Invocation to a Special Place

You are dear to me.
I give you

Hair from my head
Words from my mouth
Blood from within me

You have my essences, my life force; I am one with you.

These emanations of my body and of my soul are one with the leaf mould and the waters and the mosses of this place. The soul of this place. We mingle. I am one with you.

The Winter Lady

I joined in the Wintersnights observance by Brython over the weekend. Each doing in in their own place.

I spoke the appointed words and looked up at the stars in the clear sky. There were no clouds or anything but after I had spoken about  a shadow passing through the veil it was not long before it went a lot darker and I couldn't work out how this had happened. I sat in the dark for a while feeling spooked. The words definitely got a response.

I intended to do a meditation under the stars. But I didn't need to. The Winter Lady walked past me and I felt her presence. Or was it her absence?

Meditation Message

~~~~~Dream-Writing~~~~~

This came to me in a meditation, written down by me but only half in control of what I was writing:

What is nameless, let me not impose a name on thee. What is not human, let me not shape a human soul for thee. What belongs in one place, let me not take thee from where thy being is. What remains between us, this we share in common with every wight.
As the gods are our witness, and we theirs.

When I looked at it the next day I was awestruck that I wrote it. It sounds like someone else’s words. Where did ‘thee’ come from? I remember wavering a bit when I wrote ‘thy’ and had to think what to put. So their must have been a bit of editing going on. But I take this as something ‘given’ to me, mine by gift. I’m putting it here because I think I’m meant to share it.

Physicians of Myddfai

I went on an outing to the National Botanic Garden of Wales yesterday. I’ve often thought about visiting just to walk around the gardens, herb beds and the exhibitions. So as I had another reason to go there I arrived early and spent some time exploring the place. I had heard that they had an exhibition about the Physicians of Myddfai and was keen to see that too. The exhibition is really a mock-up of an old apothecaries shop with examples of old containers, scales and instruments for making ointments and powders from herbs. This is in a building next to the herb beds, not at their best at this time of year, though the autumn colours in the woodland and across the gardens more than made up for this.

The Physicians of Myddfai, according to legend, were descendants of a fairy from a nearby lake, who married a mortal and taught her children the secrets of herbs and their uses. The remedies used by the Physicians were written down in a medieval manuscript in Welsh. This was published with a translation in the 19th century and I was able to buy a paperback reproduction of it. I’m told some things in the book are later than the medieval remedies in the manuscript, but a lot of it is genuine and would have come from an older oral tradition, which could go back to the druids.

It’s wonderful that the Garden commemorates this tradition alongside its serious scientific work on botany. It’s part of the Garden that is set up as a tourist attraction but it’s also part of the Welsh heritage that this herbal tradition exists, carried on by the cunning men and wise women for centuries and now officially recognized by the National Botanic Garden. I’m studying these remedies to see what use I can make of them and what use my ancestors made of the herbs that grow in the woods and hedges of our land.