Ludlow

Seshat, Cymraes and I met up for lunch, gossip and shopping on Saturday and it was wonderful. A real meeting of the minds! I was amazed by the amount of attention we seemed to draw – three powerful women wearing black and pentacles sitting giggling in a cafe eating our lunch, toasting each other with coffee and glasses of water!

Cymraes brought us bottles of St Oswalds Well water which will be wonderful incorporated into work. We went to tha parish church, the Cathedral of the Marches, and had a good look at the carved misericords which were utterly beautiful.

I hope we can all meet up again soon – the Ludlow Conference looms and we’ll all be there!!

Air-Plasma-Flight

This was the first phrase that sprung to my mind. I opened the blind in my mother’s kitchen this morning at the exact moment that millions (must have been) of starlings poured in a liquid torrent over and around the house. Even through the walls I could hear the sussuration of their wings and I could barely breathe as they moulded the flock around the house, each bird a set distance from the others, of one mind, internally connected as a cloud, a super-entity with a million brains all working in tandem.

It was as if they arrived, enveloped the house in pressurised air, and by so doing removed all the vestigial pain and discontent, the lack of equanimity and the suppression of hope that I’d been feeling; dragging it away with their wings and clicking beaks. I felt washed clean.

After they passed, a line of eight lone starlings came over, the rearguard, four passing each side of the window, a salute to me, to show the job had been done, and done well.

Some natural magic, awesome in its power, to greet me and speed my day. Thank you, Goddess.

Off Away!

Heading West again this weekend to visit with TSW and Shepherdess… superb. This will a pretty interesting visit, as it’s social but also heavily business-focused. Not to titillate your tastebuds too much!

We could certainly do with some time off. I spent all my working week reeling from pillar to post, this week; neither comfortable nor stress-free. And the neighbours at our new little house seem to do everything except sleep at night-time. I counted three separate entries and exits (slammed doors, revving cars, shouting into mobiles) between 2.30am and 4.30am. I’m a really light sleeper – most of the time I’m not technically ‘asleep’ as I still have the ears-on-elastic thing from having a baby. Added to which, new houses are built of matchwood and pencil shavings, so if you cough it sounds like a bomb dropping.

I will be online, try and keep me away.

So we leave the tatty suburban street of the hometown and head out into the golden misty West… cue music! And someone promised us Beef Wellington and Tiramisu, too. Talk about Avalon…

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Well, there’s no real words to describe the excellence and sumptuous wonderfulness of this weekend. We arrived stressed, after hitting the back of the 50-mile tailback from Cribbs Causeway to Cornwall. After a protracted tussle with the map and a cross-country meander, we crossed the line into Somerset. There’s an indescribable peace and contentment that I feel when I enter this county – I’ve never lived here, and have no family connection. It’s green, bucolic, rich and fertile, with deep hollows between the hills that hide the most beautiful villages in England. The pink and gold Hamstone that they use to build with here contrasts with the wisteria, parthenocissus, clematis and greenness of the gardens and glows in the shallow evening light that pours across the fields. It’s a promised land, a dream. I love it to distraction.

We dropped straight into easy banter and gathering around the kitchen table we got on with doing the dinner, lubricating the proceedings with blackcurrant vodka, and cooking up a storm. Afternoon shaded into evening as we ate the fruits of our labours and then kicked back with vats of wine for a gossip and a giggle, and then a dance!

TSW’s brow lightened after a few jars; her back has been giving her untold grief and agony. It was lovely to see the wine doing its work and enabling her to put me royally through my paces as a belly dancer – she looked great, but I looked like a cat on hot bricks although I really got the feel for the music – I’d love to have another shot at this.

We settled to bed fairly late and I was hammered, but pleasantly – no hangover whatsoever in the morning and I slept like a log, as did Mr GW. Awakened slowly by the contented sotto voce cluckings and meanderings of the local chickens. Freshly made and delightful coffee, local fresh-squeezed bramley apple juice, and a heritage breakfast of award winning sausages and bacon, local bread and free-range scrambled eggs followed. This is food the way it’s supposed to be produced. From the area, personally chosen, carefully produced, lovingly cooked and greedily devoured!

TSW took us on a tour of the local villages – cue much drooling from me – and a visit to a cider mill. Wonderful stoneware flagons of local cider and some beeswax candles that smell of honey, somnolent sluggishness and the peace of bees. 

We left, comforted and cheered on our way, like we were stepping out of a magic circle but somehow retaining the virtue of it on our drive north. Such a lot has been decided this weekend, such a lot of issues resolved. I have to thank my friends; they are responsible for all the good things that have been achieved – and they cook a mean Welly to boot!

Blinking At You from a Pile of New Books

Sometimes you can get out of kilter – you either have nothing to read, and all day to read it in; or you see a hundred new books you want, buy a selection and then they sit there, bindings uncracked, till you have to start dusting them and they become part of the furniture.

I’ve taken with me to the new house a stack of books I haven’t yet got to grips with, and I’m going to read them all. Cover to cover. With notes taken. And then I’m going to bore you all silly with them.

Reading, to me, is the last great unadulterated pleasure. I still have good enough eyesight. It doesn’t cost anything, in practical terms, because when I buy a book it’s an investment and I rarely if ever get rid of them. It’s not illegal, immoral or fattening. It’s quiet, and above all it’s portable. Wherever I go I can slip a book in my bag to make the idle minutes go more quickly. And also, hilariously enough, if you’re reading one of *those* books, people don’t feel the irrestistable urge to plonk themselves down and engage you in conversation – which is a habit in others that drives me wild.

My Amazon wishlist is groaning with stuff as yet unbought; my bookcase smells like a bookshop, all glue and new bindings; I’ve got my avaricious eye on all manner of new titles; but I’m calling a halt and going to plough through what I have methodically –  good, bad or indifferent. I’ve got titles in the pile by Rae Beth, Christopher Penczak, Sorita D’Este and David Rankine, Phillip Cooper, Ronald Hutton and Dion Fortune – and this is only a selection.

If the British weather ever does decide to play by the rules and behave as though it really is August (9 degrees and a sharp wind this morning, *sigh*) then I may even be able to do some reading in the countryside. I used to do this when I lived in Essex, at the end of a tiny lane to nowhere. The little cottage I rented, in the grounds of a large house, had no separation from the fields and woods around; you were in the countryside even when you leaned out of the bedroom window. On days off from my job in the little town nearby, I used to grab a book and a blanket and head out across the meadows and rutted baked-earth trackways, under the bright sun, surrounded by nature, verdure and the dark black-green of English oaks in high summer. I’d find a likely spot, miles from anywhere, set up camp and read till I was drowsy; and like as not, roll over and have a snooze in the sun and fresh air. I remember once waking up surrounded by Muntjac deer – I don’t know who was more startled!

Now, most of my reading is done in the eye-flapping 10-minute margin between awake and asleep at 10pm. Not the best time to wring the juice from a work of scholarship. I need a rethink on this – I’m never going to make any headway if I’m reading three pages at a time, two of them with my eyes shut!

Highgrove’s Goddess of the Woods

I was lucky enough, this week, to receive an invitation to join a party who had tickets to Highgrove, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall’s private garden. This garden has only been in construction since 1980, but it looks as though it has been there over 100 years.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated, and what was brought home to me by our guide and by the garden itself, is that this intensely spiritual man speaks not about his beliefs; he builds them into his garden.

There are Green Men, leprechauns, sympathies to Nature everywhere. There are sympathies to all religions, if you look hard enough, but the Prince is a supporter of Temenos, an academy and bank of thinkers whose essential ideal is that, at the base of the pyramid, our feelings about God are widely differing; but as we near the apex, we can come to realise that we are all worshipping the same essential God; ‘…consonant with Plato’s view that all branches of knowledge lead to the same eternal truth’.

One garden spoke to me especially; well, it would. You approach it through a shady, cool and waterlogged garden area full of hostas, water, ferns, sculpture, shade and tranquility. Under an oak is an astonishing, photorealist statue of The Goddess of the Wood – who I take to be Hecate. Carved in banded marble, She sits, every hair of Her pubis and head visible, Her scalp worn smooth by the hands of supplicants deliberate or undeliberate; staring at the temple to Her left. Her hands are square and capable; a gardener’s hands.

I loved Her as soon as I saw Her, and I understood that there’s a gradation between the moderate, old-fashioned Christianity practised by people countrywide and the religion that I follow. It doesn’t necessarily have much to do with evangelicalism; but that’s ok. It has a great deal to do with old-fashioned respect, leaving well alone and a caring for the countryside around.

The garden combined nature and culture; earth, air, fire, water and spirit; wilderness and artifice. All together, such a superb, harmonious and whole whole. I remarked to the guide that the man worships through his garden and she didn’t disagree. 

If you can stand beside a tree planted by the hand of the Dalai Lama himself, and see it flourish, if you can stand in a meadow which the experts confidently predict will take 100 years to come to fruition, if you can look at a statue and feel your Goddess calling you, you have stood in a garden that works.

This is real magic.

 

 

Pilgrimage

Reading Women & Spirituality I noticed that Carol P Christ runs what she calls ‘Goddess Pilgrimages’ in the Greek islands. This seems to be an opportunity to travel to one of the great centres of spiritual religion since time immemorial, to drink in a little of the sacred air and to take time amongst like-minded women to feel your strength as a woman, and to explore issues and ideas. It looks, frankly, wonderful stuff.

Since I’ve begun using the net, becoming a regular on sites and blogging, I’ve met so many unique and amazing people, women particularly; and to me this is immensely special, because I generally find women very difficult. I wonder if I will be misunderstood for saying that.

Women embody all that is difficult for me in my relationships. With a very few exceptions men are not so problematic to me; I do not mean to imply that I have the species cracked or anything so shallow! Simply that I relate far, far better on a daily basis with men than I do with women. I feel collaborative with most men, competitive with most women. I think this to be a childish and ingrained reaction.

What being out there blogging, talking and learning has taught me, over and above facts, is that there is a type of woman I am attracted to intellectually and emotionally, who thinks, who talks and can elucidate an argument, who feels and is able to express the feelings she has. Recently Seshat’s Voice has been holding a discussion on compassion and empathy; neither of these are solely a woman’s province, but those with this gift in my experience seem to be uniquely successful at taking in difficult feelings from others, holding them and reflecting them helpfully to the person who has projected them, without first, absorbing them themselves and second, without altering or in any way seeking to mitigate the feelings, to diffuse them or make them ’safer’.

Men have this gift, and some of the best counsellors I know are men. However, I’m finding the experience of discovering this gift among the women I’m meeting a thrilling and inspiring one.

There are several courses I want to attend, several places I want to visit and stay at. I’m already booked on Mercian 2008, hooray. Tess’s Enneagram course looks fascinating. Dillington House always has something for the likes of us! And these organised courses apart, there are visits to be made to friends, mini pilgrimages if you like, for learning and sharing and just having fun.

Essentially, what I mean to emphasise is that I want to be out there more, not sitting in my ivory tower blogging and reading. I love doing this, it’s the peace and serenity in my day in many respects, but there’s more out there.

It occurs to me that we don’t need to go all the way to Greece to perform essentially the same offices as Carol P Christ’s Goddess Pilgrimage; in fact, it would be better for many of us if we stayed right where we were, at home with our lives and  our distractions, and our worries, and our daily minutiae, and tried to learn how to do the separation of mundane and spiritual life. Being able to go away and effect a physical separation from all the distractions is a great luxury; I simply don’t know that it wouldn’t be better to grit our teeth and try to get the same results from the home patch.

 

Morning!

For one reason or another I had to walk to work this morning, something I’ve never done and never contemplated. This is daft if I think about it – the town I live in is mainly flat, and my work is no more that two or three miles away at most, less as the crow flies! So I put on my comfy sandals and strode off in the general direction.

This took me along the side of the old castle, down across the gorgeous Victorian footbridge, through the water meadows under the trees, into the leafy quiet streets that back onto the river and out onto the main road just as it reaches the estate where I work. I saw birds, bees, butterflies; loads of happy children cycling to school, gardens and interesting flowers, people in their gardens enjoying the sun, cats on walls doing same, I smelled the cut grass and fresh-minted air and really, really loved every second.

I saw parts of my home town I didn’t know existed; re-evaluated my opinion of certain areas that I had always ‘known’ were ‘rough’ and are actually quiet, suburban, neat and tidy.

What a way to begin the day! Exercise, blowing away the cobwebs, a chance to wake up and prepare for the work ahead, not to mention the concomittant benefits from the CV workout. Perfect.

I’m going to most definitely get my bike out of storage and fettled up; much more fun than broiling in the car and getting an ulcer from the traffic every morning.

Walking

I’ve just been for a short walk in my lunch break; there’s nothing more tiring that staring at a couple of glowing screens for hours on end. It’s cold here; overcast and pretty unfriendly. I work on a trading estate, and there’s a really long road with a pavement outside our unit door, leading off toward the open country. A nice 10 minute amble, or 5 minute hike!

So off I go, feeling cold, the wind was cutting through my fleece, and I was all hunched up and resisting. Gradually, I warmed up a bit and started a conversation with myself in the back of my mind, looked about me, started taking notice of things other than my goosebumps. Trees in leaf, swallows, the forest on the hill bending in the breeze.

I got to the end of the road and turned round, and right then the sun came out and warmed me and everything else up. I strode back, swinging my arms, grinning like a fool, and thanking the Goddess and God for the day and the sun and the pleasure of being out in it.

Get Growin!

Like everyone, we were out in the garden and in the fields this weekend- just too gloriously perfect and hot to be inside, blogging!

I was reading the Llewellyn’s 2008 Magical Almanac in a quiet moment, and there was an excellent article about connecting with the earth. You can’t do this at the keyboard, but I think that many try to. You’ve got to get grubby and feel the soil upon which you stand between your toes. So that piece of reading made me think.

Then, as so often happens, I was given an amazing book about living off the land – ‘Animal, Vegetable, Miracle’ by Barbara Kingsolver (thanks again, M!!). She makes the point early on in the work that there are many children today who have no idea of the life-cycle of a plant, from sprout to flower to seeds, or indeed where vegetables come from. Less so in Britain, perhaps; but in America, there is a whole generation who find the idea that vegetables grow in dirt awful and unhygienic. See also this great post from Starhawk which expands on this point. And that’s all before you start explaining where meat comes from. Animals? Prepare for litigation – you’re traumatising my child!

All the work we did in the garden this weekend got me thinking about food production. We eat quantities of salads and tomatoes all summer long. Why not grow them ourselves? We live in the heart of a busy city – what better way of taking something back than using the free sunlight, water and dirt and producing something worthwhile? I have a blind spot where vegetable growing is concerned. If it’s a plant to please and smell nice, I can manage it. If it actually has to serve a useful purpose, well, something breaks down and I can’t see the point. If you analyse this as an attitude, it’s simply bizarre. So enough shilly-shallying! The thought of being able to gorge ourselves on flavoursome, juicy, tomatoey tomatoes (and face it, when can we buy those is Britain??) as well as putting up gallons of tomato sauce for the winter seems to be enough of an incentive. Plus basil, peppers and chillis and you have all the raw materials for hundreds of tasty meals.

At a stroke we could: reduce the food miles of the salad and tomatoes to nil. Produce properly organic salad vegetables, with probably enough spare to give away or barter for other things. Learn about heritage and rare varieties and grow for flavour, something commercial tomato growers fail to do.

Above all, we’re putting in place a system of seasonal growth for benefit and food, which will teach us more about our land and the uses it can be put to; and it will teach our young sprout that food doesn’t come from the supermarket – it comes from the earth.

 

A Perfect Weekend

To Somerset, to visit dear friends S and K, who welcomed me in, and bade me be at home. Nothing could have pleased me more!

Saturday was gorgeous; a visit to Glastonbury made me laugh at some of the more eclectic types wandering about, but there but for the grace of the Goddess…. nearly bought a fake flower and ribbon chaplet but managed to restrain myself when I saw the price!

S took me to the Chalice Well Garden – amazingly beautiful.  Here’s a few pictures which may or may not do justice to the orderly and well-stocked state of the garden, which could best be described as being of a sumptuous simplicity. If only I could get mine to look like this!

The collonade was simply amazing. A calming and centring entry to the garden proper.

The pool was a gorgeous rill, across odd-shaped pans, and the noise was indescribably soothing and calming. The water runs all the way from the top of the garden, in the well proper, to the foot. The energy likewise flows down the hill and away across the plain. Quite the most lovely place I’ve been this year.

… and here’s the well itself. We forgot ribbons; but I was able to cobble an offering together. I felt accepted, and the strength and peace the visit gave me has lasted.

We had a superb dinner out on the Saturday night – two druids, myself, S and K: between the five of us we cleared the restaurant. Too funny. Drank a skinful, retired extremely pissed at 1.30am and not a trace of hangover in the morning – even better!

The place in which my friends live is so soft, so welcoming, so much the opposite of harsh and unfriendly. It’s a world within a world, totally isolated and approachable only by single-track lanes. It’s like a magical hideaway.

I don’t know how to say how much this weekend has meant to me; the gifts, the cheer, the encouragement; rare people and a rare place; perfection.