and skill which that association conferred. In many ways, the Gaelic tradition of the bean feasa was shamanic in nature, involving visits by practitioners to the native spirit world in order to return with gifts and knowledge.7 Crucially, the bean feasa was implicated in the wider health of the community, as well as that of individuals: she was consulted to repair ‘breaches of communitarian or cosmological harmony’.8
The Wise Woman as herbalist, spiritual guide and psychologist – I recognised at last that this was the ultimate journey I was on, its goal a way of being in the world that I had longed for all my life. I wanted to become a Wise Woman, grounded and rooted in the Earth, listening to its stories and mediating the wisdom of the Otherworld – the old ancestral and spiritual wisdom which shows us how to live in balance in the world, how to live in harmony in our communities. That was my journey: the weed wife’s version of the courtly Grail quest – moss-encrusted, grub-infested, infinitely more feral. No knights, no unearthly longings, just an ear to the Wells, and the nourishing beauty of the rich brown earth.
The Wise Woman is the Heroine, returned from her Journey, belonging finally both to herself and to the land where she lives. She is ready to offer up her knowledge and her gifts in service to the community. The Wise Woman, the weed wife, the curandera – whatever you call her, she is my inspiration. I recognise in her the need which each of us has to find strength from within ourselves; the need which each of us has to delve deep inside to uncover and develop the sources of our own belonging. To come to belong to this wide, wild Earth.
This is the work we must have done before we can ever hope to bring our newly birthed wisdom, our skills and our love, out into the world. Those gifts are hard won, and take a long time to cook before finally you get to serve them up in a thick, nourishing herb-scented stew. But once the stew is ready, the Wise Woman is a critical and integral part of her wider community. Her gifts are the gifts of the land to which she completely belongs; her voice is the voice of the Earth, the voice of the Otherworld which echoes from the depths of the Wells. Her gifts are the gifts which heal; she can use them to heal the Wasteland, reweaving it back into fertility, one thread at a time.
‘Women have always been healers,’ scientist and alternative medicine pioneer Jeanne Achterberg9 tells us. ‘Cultural myths from around the world describe a time when only women knew the secrets of life and death, and therefore they alone could practise the magical art of healing. In crises and calamity, or so some of the stories go, women’s revered position as keepers of the sacred wisdom was deliberately and forcibly wrested away from them.’ Women have always been the keepers of the Earth’s healing wisdom, and from the beautiful mountain lake called Llyn-y-Fan Fach, in the Brecon Beacons National Park, comes the story of one such woman.10
~
A widow-woman lived once with her son in the Black Mountains of Wales. Her husband had been a farmer who was killed during the troubles which plagued the land in those times, but despite this, fortune seemed to smile upon the woman and her son. Their cattle prospered and grew fat, and increased in numbers so much that she had to send her son away out over the hills with a portion of the herd to graze the fertile lands near Llyn-y-Fan Fach. The son tended the cattle well, and as the years passed and the herd thrived, he grew into manhood.
One morning, as the young man was walking by the shore of Llyn-y-Fan Fach, he saw a beautiful woman sitting in the centre of the lake, seemingly floating on top of its calm waters. It came to him that she was one of the Gwragedd Annwn – the wives of the Otherworld – who are known to live at the bottom of such remote mountain lakes. She was the most beautiful woman he could ever have imagined, and as he stood there with his mouth open staring at her, she lifted her head and looked right back at him. He lifted his hands to offer the woman some of the bread and cheese that his mother had made him for his lunch, and she rose, and glided over the surface of the waters towards him. She gently refused the food, and as he stretched out his hand to touch her, she eluded his grasp, singing out: ‘Hard-baked is your bread! And it is not so easy to catch me.’ With these words she immediately vanished beneath the surface of the waters, leaving the young man yearning and love-lorn.
On his return home, he told his mother what had happened. She told him that he should return the following day to the lake, and instead of the hard-baked bread, he should take unbaked bread dough with him, in case the woman might like it better. And so the young man rose well before dawn the following day. He placed bread dough in his pockets and made his way to Llyn-y-Fan Fach, reaching its shores just as the first rays of dawn peeked over the nearby crags. He walked and walked, his eyes straining over the waters so that he might catch sight of her when she came. And when finally she appeared there in the centre of the lake, just as before, his hand went into his pocket and he offered her the dough. Again, she floated over the surface of the waters towards him, and before he could stop himself, his lips moved and words came pouring out and he found himself offering her his undying love. She gently turned away, saying: ‘Unbaked your bread! And you I desire not.’ And once more she vanished beneath the waters. But this time, before she slipped away, she turned to him with a smile playing upon her lips, and the sight of this gave the young man some hope that he might still have a chance to win her. Again he went home, and told his mother what had happened. This time his mother suggested that he take with him part-baked bread, and that this might please the mysterious lady.
At the crack of dawn the following morning, the young man once again made his way towards Llyn-y-Fan Fach. With renewed hope in his heart, he reached the shores of the lake and resumed his walking and gazing. But the morning sun climbed in the heavens, and eventually noon came and went, and still he had seen no sign of the lady. By the time the day cooled to evening, he still had not caught sight of her. Then, just as he was about to give up as the sun fell in the sky and the shadows lengthened, the lady appeared and glided over to the land. She smiled at him and, emboldened, the young man reached out to her.
This time she accepted the part-baked bread he offered and did not shrink back as he took her hand. She listened to his marriage proposals and agreed to wed him. But there was a condition, she said: if ever he were to strike her three undeserved blows, then she would vanish and leave him forever. He readily agreed; he was in love and of course would have consented unthinkingly to whatever she requested of him. Then she released his hand and began to call up from the lake a flock of sheep, and then a fine herd of fat cattle, many goats and several horses, while the young man looked on, unable to believe his good fortune.
He returned home with his lady and her animals, and they were married. They settled at the farm known as the Ridge of the Milk-Parlour, close to the village of Myddfai. They lived there in happiness for several years, and were blessed with three fine sons. Then, one day, there was a christening in the neighbourhood to which they had both been invited, but the lady was reluctant to go, saying that it was too far to walk. Her husband said that she should fetch one of the horses, and she agreed to this, as long as he would fetch her gloves from the house. He did so, but when he returned, he found that she was staring into her herb garden and had not yet fetched the horse. Playfully he slapped her on her shoulder with a glove, crying, ‘Go on, go on,’ but she turned on him and reminded him of the promise he had made, that he would not strike her without provocation. It was for her, she said, to decide whether time taken to ponder a cure from the plants in her garden was more necessary than arriving early at a christening. Now he had struck her the first blow, and she warned him to be far more cautious in the future.
On another occasion, they were attending a wedding, but in the middle of the wedding party the lady of Llyn-y-Fan Fach looked at the bride and groom and then burst into uncontrollable tears. Her husband slapped her on her shoulder and demanded to know why she was weeping inappropriately in the midst of such a joyful occasion. She replied: ‘I am weeping because these people are entering into a life of trouble, for they do not love each other well; and now your own troubles have been doubled, for you have struck me a second time without cause.’
The years passed and their sons grew up to be handsome and accomplished young men. The times had been good, but still the man was watchful and his wife reminded him to be careful that he did not inadvertently lay upon her the final causeless blow, for then she would be gone from his life. But one day they were attending a funeral, and while the assembled mourners were overcome with grief, his wife seemed full of mirth and high spirits. On occasion she would smile, or burst into fits of laughter. And because of this, her husband tapped her on her shoulder, imploring her to hush and not to laugh. She replied that she was laughing and joyful because, when people died, no more earthly concerns could trouble them. But the final blow had been struck. ‘Now the marriage contract between us is broken. Farewell!’
And immediately the fairy woman set off towards the farm and there she called her sheep, her goats and the horses to her. And she called her cattle to her: ‘Brindled cow, white-speckled, spotted cow, blood-freckled, four-filed sward-mottled, the old white-faced, and Geigen the grey; with the white bull from the king’s court, and the little black calf suspended on a hook, come you all safely home!’ They all responded to her command, and even the little black calf, though it had been slaughtered, came back to life and leapt off the hook and trotted towards her. This was the springtime, and four of her oxen were ploughing a nearby field. To these she sang: ‘Four grey oxen upon the field, come you also back safely home!’ Then the lady crossed Myddfai Mountain with all of her stock behind her, and they came to the shores of Llyn-y-Fan Fach, where they entered the waters and vanished beneath the surface.
Her three sons were left disconsolate, and often they could be seen wandering the shores of the lake, in the forlorn hope of catching a glimpse of their lost mother. For in his sorrow, their father had told them the tale of their mother and her magical origins. Then, one day, as they were walking near the place called Dôl Hywel, near the mountain gate known today as the Physicians’ Gate, their mother suddenly appeared to them. She called her eldest son Rhiwallon to her, and told him that his appointed mission on Earth was to relieve his fellow man from suffering and pain through an ability to heal all manner of diseases. To this end, she gave him a bag full of instructions for the preservation of health. She told him that by strict adherence to the methodologies here, he and his descendants, for several generations, would become the most skilful practitioners of the medical arts in the entire realm. Then she vanished, but her voice lingered and she promised to meet him whenever her advice was most needed.
On several occasions after that it is said that she met her sons. Once she met them at quite a distant place known as the Dale of the Physicians, and from there she walked with them all the way back to Llyn-y-Fan Fach, pointing out to them all the healing and medicinal plants that they encountered on the way. The knowledge that their mother had imparted to them, along with their own natural skills, soon made them the country’s most notable physicians. And so that their knowledge would never be lost, they had it committed to writing and so preserved it for all successive generations.
~
A converted stone church in the village of Coachford, a few kilometres outside of Cork city, isn’t the kind of setting in which you’d normally expect to find a place of learning focused on disseminating indigenous herbal traditions. And yet, as well as being the home of Nikki Darrell and her two teenage children, the church is also the premises of Veriditas Hibernica,11 an organisation which Nikki founded to teach the reclaiming of Ireland’s native herbal heritage. It’s an unpretentious and beautiful conversion, and although the rooms are dark – the old church windows are small, and the walls thick – they’re large, the ceilings are high, and there’s a liberating sense of space. Evidence of Nikki’s herbal practice is everywhere; one wall in the huge, decidedly unfitted kitchen is lined with shelves filled with herb vinegars: ‘We’re testing them out, as alternatives to alcohol-based tinctures,’ she tells me, as she pours a measure of something into a pan of bubbling bean stew.
Fortuitously I’ve arrived at lunchtime, and am offered freshly baked bread and a bowl of that gloriously aromatic stew, which also contains a variety of herbs foraged from her compact garden. ’There’s such a big interest in foraging now,’ she tells me as we sit down at a large wooden table, ‘which is good because wild foods have been shown to contain all sorts of micro-nutrients that aren’t present in our diets normally, and which can protect against lots of diseases. It’s all part of the desire that so many people are feeling to return to living in harmony with what is around us.’ That desire to connect back to the cycles and rhythms of the natural world is the origin of Nikki’s vision for Veriditas Hibernica, which came into being about eight years ago. ‘It was born out of a desire to help people in Ireland reclaim their relationship with plants, to remember the rich cultural heritage of this land, where people came to learn plant medicine and lore many centuries ago.’
Nikki has had a strong relationship with plants ever since she can remember, and was always drawn to work with them. ‘I bought my first packet of herb seeds when I was about nine, and my first herbal when I was eleven. I used to help out in the garden at home and we did a bit of foraging among the weeds that grew alongside the vegetables. We pickled, made cordials, jam and wine, and I loved it. In my teens I helped out at summer Woodcraft camps for kids and rambled through wild places, always loving to discover new plants. All I ever really wanted to be was a herbalist, a gardener, a grower – to tend plants and make good food and medicine with them. When I left school, I studied horticultural and plant science at university and spent five years as a research scientist, because as far as I knew then there was nowhere to study to be a herbalist, and questions about pursuing such a path didn’t meet with much support in a middle-class grammar school environment focused on academic competition and achievement!’
Although it wasn’t what she’d originally intended to do, Nikki’s scientific training gave her a good grounding for the rest of her work, and now she is glad to have pursued that initial path. But when she came across some people who were actually training professionally to be herbalists, she left the research world and signed up for Herb College. But by the time she graduated as a Medical Herbalist, she was feeling that something important was missing from all that study she’d undertaken.
‘I became angry,’ she tells me, ‘because people in the herbal profession were declaring that it was necessary to have at least a BSc and probably an MSc in order to practise, and that the proper place to learn to be a herbalist was in the lecture theatres and laboratories of “real educational establishments”, to the exclusion of all other routes. Now, I have a long string of letters after my name, and lots of academic qualifications; I’ve worked as a lecturer in third-level institutions and sat on all sorts of fancy boards. But this is not what made me a good herbalist. In fact, I had to unlearn quite a bit of what I was taught. And that journey to finding out what it is that was missing from most of the professional training that’s on offer has been fascinating, and led directly to the approach to herbalism I’m offering here.’
Nikki’s diverse and comprehensive training is very much in evidence: after we’ve finished that delicious lunch she gives me a tour of the premises, and I am utterly entranced by an enormous library of books on plant science, herbalism and related subjects in the high-ceilinged living room, which also happens to be the room where she holds many of her classes. Shelves and shelves of them, and so many titles which leap out and beg to be picked up. I linger, but there’s more that she wants to show me and so we move on; if I could ever find a way to be left alone in this place for a couple of days, I’d leap at the chance. But in the meantime, I’m interested in that alternative approach to learning herbalism which she champions at Veriditas Hibernica.
‘Well, I had a little epiphany in the midst of my anger at the system,’ she says, ‘which related to the fact that community herbal practice has existed ever since people joined plants in the world, and for thousands of years people grew up learning the traditional healing arts from their mothers and grandmothers (and sometimes their fathers and grandfathers). They learned to recognise the plants, to grow them and tend them, to prepare food and medicine from them at the kitchen table or in the community house. Every woman was taught how to do this work for her family, and sometimes for the wider community. It is part of our heritage.’
I come to a halt again, thoroughly captivated by a beautiful little white-washed chamber with a massage table where she carries out her consultations. The walls on one side of the room are lined with shelves and cabinets filled with jars and an extensive selection of large bottles of neatly labelled herbal tinctures. I flick my eyes over them to see which ones I recognise, which plants I’ve worked with myself, as Nikki explains how she set about turning that epiphany into a vision for how herbal practice might be brought back into the community. ‘I started by running short introductory courses on herbs for use at home as food and medicine, on setting up a herb garden, on making natural skin care products. And then some of my friends and acquaintances began to ask me to teach them more, so that they could use herbs for their friends, family and community with confidence.’
It’s clear from everything she says that Nikki strongly believes that community empowerment is the critical ingredient that’s lacking in traditional herbal training. That, in refusing to acknowledge the long traditions and great strengths of folk medicine and community herbalism, it runs the risk of becoming – like conventional medicinal training – both exclusive and excluding. ‘Yes,’ she says, nodding emphatically, ‘I do feel very strongly about the value of empowering people to take care of their own health issues where possible, and also about the importance of community in our wellbeing. So I took hold of that thread and set about devising a longer training in community herbal medicine. It’s been incredibly successful; last October we had our seventh intake of herbal apprentices, and in March we started a second intake for this teaching year, as there were about twenty people on a waiting list for next autumn.’
We head outside and walk around the gardens, and Nikki explains how they evolved over time, just as the philosophy here at Veriditas Hibernica evolved and clarified. The garden area around the church is a small plot, mostly consisting of gravel. Initially, Nikki laid out a few neat potager rows, but as the focus of her teachings turned to foraging and recognition of wild plants both as food and medicine, she began to develop larger beds in the middle and at the edges of the gravel, with wild forage plants growing freely alongside cultivated vegetables and exotics. From a distance the beds look chaotic, but when you step closer and begin to sift through the mass of green and identify individual plants, it’s easy to see how it might work beautifully for teaching purposes.
‘We bring the forage plants to live beside us, or often they just show up and then we tend them. We teach people how to cook, garden, clean, make medicines in a simple ordinary grounded way – the “ordinary sacred”, which is what we believe feminine wisdom is about: grounded and earthy and full of fun. We encourage the apprentices to sit with the plants, to spend time with them, to learn to tune in to what they are saying or expressing through their form and colour and taste and texture and smell. We also teach them about the plants as chemists and alchemists, and how to use their sense of taste and smell to recognise the different molecules which the plants manufacture.’
As well as working in the gardens, the large rambling building is now tended by Nikki’s growing community of herbalists, who use natural products made of vinegar, oil, salt and herbs to rejuvenate the wood and clean the windows and floors. ‘Often they’ll light incense or smudge as they work, playing music, or singing and dancing,’ she says. ‘We aspire to get to the point where people take this as commonplace, the normal and natural way to live: in healthy sustainable community, with the humans and the other beings in our local habitats supporting and encouraging each other to be our most authentic selves. And above all, caring for the plants that clean our air, our water, provide food, fuel, medicine, shelter and help us to remember who we are.’
For Nikki, whose original roots are not in Ireland but in the Caribbean and in London, the core of this work is about being local, becoming native to a place. To be native in this sense is to know, as well as to cherish, the place you are in. Native wisdom is the foundation of a lifestyle which is grounded, in harmony with the land and the specific place where you live, and she bemoans the fact that native plants are often seen as second-class citizens in the herbal world.
‘Our native plant allies have been discarded in favour of the exotic and scientifically validated. Plant medicine has been given over to academics and scientists and dissected, its spirit nearly extinguished. At one time the people of this land saw themselves as part of the web of life, understood the sacredness of the natural world and the part that humans need to play in order to make a healthy ecosystem. They saw the need for working together with the other living beings in their local habitat, and knew that they had to be in a sustainable relationship with them in order to be care-taken by their environment. Nowadays, so many people have lost touch with the knowledge and wisdom that was once commonplace, common sense, innate, almost instinctive: that indigenous knowledge and wisdom which allows us to recognise plants, to know how to gather and harvest them sustainably, how to encourage them to grow well, which ones are good food and medicine.’
It seems that it’s taken us so little time to lose the rich knowledge that was built up over thousands of years by our ancestors in this land – the kind of knowledge which, in most of the remaining indigenous cultures around the world, is the foundation of their daily lives, as they live in ways which are intimately and vitally connected to their wider ecosystems. Nikki agrees. ‘My vision at Veriditas Hibernica is to do my part to help restore that state of affairs here,’ she says. ‘And especially, to work with the feminine energy that I think relates so well to plants and to our other allies in nature. My own personal journey has taught me so much about the need to honour feminine community in particular, to offer a space where women can gather together to reclaim their identity and strength and wisdom. Traditionally, women have always come together to plant seeds, gather herbs, cook soul food, share stories and make medicines, and to pass on their wisdom and knowledge. Women are the core of a healthy community, and also at the core of a healthy community and world is respect for women, their voices, their medicine and their work.
‘So my work here has shifted into alignment with the journey which many women are now making: a journey back to authenticity, to respect for the feminine, and to a good grounding in traditional wisdom – our own indigenous wisdom. It seems to me that the next step is to learn to bring together that indigenous wisdom and all the valuable learnings and technologies of the last centuries – while discarding those that are not healthful – to create a reality in which we can live sustainably on this planet, in harmony both with our own species and all the other species we share it with.’
It is easy to sink into the magical Otherworld of the journey, and for some of us the temptation to stay withdrawn from a challenging everyday world can be strong. As Joseph Campbell writes, ‘The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfilment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world?’12 And it is always possible to refuse the Return, to go into permanent retreat, or to make the search for personal enlightenment and self-illumination your lifetime’s work – but if you do, chances are that, sooner or later, the world will come knocking. For others of us, as the world (and our own species) lurches from crisis to crisis, as we listen to the cry of a grieving Earth, the call to Return is strong.
As in Campbell’s model, when the Heroine returns from her Journey she always brings back to the world a unique gift. But the wisdom which Campbell’s Hero has achieved on his Journey is ‘transcendental’ and ‘cosmic’; our Heroine’s wisdom may spring in part from her association with the Otherworld but above all else it is grounded, rooted and earthy. It is the wisdom of this world and the Otherworld combined: the creative, regenerative power of life. Campbell declares that, ‘Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery.’ But for us, for women, there has been more than enough focus on ‘man’. For the planet, there has been more than enough focus on humankind. And in our endless self-obsession we have clearly lost sight of the ‘crucial mystery’ – which is not man, and is not humankind; it is an understanding of our place in the wider web of life on this beautiful and mysterious Earth.
And so the Heroine’s task on her Return is to bring humankind back in its place in the world: to bring about a re-enchantment of our relationship with the Earth. The Return, then, is about what Jungian analyst Marion Woodman calls ‘conscious femininity’13: bringing the wisdom in nature to consciousness, as we position ourselves with nature against a destructive and dualising culture. This is the true task of the Wise Woman: to offer again the fructifying, land-healing, life-giving drink from the Grail. To reclaim our ancient authority: to restore to the world the Voices of the Wells.
Each of us returns from our pilgrimage changed, because sometime during that long process of transformation we’ve undergone, new insights and strengths have been uncovered. The first question which arises on our Return is what we are going to do with them. According to Jungian Robert Johnson,14 the wounded feminine in women is associated above all with helplessness, so that a woman feels incapable of acting – ‘What can I do? What can I do?’ is her cry. Now that we have discovered and uncovered the buried feminine – in ourselves and in our culture – and now that we have walked the long path of our pilgrimage and endured, we must each begin to decide how, using our own unique gifts, we can work to restore the fertile feminine principle to the world, to reclaim our lost power, and so take responsibility for the healing of this Wasteland. To speak for the Earth itself.
One of the wounds dealt to us by the coming of the Wasteland is our severance from the land, the rupturing of the relationship between people and their places. The healing of the Wasteland requires a healing of this wound. Our Return, then, requires a place in which we can be grounded, rooted; a place in which our particular gifts and wisdom can flourish; a place in which we can fully embrace the natural world around us, and our part in it. A place from which we can speak.
Whether it is permanent or temporary, attachment to a place is intrinsic to the formation of a healthy, ecologically aware identity. We all need a sense of belonging – but sometimes it seems as if this is the most difficult thing in the world to achieve. If you ask people what it is exactly that so many feel is missing in their lives, what it is that creates the daily sense of dread and dislocation that so many of us live with, they’ll very probably talk about belonging. ‘I don’t know where I belong,’ they’ll say, or ‘I can’t seem to feel at home.’ Sometimes, ‘I can’t seem to put down roots.’ This is the ailment which lies at the heart of the Wasteland: so many of us – and especially, so many of our young people – are alienated because we feel as if we can’t belong to the world.
Belonging: from the Middle English be (an intensifier) and the archaic verb long, based on the Old English gelang, ‘together with’. There are two ideas caught up in most dictionary definitions of the word: the idea of belonging to or fitting into a group of people, and the idea of belonging to a particular environment – or, as the Shorter Oxford Dictionary puts it, ‘not be out of place’. For sure, belonging is about people, and about community, and this is the way the word is most commonly used. Our tribe matters. But place is important too, and it’s unfortunate that so often in contemporary intellectual discourse the idea of place is considered to be an unfashionable, outmoded concept – a fixed concept, when the fashion is for fluid. Place, we are frequently told, is rather a static idea, whereas movement and mobility are inevitable and essential consequences of the ‘Modern condition’. And rootedness apparently is passé; we’re supposed to have moved beyond it. Rootedness to place often seems to be associated with closed-mindedness, even poverty; with lack of education and ambition. So the implication is that if we promote a deep sense of place as a critical component of belonging, we must be promoting an odd kind of intellectual conservatism that is quite out of step with the times.
Whether rootedness in place is a fashionable idea or not, whether it fits with the ‘Modern condition’ or not, there’s little doubt that both our environmental and our existential crises derive in good part from a dissociation between people and the places they live. We have grown to see the physical world around us as empty of significance, as inanimate. We call the places where we live ‘property’. And we inhabit our dualistic worldview so completely that we aren’t even aware that there is another way to be. What is that other way? What could it mean, to truly belong to a place?
It isn’t simply about whether or not you were born there. It is about whether your identity has been and is being in some way shaped by that place; having a sense that its stories, its topography, its weather, have formed you – formed your character and your values. It is feeling yourself to be profoundly rooted in the sand or soil of a place, having both a deep knowledge of and a sense of affinity with the non-human others which inhabit it along with you – both plant and animal. It’s about experiencing your place as living, as animate. It’s about living in physical, hands-in-the-dirt, feet-in-the-water relationship with it – in some way, about seeing yourself as inextricable from it. This way of being in the world is possible wherever you live. For some of us, it is easier in wild places, or at least in the countryside. Others – like Viv Palmer, the Bug Woman; like Jacqueline Woodward-Smith, who we’ll meet later in this chapter – find it just as easy in a city.
More than half of the world’s population live in cities and towns, and that percentage is forecast to continue to rise. Environmental social scientist Julian Agyeman believes that a reinvention and revival of sharing in our cities could enhance equity, rebuild community and dramatically cut resource use. He suggests that the intersection of urban space and cyberspace provides an unsurpassed platform for more just, inclusive and environmentally efficient economies and societies rooted in a sharing culture.15 The environmental organisation Friends of the Earth also argues for towns and cities which are controlled by the people living there: ‘It’s not the people who are the problem,’ their website states:
It’s the way we build, organise and run our cities . . . Imagine a city that asks you what it should spend money on. A city that funds affordable housing and prevents rip-off landlords. One that can raise money without going to central government with a begging bowl. Where education empowers you to participate in decisions on big issues like economic policy, air pollution, transport, energy and food. Instead of treating kids as future cogs in a consumer machine. Imagine a city where sharing is the norm – from cars to pets. From skills to community-owned energy. Where libraries aren’t just council-owned places we go to borrow books. They’re 3D printing labs where residents lend and repair household tools. Places where nature thrives – fruit and vegetables growing on our streets, walls and the roofs of high-rise flats.16
The idea of living in place in a deeply connected way isn’t new. It’s something that all people would once have had, and which indigenous peoples around the world still do – but which most of us in the West now lack. It’s radically different from the way that most of us live, those of us who, though of course born somewhere, are in no meaningful sense of anywhere. Unable to belong to any particular place, we so often find ourselves unable to belong to the world, from which as a consequence we hold ourselves separate.
Aggravating this problem of belonging is our tendency (the result of 2,000 years of human-centred Western philosophy) to retreat inside our own heads and look there for solutions to all of our problems. We spend our lives searching for meaning in ourselves, engaged in deep conversations with our ‘inner child’, meditating on a mat indoors, trained to be ever-mindful of what’s going on inside us – our breath and our thoughts and emotions – when so much of the meaning we need is beneath our feet, in the plants and animals around us, in the air we breathe. We swaddle ourselves so tightly in the centrality of our own self-referential humanness that we forget that we are creatures of the Earth, and need also to connect with the land. We need to get out of the confines of our own heads. We need – we badly need – grounding; we need to find our anchor in place, wherever it is that we live. Once we find that anchor, so many of our problems fade away. And once we find that anchor, so often we uncover the nature of our true work, the nature of the gift we can offer up to the world.
In May 2010, we took up residence in our new house at the end of the world, and we called it Taigh nam Fitheach: House of the Ravens. It was one of three dwellings along a tiny side road which branched off from the main village street and stretched all the way down to a wild, rocky headland studded with hidden beaches. This one-and-a-half-storey house, the main part of which had been built on the croft from local stone sometime around the very end of the nineteenth century, had fallen into disrepair. The heating didn’t work; the roof was a haphazard patchwork quilt of tile, asbestos and slate; there was no damp-proof course and so all the concrete floors in the downstairs rooms were sodden. The croft was in no better shape. A bizarrely ramshackle, mostly derelict ‘shed’ constructed from a miscellany of old windows and doors was the only infrastructure on the land, and although the external border was solidly deer-fenced against the resident marauding gangs of thirty or more stags, every internal strainer and fencepost was rotten. We immediately launched ourselves into a renovation project, and then set about expanding both our crofting and our business activities, working hard to find a place and a function in that widely dispersed and sometimes challenging community at the end of the world.
Eventually, we were both going to reap the consequences of the excesses of energy and activity that we were sowing during those years. But in the meantime, precisely because of the way we were now living, close to the many animals we kept on the croft, close to the land which I walked as well as worked, a different kind of learning was taking place. After all my vagabonding ways, my fleeting glimpses of heaven in this place and that, I was finally learning to truly belong to the land. And out of that most precious of all journeys, I was slowly developing the unique gift that I was going to bring back to the world. I was learning to become what I had always wanted to become, to reclaim that dream I had had, so many years before: the woman on the night hill, listening to the birds and the foxes, hands in the rich soil, feet cold and bare in a fast-flowing river. Embodying her sense of her own deep belonging to this world, utterly rooted in the land in which she lived. I didn’t have a name for her then, but I did now: the bean feasa, the Wise Woman of my native tradition.
It wasn’t an active strategy; it simply happened. It happened because of the hours I spent outside each day in all weathers, tending to the vegetables, doing my chores around the croft. It happened because, whatever else might be going on in the house or out on the land, twice a day I went out walking. I spent so much time walking simply because this beautiful, hard, radically wild land called to me. It had shouted out my name into the fierce Hebridean wind the first time I had seen it, as if it had been waiting for me for years. Longing for someone who would see it for what it really was. Like a lover, I crashed headlong into its arms. I wanted to be out there, walking the shoreline, clambering over rocks, peering into rock-pools, face turned always to the sea like Miranda gazing out into the tempest. The gales and the rain and the storms weren’t a hindrance; in so many ways they were an essential part of it.
The pull of that land was like a drug, and I couldn’t seem to do without it. Every morning, before the rest of the world was awake, I would take the dogs out onto the aird. Down to the small, tidal sandy beach which no one else ever came to, or along to the bay where the tiny Breanish River runs into the sea. I would walk the same familiar paths and sometimes I would stake out new ones. I knew that land as I had never come close to knowing anywhere else, and I knew it intensely in every season. Not just the plants, but the birds and the animals too. I watched in February for the oystercatchers to return, then the lapwings in May; I tracked the migrations of large flocks of whooper swans who descended twice-yearly on the loch at the bottom of the croft. I walked in storms so fierce that I could hardly stand up, and I stretched out and dozed on hot sunny summer rocks. In the tiny, inward-looking community we lived in, there was no one else out there to fall in love with that place as I had fallen in love; there was only ever me, and the dogs, and the land.
More than just knowing the place, I came to know its stories. In the mountains to the east of Taigh nam Fitheach, filling the view from every front window, the reclining figure of a woman could be seen – hair rippling out in long waves, with one arm thrown back behind her head. There are other places throughout the islands and mainland Scotland where the shapes of specific mountains or ranges represent the silhouette of the old goddess of the land. The best-known of them is Lewis’ ‘Sleeping Beauty’ mountain, which in Gaelic is called Cailleach na Mointeach – the old woman of the moors; she can be seen on the far south-eastern horizon from the Callanish stone circle. I looked out onto our own reclining goddess every morning when I opened the bedroom curtains; she was visible from my desk as I worked, and she dominated the landscape when I walked or worked outside. I whispered my hopes and fears to her each day as I walked the headland. She was always there, a constant, vivid reminder of the divine feminine in the landscape whose stories exist still both in Scottish and Irish mythology.
Woman in the mountains, Breanish, Isle of Lewis
In the Western Isles, the stories tell of her two aspects: Brigid, known there as Bride, and the hard, stony blue-faced Cailleach – the Gaelic word for old woman, crone or hag – who we will meet more fully in the next chapter. One version of the story says that the old woman of winter, the Cailleach, dies and is reborn as Bride the spring maiden on the old festival day of Imbolc (1 February). Bride is fragile at first, but grows stronger each day as the sun rekindles its fire, and turns scarcity into abundance. But as autumn approaches and the light begins to fade she weakens again, and her sister the Cailleach begins to awaken. And by the old festival of Samhain (1 November) it is the Cailleach who rules the season, and Bride who sleeps quietly in the hills. There are many stories about this battle for the seasons which takes place between Bride and the Cailleach, but they can clearly be seen as two aspects of life in balance, of the need for both darkness and light, for both summer and winter, the ever-renewing cyclical nature of the world.
Wherever I walked, this and other stories of the land were made visible in its permanent features. That reclining figure in the landscape became my confidant, living as I did at the far edge of the world with nobody much to talk to or relate to other than David. The land became my best friend. It was perfectly animate to me, utterly alive. I was deep in relationship with it. And as I walked, day after day, year after year, I began to feel as if I were merging with the land, becoming it, not only knowing but living within its stories. This is the deepest connection of all, a facility that can only come from years of grounding in a place, and from paying more attention to it than to anything else. When you live as I lived, when you are with the land as I was with it during those years, loving it, tending it, talking to it – in some strange but very real sense you fall into its story. You become part of the land’s story of itself, part of the land’s dreaming. And when you reach out to the land in the way that I reached out, there are consequences. It engages with you, in turn. It reflects you back to yourself. It teaches you, and if the land you inhabit is hard and bleak, then its lessons may be as hard and as bleak as it is. Because above all, the land tests you.
I had a dream, a few months after we first moved to Lewis, after I had stumbled across an especially remarkable and hidden part of the coastline, all rock beds and carved-out cliffs. It was what I have always thought of as a Big Dream: the kind you might have just a few times in your life. The kind of dream you know is telling you something, though often enough you have no idea what. A mythic dream. I dreamed that this rocky place I had discovered was peopled with animals, and those animals were formed from carved-out rocks in the cliffs and the ground. A cliff face above a rock pool became an eagle with outstretched wings, and a little further along was a stalking wolf with holes for eyes where the sky shone through. In a shallow channel of sea water which I would somehow have to cross if I wanted to carry on walking, an enormous whale offered its body for a stepping stone. I could sense something stirring in the air around me, and it was redolent of power and danger. If you tread on that sleeping whale, the place seemed to be saying to me, the keeper of the stories; if you waken the animals; if you talk to the sleeping heart of the rock; if you risk the wakening of the sleeping power of this abandoned land – you never quite know just what it is you are going to awaken in yourself. Will you wake them anyway? Will you do it? Will you risk it, without fear of the consequences?
I put the dream to one side; I didn’t know what it meant. Three years later the image of that wolf with holes for eyes where the sky shone through would come back to me in a powerful wave of understanding of my own needs and nature . . . but that is a story for the following chapter. I risked it, anyway; I was too far gone to hold back now.
My intense identification with that place began to have a strong effect on me, to follow through into other parts of my life. How could it not be utterly transformative, this process of shape-shifting into the land? I began to think about the things in my life which really mattered to me, and which nourished, rather than depleted, and I began to long to downsize and simplify. I wanted only to indulge in activities that derived their meaning from the land. I grew fascinated by traditional herbalism, and as well as the practice of wildcrafting, I began to cultivate medicinal herbs in the tiny area of our garden which we’d been able to make windproof. I learned to spin, so that I could turn the fleeces from our own beautiful sheep into yarn – spinning, spinning myself into being – and then I learned how to use the wild plants on the headland for dyeing that yarn. I learned how to weave baskets from willow, and planted osier on sheltered areas of the croft.
As Alice Starmore would tell me some time later, if you don’t know a place then you don’t feel responsible for it. I knew this place and loved it deeply, and as a consequence I was beginning to fully take on my feelings of responsibility not just for this very specific patch of land, but for the wider Earth of which it was a part. I began to think about what I might offer to a world in crisis, and to examine the skills I had, the opportunities to make a difference. What was the gift that could I bring back from my long, swithering journeys? It soon became clear that the most obvious vehicle which we had for change-making was the fact that we still ran a small publishing company. And so I set about founding a quarterly magazine which we called EarthLines,17 to publish articles and showcase art which explored our complex relationship with the natural world. It had a strong land ethic and a focus on the culture and lore of place. We wanted to find people who were living authentically in the face of environmental crisis, who were prepared to unflinchingly explore the challenges that we all now face. We wanted to provide inspiration for change.
Although it had been years since I’d actually practised any of these skills, in theory I was still a writer, a psychologist, and an ‘expert’ in the use of myth and story as vehicles for transformation. For a long time, I’d been mourning the loss of my own writing practice. After The Long Delirious Burning Blue was published back in 2008, when it had been well received and generously reviewed, I’d found it impossible to find the time to work on a new book. I’d received a Writer’s Bursary from the Scottish Arts Council to complete a new novel, but sadly, the pressure of running Two Ravens Press, of always having to focus on the writing of others, meant that there was never enough energy for my own. And in my growing despair about the state of the world around me, I’d lost more than energy: I’d lost heart. I’d lost faith in words. Words had ruled me for far too much of my life, and I’d simply run out of them. I’d begun to feel again as if I had nothing to say. But now, inspired and nurtured by the land, quickened by the warm, fertile silence inside me, my own work was pushing to be reborn.
I sat one bright, calm morning on a rocky outcrop down at the headland, watching a seal watching me. It made me remember the Selkie stories that I’d always loved so much, and which so obviously emerged directly out of the deep relationship that people in these islands have always had with the sea and its creatures. The stories that were resonating with me right now were stories that offer insights not just into our own lives and problems, but insights into our relationship with the land and its non-human inhabitants. But almost all the ideas and practices I’d ever encountered while working therapeutically with myth and story originated in the work of Jungians – fine, popular writers like Marie-Louise von Franz and Clarissa Pinkola Estés – and focused entirely on the plotlines and archetypes which illuminate the dark, hidden corners of our own individual psyches. And by this stage in my life, I was convinced that one of the major problems with Western civilisation was the fact that too many of us spend far too much time in our own heads, analysing and over-analysing, and then going back around and analysing some more.
I was so very tired of our endless, exhausting, human-centred psychology, and in therapeutic work which used narrative it so often seemed as if the stories had been dumbed down, scaled down to fit us: the big bad wolf reduced to a mere bit-player on the vast stage of our individual egos, wandering in ever-decreasing circles around the neatly fenced forests of our inner landscapes. What if we let the wolf out, put him back in the real world where he belongs? What about the stories which re-animate not just our own souls, but the soul of the outer landscape, and which bring us into relationship with it? The stories which are embedded in place, and which, by listening to them, embed us in place in turn? The myths that Canadian writer Sean Kane calls ‘the power of the place speaking’?18
These were the kind of myths that come from my own Celtic traditions, our own Dreamtime stories which tell us how the land came into being, our own mythlines, peopled with characters and gods and goddesses who arose directly out of the land I was walking on now. Peopled with women who were literally the power of the place speaking, for they spoke with the Voices of the Wells. I realised that – perhaps precisely because of their strong rootedness in place, their refusal to reduce key characters to easily assimilated archetypes, and the lack of an obvious simple take-home message in most of them – these Celtic myths (and especially the complex, ambiguous myths from the Gaelic tradition) so rarely appeared in books and articles by Jungians. Almost everyone focused on Greek myths and the archetypal characters which could be derived from them, with all the Greek gods and goddesses neatly categorised and their sometimes complex histories simplified and, more often than not, reduced to clusters of straightforward personality traits which people were encouraged to identify with and somehow assimilate into their own lives. But regardless of whether this kind of thing made sense as a strategy for ‘personal growth’, those archetypes, and in particular those divine women, had no resonance in my land – they were so deeply enmeshed in the Mediterranean lands in which they arose. Hera never made it as far as the Outer Hebrides, and nor did Athena: they’d have run back shrieking to the olive groves if they’d so much as set foot on these icy, rain-soaked, windswept shores. They didn’t belong here; they made no sense here.
So back I went again to those old Celtic stories, thinking about the ways they informed our connections to place. I started to write about them, to work with them, in the context of my own increasingly rich experience of place and belonging. And I found myself, more by instinct than by specific design, focusing exclusively on stories and mythology about women. Over time, ever since I had begun while in America to explore the nature of my own womanhood, I had become more and more interested in women’s unique ways of experiencing the natural world, and their relationships with the land. Since that time of reawakening, as well as finding myself making women friends much more easily, I had begun to read almost exclusively books by women. I had discovered the great female ‘nature writers’ – writers like Annie Dillard, Terry Tempest Williams, Jay Griffiths – whose relationships with the natural world seemed so very physical, so sensual, so deeply embodied, and so very different from the ways in which male writers often wrote about their relationships with nature.
Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that very soon I would turn to writing about and working exclusively with women. I began to run creative retreats for women, bringing them to the place where we lived, holding the space for them while the hard, beautiful landscape worked its transformational magic. It was a nourishing combination of writing, story and therapy. I was finally in my element. I had finally found that unique gift I’d been searching for all my life: the gift of the bean feasa. I was finally getting ready to Return.
If the power of the Celtic woman is the power of place speaking, then this is the gift that we can offer to our world, the contribution that we can make to the healing of our Wasteland. We are the carriers of the wisdom of our native places, the knowledge of the plants and the animals, the rich intelligence of the cycles of life and the seasons. We are the mediators of the wisdom of the Otherworld, the Voices of the Wells. We are the Wise Women.
The Journey of the Heroine we’ve been following in this book is a journey back to the ground of our own belonging in the world, a retrieval of our life-giving feminine wisdom and the regrowth of the roots that nourish it. Our own roots, which reach down into the soil, push down into the cracks in the rocks, drink from the groundwater that flows down the mountains. This is not a journey which takes place in our heads. It is a journey which takes us out of our heads and weaves us back into the shimmering web of life – life, with all its beauty and its chaos, its caresses and its stings, its dangers and its blessings. In this journey we learn to get our hands dirty – to thrust them into the fecund earth and plant the seeds of the world’s new becomings. We learn to listen again to the stories told to us by the land in which we walk. These stories are a gift and a terrible burden; there is joy and abundance, and then, in the passing of a cloud over the sun, there is sudden loss and a grief which is almost too heavy to carry.
Carry it anyway; we were built for it, we women. It was always our role to carry these stories and it must be so again, now that the world calls out in its agonies for us to rise up and speak the truth. Now that the Earth calls out for us to speak again with its voice. The stories are everywhere still: listen, and you will find them. They are the tentative flowering of a dog-violet in spring. They are the thunder of rock fall in winter ice. They are told by the heron, as she shrieks her grief for the death of the salmon into an early morning sky. They are told by the hare, remembering the days when the fields were filled with poppy and corncockle, and the grass was long and gave shelter. They are told by our sisters around the planet.
We do not do this alone. We do not do this without the world, which listens in its turn as we tell the stories back to it. The world does not see that we are ‘other’, that we have made ourselves separate. It sees only a dog-violet, hears the clattering fall of winter rock, feels a woman’s hands on the bark of a tree. The world is listening to you; you are in this world and of it and it is in and of you and wherever you go you carry this gift with you. Be the power of the land speaking. Pass the gift on. Pass it on, and in this way we, like our female ancestors from long ago, like the goddesses of Sovereignty in our native mythology, become guardians and protectors of the land. By taking up these ancient roles, we begin to restore life to the Wasteland. Refuse the continuing destruction, because what hurts the Earth hurts us. Because we are the whole Earth. We are the Voices of the Wells; we are the power of the land, speaking. Use your voice. Speak.
This path, this revolution of belonging, necessarily entails accepting our responsibility towards our own places and communities. It might be impossible to save the world all in one go, but it is possible to protect, guard – and yes, even save, when necessary – our home places and our communities. If we have to do it little by little, one place at a time, then now is a good time to begin. Each of us sewing just one of the squares which contributes to the vast, growing patchwork quilt of the world’s renewal. So many of the women I spoke to while I was writing this book showed me that it can be done, and in so many different ways: we each bring our own unique gifts to the process, and we each have our own unique place to protect.
Jacqueline Woodward-Smith practises her gift of place not in the wild, green Celtic heartlands, but in the seething centre of population that is the city of London. That’s where I first met her, under the arrival and departure boards of Liverpool Street station in the evening rush-hour, shuffling from side to side to avoid being run over by endless swarming masses of tired, aggressive men and women intent only on finding their way to a train and getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as possible. There she was, the perfect antidote to it all: very much larger than what passes for life in all this insanity, with a big wide smile, bright red hair, wearing large glasses and a full, long black cotton skirt patterned around the edge with large white skulls.
Like so many of the women I’ve spoken to, Jacqueline began by working within what she calls ‘the system’, spending twenty-four years in the British government’s Home Office – the epitome of uncaring, institutionalised bureaucracy. One day, heart-sick, she watched a sunbeam reach through a window and light up a corner of the paper-filled desk she occupied in the bowels of a building filled with others just like her. Sometimes it’s the simple things which break us, and something had been building up inside her for a long while. She handed in her notice, and off she went to train as a counsellor. Now she works in schools, helping young children whose family lives are difficult, whose ways of being in the world are different, and who find it hard to fit into a school system which is, as Jacqueline says, ‘designed for conformity’, in which there are ‘no wild edges where you can be yourself’.
It’s not necessary, she tells me firmly as we forge a path out of the teeming station (I’m just closing my eyes and hoping for the best), to live in a wild place or in the countryside to have a strong connection with the natural world. It happens in the city too, and Jacqueline’s own connection to London is deep. ‘In some funny sense, my attachment is about the physical layers of history here, about continuity,’ she says, as we sip tea in a busy coffee bar behind the station. ‘A strong sense of relationship with the generations of people who lived out their lives in this place. Of course they would have had deep connections with it, and those of us who make it our home still do. Yes, it’s a city; yes, there’s concrete – but it’s not a dead place. There’s still nature, it just expresses itself differently. I’ve counted twenty-seven different wildflowers along the verge by the side of a road in Blackheath which I walk along every day. Wherever you are, even in the heart of the city, at the very least you can find a plant growing out of a wall! That’s the gift of a city. The city teaches you to focus on the small things. I look at London and I don’t think “Wow, this is a big city, all concreted over.” I think, “Look – there’s some common vetch growing over there, and it’s beautiful.”’
Jacqueline’s gift is to teach as many people as she can to see what she calls these ‘small beauties’: from the disturbed and disadvantaged children she counsels for her day-job, to the many fans of her popular Facebook page, where most days she posts a list of those small beauties she’s encountered herself. Today’s list of ten things includes the following: ‘Hearing a high-pitched peeping as I left the Crossbones Garden and seeing that it was a fledgling blackbird calling for food from its mother, who was digging about in some fallen leaves to find morsels to share. I watched them for ages. A beautiful moment of intimacy with the wild.’
In a city perhaps more than anywhere else, Jacqueline suggests, community is critical if you plan on changing the world. ‘London is really just a load of little villages joined together,’ she says. ‘Most places have their own centre. I live in Blackheath. I know its shape, I know where the middle of it is. I shop in local shops and I talk to local people. There’s a community orchard, and a park at the bottom of the road where lots of people go. Caring about places, caring for the environment, isn’t just for people who live in the country. There are people in cities who are just as concerned about the state of the planet. We might sometimes need to approach it in different ways, but there is a surprising, sometimes hidden resilience in London’s communities. I see it in practice every day.’
Jacqueline is as inspired as any country-dweller by the myths and stories which come out of this land. ‘They’re incredibly important to me, and I can feel them just as deeply in London, where so much of the history of this land has been centred. I feel as if I would die without those stories. They illuminate my life, my concerns, my place. Take the story of Blodeuwedd, the Flower Maiden. It’s a story I’ve always felt strongly about, and whenever I look at those wildflowers along the verge, it floods back into my heart.’
The old Mabinogion myth Jacqueline is talking about begins with the Welsh hero Lleu Llaw Gyffes, who has been placed under a tynged19 by his mother Arianrhod which prevents him from ever taking a human wife. And so instead, Lleu’s magicians Math and Gwydion ‘[take] the flowers of the oak, and the flowers of the broom, and the flowers of the meadowsweet, and from those they conjured up the fairest and most beautiful maiden anyone had ever seen.’ Blodeuwedd may have been created to satisfy one man’s needs, but she falls in love with another, and together they conspire to kill Lleu – the only way that she might have her freedom. But Lleu escapes, and Gwydion takes revenge by turning Blodeuwedd into an owl. It’s an interesting story about woman as property – full, like so many Celtic myths, of ambiguity and complexity. As ambiguous and complex as these vast cities that we have created, so easy to dismiss as ‘urban jungles’, so easy for those of us who thirst for more wild places in the world to abhor.
‘It’s easy to dismiss the cities and its wastelands,’ Jacqueline says as I stand up to leave, ‘but wildflowers grow there as well.’
Love the place you are in, is the message; it doesn’t matter what the place is. Even the broken places need to be cherished. And as I make my way back through steaming summer streets to my friend’s flat in the Barbican, my eyes find a way to tune out the crowds and to focus instead on the green things pushing their way out through the cracks in the pavement, taking every opportunity to bloom.
Back in the Celtic heartlands, Loveday Jenkin works in quite a different way to change the system that so many of us seek to escape: she turns her gifts to politics. She is the spokesperson on environmental issues for Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish nationalist party, and is a passionate advocate for Cornwall’s Celtic identity. For Loveday, trained in ecological biochemistry, that identity is strongly associated both with attachment to and a sense of responsibility for place. ‘My sense of being Cornish – and therefore Celtic – relates very strongly to my environmental activity,’ she tells me over coffee and chocolate brownies amid the mid-morning clamour at the Godrevy Beach Café, on Cornwall’s north-west Atlantic coast. ‘Part of the bones of my identity is that feeling of being an intrinsic part of this place, and so understanding how it works. I believe strongly that we can learn from the place itself how best to manage its ecosystems, and to deal with any environmental issues that arise in them.’
Loveday’s parents were both founder members of Mebyon Kernow, and key shapers of the Cornish cultural revival. ‘I’ve been politically aware for as long as I can remember,’ she laughs. ‘It was impossible not to be, in our house. I remember hand-addressing envelopes containing party information when I was ten, and at sixteen I was knocking on doors to try to persuade people to vote for Mebyon Kernow. Today, even though the percentage of people who actually vote for us is quite low, our policies are very popular because our focus is on doing things locally, trying to make sure that decisions are made which are right for Cornwall. Because a lot of the English government’s policies don’t work for us. Our environment is similar to that of Wales, Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland – it consists of a lot of dispersed small settlements, rather than a big city playing a central role. And so Mebyon Kernow’s policies are much more environmentally focused and community-based; it’s a left-wing, social, green party. That focus on the environment and the community comes from a strong feeling that this is our place. We belong to it, we care for it.’
In the early part of the last century, she tells me as we walk in a chill, gusty Atlantic wind to the place where the Red River meets the sea, Cornish culture had been so strongly overlaid by the dominant English culture that the customs, stories and language which sprang from the land had almost vanished. Now, after decades of hard work from cultural activists, there is a strong and spirited cultural resurgence. ‘Cornish culture has grown phenomenally during my lifetime, and in particular the old Celtic aspects of it. The majority of people here now recognise that Cornwall is a Celtic nation. We’ve seen that unique Celtic culture flourish again with the revival of Cornish dancing and music, and the rebirth of traditional Cornish festivals. Part of the vestiges of old Cornish culture which have been reclaimed are the folk tales and stories, a sense of Cornwall as a mythic place. That sense had always been there, though awareness of the stories had begun to slip away. But those tales come directly out of place, and so they still have relevance and meaning to people who live here when they recover them. They can just plug right back in.’
At the heart of this cultural revival is a revival of the Cornish language; Loveday is also a major contributor to that process, having brought up her two children to speak Cornish as their first language. ‘There’s a sense here now that it’s okay to be Cornish. It’s different, yes – but it’s okay to be different, because there’s something here in this land that’s unique, and rich, and it is ours. Now, there are a lot of cultural exchanges with other Celtic nations – especially the speakers of other Brythonic languages in Brittany and Wales.’
Loveday is very clear that her passionate advocacy for the natural world, place and community all spring directly from her strong sense of identity as a Celt. ‘There is something different about us. It’s hard to find the words to describe it. If I’m away, as soon as I come back across the border to Cornwall, I recognise it. But I also recognise it in other Celtic countries. If I had to try to define it, I’d say it’s that we are rooted in the land. We’re a part of it. There’s an element of survivorship which is part of the innate character of the Celtic people, I think; there’s an extremity in these countries, both in the landscape and in the weather. Being Celtic is about standing up in the face of those elements. Whatever happens, we’ll still be there. Because we’re rooted here, we’re grounded.’