H is for Hedge

So let's talk about hedges, in the context of hedgewitchery (if that's a word). The hedge, of the English type, being the border between the cultivated, civilized land, and the forest, the wildwood. And so a metaphor for the Veil, the barrier between this world and the Other, that which is crossed on a journey of a shamanic type.

Except I don't live in England. I live in New England. We don't have hedges like that, old thorny hedgerows planted as living fences, to mark boundaries, keep the sheep in, and provide home for hedgehogs; what we have here are stone walls. Old, tumbled-down, New England fieldstone walls, more than a few of which date to colonial times, though of course it is simple enough to build new ones (and I've built a few myself). They, too, mark the boundary, in many cases, between the cultivated field (or mown lawn) and the woods; and they, too, are a haven for wildlife and wild plants, especially in my yard blackberry brambles.

Three sides of my property are marked by fieldstone walls, dating to who-knows-when; the house itself, a colonial probably circa 1745, has a fieldstone foundation. And six fireplaces, though I don't mean to brag; but it's a lucky, lucky house for a Witch, and I know it.

Old fieldstone walls criss-cross the woods around here, woods that were once fields but have since been reclaimed by forest; driving around, especially in the winter when the leaves are off the trees, one can see the old property lines, the old boundaries now lost, the walls now little more than piles of rocks more or less in a line.

I have not tried, so far, to imagine or See the barrier crossed in a journey as a fieldstone wall. But it is a good metaphor, a local metaphor, one that speaks of this land, this very specific place, this bit of Earth I tend, my home; and so I wonder if I might picture it so. I would think it would be profoundly centering and grounding, and root me here. I shall have to give it a try.