I was very pleased today to learn that my friends, Jesse Wolf Hardin and Kiva Rosethorn, had included one of my essays from Plant Healer Quarterly in their new anthology, Botanica Folklorica. I am including an excerpt from the essay below — to read the rest (and some beautiful writing by other people whose work I love and admire,) buy the anthology at https://planthealerbookstore.com/shop/p/botanica-folklorica-herbal-tree-mushroom-lore
Meanwhile, I am in a mad dash to finish the final edits on my next book, The Silver Branch and the Otherworld, which will be published on my birthday next summer — it, of course, is also filled with my ramblings about trees and gods and magic and ancestors and such.
Here is a little taste of what I have to say about my visit with one exceptional Oak:
I visited one of the remaining native old Oaks in Ireland during my first visit there. The branches of the Oak spread out widely, creating a canopy above me, and I leaned back into the trunk, feeling its strength, the solidity of its support. I felt deeply held in a way my mind began to call “maternal.” Then, deep in my mind, I heard a deep, sonorous voice that was not my own say “No. Not quite. Not maternal.” And then I half remembered the question I had brought with me to Ireland, and understood that I was being shown the nurturing aspect of masculinity, the masculine aspect of nurturing.
Wendell Berry and the late, much maligned and misunderstood Robert Bly spoke of afundamental change in the nature of masculinity that occurred during the industrial revolution. In agrarian life, men worked the land and were deeply integrated into the life of the family, bringing a particular quality of care and nurturing and presence. When men began going to work in factories (and offices) they were no longer part of those daily rhythms of family life in the same way. As a result, the memory of how to hold space in a particular way began to fade from the culture, generation by generation. And the cultural ideal of masculinity grew more rigid and more stoic, a tension choking off the fluid expression of one of the currents of the converging streams that form the river of expression we call masculinity. There is an irony in the language we use to describe this – we call our cultural forms of policing gender that give preference to the most harsh and domineering aspects of masculinity “patriarchy,” when, in fact, in addition repressing and oppressing the feminine and the Queer, they in many ways also shut down the organic expression of the qualities of being we might most accurately call “fatherly.” In one of the least understood aspects of his work around masculinity, Robert Bly pointed out that because so much cultural memory had been lost, when necessary and liberatory changes to understandings of gender came in with second wave feminism, men seeking to recover the nurturing aspect of their own beings as they shifted out of the rigid structures they had been bound by had only the feminine to model their new identities after.
Bly sought the remedy to this by seeking to retrieve cultural and mythic memory through the realm of symbols and stories from earlier times in the history of our culture. But that knowledge also remains available through conversation and engagement with the elder voices, the other than human teachers who influenced the ways our ancestors channeled that current of expression – the fundamental difference and advantage being that these intelligences exist entirely outside our current cultural frameworks of knowing, and can speak with us directly now rather than simply offering us a glimpse into what other people understood at another time in history. The Oak was letting me know that it was one of the elder voices willing to help me shift my understanding and expression.
The first part of that transmission of understanding came in feeling the presence of the Oak and anchoring it into my sensory memory. As I write this now, I reach out to that intelligence by adopting the posture of leaning back into the trunk of the tree, feeling again the texture of the bark and the strength of the wood and then the rootedness of the tree and then the quality of sunlight filtering through the leaves and branches and then the shadows cast that show me the way in which I am sheltered from above. At the edge of my awareness I begin also to feel two of the gods different lines of my ancestors called to beneath old Oaks, and the qualities that they and the tree share: An Dagda and Thor. The next part of the transmission would come as I engaged them . . .