Happy Imbolc everyone! Also known as Brigid’s day, St Bridget’s day and Candlemas.
This is the first festival of the calendar year and the second of the Celtic wheel of the Year. It’s one of my favourite festivals of the Celtic year and it is traditionally celebrated as a feast of blessing the lactation of ewes, the return of the light (hence candles) and the flowing of springs and wells, though I associate it mostly with the mating of frogs! In other words, it is time to start thinking about the year ahead and asking for help to allow the fluid juices of growth and abundance to flow copiously. It is a time to propitiate the goddesses of old, the once and future Divine Queen. It is these sincere prayers, always both practical and spiritual (the theme of our new course – see below) that re-binds us to the wheel of life; of the land, the water, earth, weather, and the vagaries of life – the plants and animals that we depend upon are recognised in conscious supplication. We bow our heads, and anoint ourselves with earth’s sacred living waters.
Yet how many of us can say that our lives depend directly on springs, wells and indeed the breast milk of ewes. That unfortunate detachment from what sustains us leads to a forgetting of these powerful rituals, rituals embedded not only in the fabric and heartbeat of the land we inhabit, but also deep in our own hearts, in our bones – quite literally. The reciprocity of prayer and sacrifice acknowledges the interdependence of all beings – including us, and we remember Nature wants us too.
Up here in the ancient ‘pueblos blancos’ of the Alpujarras mountains, a region where the moors took irrigation seriously we find many water channels (Acequias), wells and sacred springs, they are marked on maps, they even have roadside signs to them, As I sit writing outside, I can hear the nearby spring gushing down the hillside. Our house is right next to the ‘Fuente alegre’ which translates as the joyful spring. Higher up the mountain we visited a very famous healing spring that was renowned throughout Andalusia – the ‘Fuente Cuesta Viñas’, a remarkable place where 4 springs all converge, each one with different healing properties. The water emerges from the ground almost warm, and in 3 of the springs the water oxidises on contact with the air, indicating its’ extremely high iron content, the grotto is rust red. The 4th spring emerges carbonated, it’s water fizzing with life and tastes of a cocktail of replenishing minerals that alkalinise the body, and flush out toxins. Unfortunately, like much of rural Spain, the area has become depopulated of younger generations, and the Spring has fallen into neglect and disrepair, the toilets and bar area broken and vandalized, litter and graffiti on the walls. It was so sad to see such a beautiful gift of the earth abandoned in this way, and we reflected that many people just aren’t that interested anymore, they care less about water from the ground, when they can buy it in bottles, and large multi-nationals like Coca-cola and Danone are gradually buying up the Spanish springs and draining the water table. Let’s hope that this spring stays open and free to everyone to discover its’ healing waters in the future.
Bless all the sacred springs and wells of the world and the joy and sustenance they bring us.
January saw us hitting the local beach here at Wonwell in the sunshine and cooking up a lovely feast with friends to welcome in the New Year.
February 1st we celebrated Imbolc at our local Ashburton healing Well and later at the Chalice Well gardens in Glastonbury. A very magical time in a special place.
March saw us taking a much-needed break and catching a dose of sun in Lanzarote, an Island singularly lacking in trees! But stunning volcanic landscapes.
April and Spring is here, everything is greening up in those translucent verdant glowing colours. Ferns uncurl and forest bathing courses start again. Late April sees Stefan attending the Remembering Earth Time Spiritual Ecology retreat at Sharpham House in Devon.
May and we are now full ensemble, full throated choir of joy. We attended the amazing Bhakti festival in Dorset and also the Nature and Neurons conference on The Gower in Wales.
In June Cow Parsley and Hogweed are doing their thing, and we started on a new collaboration with the amazing people at the Together drug and alcohol project. This was an offshoot of the Woods 4 Wellness programme, and we had some great sessions which we hope to repeat in 2025.
Also In June thanks to Primrose’s hard work we also successfully became a CIC so we could get funding to run our outreach projects.
In July Stefan finally launched his book Wild Life, and we started running the new Plymouth University Clinical Psychology Ecotherapy sessions at Mt Edgecombe, a short ferry ride from Plymouth.
August – we were busy with courses but found time to attend the glorious Medicine Festival and meet up with lots of friends and with the help of Tanya, Emma T. and Elena we ran an early morning Forest Bathing walk with 43 people in the beautiful Wasing estate.
We also started on another new collaboration with The Pelican Project in Exeter for young adults with autism and other complex needs, This project is called ‘Pelicans in the Wild’, and ably assisted by Sonya and Jane and other guest teachers we have had such a blast out in Nature.
September and we headed up to the Forest of Dean for ‘Deeper into the Woods’ our Advanced Diploma training. This was a new venue for us, and I can honestly say it was one of the best weeks of my life, with an incredible staff team of Amanda, Pina and Andrew who held the space so beautifully, and a wonderful group of dedicated students who endured some wild weather, a memorable night walk, and evenings round the fire.
In October we ran our last 2 courses of the year, popped over to Spain and in the mountains of Catalonia helped with the Almond and Walnut harvest and took part in a beautiful ritual to honour the Madonna in the local church. We also had our official Wild Life book launch at Eastgate Bookshop in Totnes with the venerable Harry Hilser asking the questions.
November was memorable for some severe flooding here and our last Pelicans session of the year with the obligatory sausages, hot chocolate and marshmallows round the fire.
December. We are winding down now, heading into the darkness and sowing seeds for next years courses and projects.
Primrose has gone on maternity leave and we welcome Natalia who has settled in amazingly well, and started to take over the office role alongside her fund raising activities. We have also now been joined by the equally wonderful Jade Kellett who is doing some of our Social Media work.
I would like to thank you all for such a fabulous year in the woods and as we enter our 8th year of trading I look back on all our achievements and I think the growth of our forest bathing community means the most. Without you we are one hand clapping, and it is with the amazing diversity of students, mentors, teachers and practitioners that we grow stronger, wiser and lead this new wave of an exciting, dynamic discipline with our courage, grace, humour and humility and above all our gratitude for the bounty of Nature.
I invite you all to join me on the Winter Solstice (Dec. 21st) to give thanks for another year of life, and pause to remember those who have passed and those yet to come and what sort of planet they may inherit from us.
A special massive thank you to Primrose Matheson for her incredible hard work, diligence and patience over this last year and we all wish her well with the birth of her next child any moment now. Blessings!
Finally a plug: Stefan’s book is a bloody expensive stocking filler but it will keep you amused, engrossed, perplexed and engaged over the long winter months by the fire, so please check it out at any reputable bookseller priced £24.99 and published by Singing Dragon.
Throughout our evolution we have sought for meaning and connection – a sense of a higher power that illuminates our lives and gives us context, a sense of being part of a larger whole with a purpose, a sense of beauty in the midst of suffering and striving to survive. Along this rocky path strewn with demons and potholes, we encounter the many mystics who have discovered another version of reality, an alternative view of our material lives in the frame of revelatory, other worldly experience. A common theme amongst these mystics is that they received visions, they felt light and fire envelop them with love and a radiance beyond words, these visionary states were often preceded by illness, or childhood sickness. What is remarkable is that from mediaeval times we have written accounts of these mystics and visionaries, and many of them were women.
One of the earliest recorded and hugely influential personalities in this lineage is Hildegard of Bingen. (c. 1098 – 1179.) She was sickly from birth and received visions as a child.
‘Hildegard said that she first saw “The Shade of the Living Light” at the age of three, and by the age of five, she began to understand that she was experiencing visions. She used the term visio (Latin for ‘vision’) to describe this feature of her experience and she recognized that it was a gift that she could not explain to others. Hildegard explained that she saw all things in the light of God through the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.’
Her parents placed her in a Benedictine monastery set within the Palatine Forest in Southern Germany. Hildegard, although living in much pain became a polymath writing a vast library of mediaeval verse and music, studying Natural History, Medicine and even inventing her own mystic alphabet. I consider her to be one of our earliest ecologists bringing that mystical quality into her understanding of the way of Nature, and she regarded medicine and gardening as parallel forces.
“I am the fiery life of the essence of God; I am the flame above the beauty in the fields; I shine in the waters; I burn in the sun, the moon, and the stars. And with the airy wind, I quicken all things vitally by an unseen, all-sustaining life.”
Hildegard felt that she was guided by the ‘reflection of the living light’ and she reminds me of another profound visionary hermitess Julian of Norwich who lived slightly later than Hildegard (1343-1416) Mother Julian had also suffered sickness throughout her life, and also recovered through receiving visions which she later documented in her book Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving English language writing by a woman. She wrote so eloquently of love from her small cell, visited by so many seeking her help and wisdom. She had a refreshing non-judgmental attitude of grace towards our failings: –
“Grace transforms our failings full of dread into abundant, endless comfort … our failings full of shame into a noble, glorious rising … our dying full of sorrow into holy, blissful life.”
Jumping across the chasm of many centuries comes a different sort of visionary, but still a challenger of the norms and the establishments of the day. Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964)
was a pioneer, advocate and sister in spirit of these 2 earlier trailblazers in her strong beliefs and convictions, except that Theocratic religion had now been replaced by the religion of science, and so required someone who was well versed in the language of rationality. Carson has become one of the 20th century’s most influential voices in literature and environmentalism. She wrote in a way that combined science and poetic writing. Her revolutionary text Silent Spring helped shape the modern environmental movement. Carson had already gained a huge following for her ecological books about the sea, bringing knowledge and awareness to the general public. In the 1950’s she challenged government and industry over the use of chemicals and pesticides that she regarded as poisonous to all life forms.
“It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction.”
As a child Carson spent most of her time wandering the family farm in Pennsylvania and had her first nature story published by the age of ten. Towards the end of her life she was fighting terminal cancer, completing Silent Spring and raising her adopted son. Silent Spring reminded us of the fragile and complex interdependence of all life, the value of the thrush’s song, and the beauty of the natural world. She never got to see the legacy of her work and how she has inspired contemporary writers, scientists, plant spirit environmentalists like Monica Gagliano and mystic poets like Annie Dillard who reflects on our place in the awesomeness of nature:
“Concerning trees and leaves… there’s a real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on a granite slab and start to swell, bud and flower. Every year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day. A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. A tree stands there, accumulating deadwood, mute and rigid as an obelisk, but secretly it seethes, it splits, sucks and stretches; it heaves up tons and hurls them out in a green, fringed fling. No person taps this free power; the dynamo in the tulip tree pumps out even more tulip tree, and it runs on rain and air.
We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other’s beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.”
Finally this year’s Booker prize has been won by a book Orbital which invites us to see the fragility of our green and blue speck from the confines of the Space Station. In her acceptance speech the author Samantha Harvey said “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves,” and this returns us neatly to Rachel Carson’s observation on our hubristic blindness – “But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.” This also echoes Hildegard’s appeal to us: “The earth which sustains humanity must not be injured. It must not be destroyed!”
Actors come and go, but the message never changes.
References:
Hildegard of Bingen Wikipedia, Goodreads
Julian of Norwich – Friends of Julian of Norwich.
Rachel Carson – Silent Spring, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/may/27/rachel-carson-silent-spring-anniversary
Monica Gagliano – Thus Spoke the Plant 2024
Annie Dillard – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 1974
