Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Mugwort Trial

I did try that mugwort flying ointment again, after I journeyed to talk with the plant herself; it worked this time, very definitely.

It brings a very different quality to the visions I experience, however. There is a very sharp clarity to things, an edge and a harshness, almost. It's also just a damned spooky plant. I found that during the vision, and for a couple days afterwards, I was seeing things out of the corner of my eye all the time.

I'm a skittish sort, given to anxiety; also I live in a two hundred and fifty year old colonial that was, and I am not making this up, the boyhood home of a murderer in the 1950s. There be ghosts here. And while I don't think their sort can hurt me, still, I don't need to see them all the time or be woken up by Emily leaning over me staring in curiosity. She's a nice girl, as far as ghosts go, but seriously. I'm already given to insomnia.

I'd even done, a year or two ago now, a little meditation to turn off my ability to see ghosts, because I just didn't need the extra anxiety, having enough of my own occurring naturally, thank you very much. I imagined a tap, like the kind on the side of the house, labelled 'ghosts'. And I closed it righty-tighty, until it was bone dry underneath.

That worked, for some time. And now I don't know if it's just the time of year now, as we slide down towards Samhain, but that mugwort flying ointment seemed to open that tap right up again. And again, I am really ridiculously sensitive to drugs and medicine, so I'm sure it is in large part just me.

But I don't need to be spooked, either. I will probably use it here and there, but for now the sweet honeysuckle is working just fine.

Queen Anne's Lace

I have been following along with Christopher Penczak's The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft book all this year, having started the year-and-a-day course within it on the first of January; I figured it was a good place to start, even though I've been doing a good deal of what is in there on my own. It can be good to have a structure, and even some rules once in a while, even if one just throws out those rules later. (The same goes for art, of course.) Also it looked pretty balanced and that I'd get a good taste of things by following it.

So this month the lesson in part has been about plants, and journeying to find the 'medicine' they have for you. I have some problems with that terminology because it does strike me as appropriative of Native American traditions; however there isn't really an equivalent word in English that has all the nuances of it used in that context, so.

Last week or so I did a journey to connect with a plant, one whose 'medicine' was 'correct and good for me at this time', as Penczak suggests; what I got was Queen Anne's lace, Daucus carota, the wild carrot, as well as the word Sovereignty and a connection to the Goddess Áine of the Irish, which was especially interesting as I didn't know She was a sovereignty Goddess until I looked it up afterwards.

As that, however, just felt like an introduction, yesterday I sat down with some Queen Anne's lace I'd picked and painted it. And let me tell you that is one freakin' complicated flower. It's more or less a fractal, with the spray pattern of the main umbel repeated in the smaller ones. The finished art is pretty impressionistic, but there's only so much detail I can get in that particular style. Still, though, I think it came out pretty good. It's certainly recognizable, and that's the important part.

When I finished painting last night I put some of my really-very-mild honeysuckle flying ointment on and counted down. I haven't actually tried drumming myself; I have this feeling the movement will keep me on the surface. I really do have to be able to be still to get into trance, at least in my experience so far. I have tried to listen to a drumming track, and I'll say it certainly worked. Far too well. When I was done I couldn't make a fist I was so relaxed, though I was simultaneously sort of anxious, because the drumbeat was too fast. It didn't feel exhilarating; it felt like I was being chased by something big and nasty. And from the point of view of someone recovering from abuse, i.e. being prey my whole life, that was a definite no. At least for now.

So anyhow there I was by the Tree, and there was that spirit husband of mine. And there he was, and there I was and there was honeysuckle ointment on my third eye and wrists and damn but didn't he look good and so after a bit of distraction because, well, side effects, he took me around back to the little herb garden. I swear. It's kind of hilarious. I mean not that I need help finding the man attractive, Holy Mother of the Gods I really don't. But sheesh.

So he takes my hand (my left in his right, as usual) and leads me to a spot in the little herb garden by the Tree, the one with the brick circle-in-a-square; and there in the hottest driest sunniest spot of the garden, is a Queen Anne's lace plant. It is quite robust, a good four feet tall.

I sit down in front of it on the bricks; he sits behind me and I lean on him a bit. I look at the flower. I have never heard of anyone cultivating it as an ornamental, and I wonder why. It is really very beautiful, and just in the Googling around I did looking at pictures I can see that sometimes each little cluster has a pink or purple tinge to the center. I'll bet some hybridizer could really bring that out, as well as make the umbels like ten inches across. But as far as I know no one has. I suppose they've bred it for the carrot root, and I also know that it is a fine thing sometimes to leave well enough alone, and that the idea of it is, if not insulting in some ways, simply unnecessary. It is wild, and beautiful, and that is enough. I still wonder, though.

I ask if it would like to talk to me; I don't get anything, though I can feel that it is a she, although maybe that is just the name. I tell her I have made a little picture of her and I hope she finds it pleasing.

I think I faintly hear just a little bit of giggling. She's named after a queen, but there is also something a little bit like a child playing dress-up to her, too. Maybe it's the connection with the common carrot, I don't know. But she feels more like a princess than a queen to me. It is an interesting dynamic; there is, if not a contradiction to her, a complexity.

Suddenly I get a picture of her, something in motion; I watch each flower head explode, like a firework, then each little piece of that first explosion also explode. And then I See it: it's not a firework. It's the Big Bang, the explosion from which the Universe was made. The main umbel is the Universe; each secondary one a galaxy; each tiny little white flower a star. And the single dark flower in the center is reminder that it all begins in darkness, with the Void.

Then I watch it ungrow, the flower closing up into a bud, and the stem and leaves withdrawing down down into the ground; and then there is the root of her, the tough woody thing that fights its way through the poorest soil here in New England.

When I can find the words I ask, "How do you heal?"

She says without words, By growing a deep root so strong it enables me to stand tall as myself. Ah. That goes with 'sovereignty' quite well, doesn't it.

She then says The only way to disentangle complexity is to learn it, to really understand it by looking at it.

I realize that her flower head is also a symbol for the labyrinth, that complexity within, the journey into the dark and the Self; she connects the outer and inner, the higher and lower, the delicate and the tough, the macrocosm and microcosm, the light and the dark, the Universe and the Labyrinth.

After that just as suddenly I find myself looking again at this ubiquitous wildflower, one which is yet another introduced species in these parts, and don't think I haven't noticed that the invasive European plants are the ones asking for my attention. I am, I suppose, descended from invasive Europeans myself.

I bought carrots this week. That sounds silly, but it is an old, old, magic; for eating something is a way to take its essence into you. I don't care for them too much, I will admit, especially cooked; but, there at the end of this vision I get the suggestion that I should make some carrot cake. I think about it; I have all the ingredients, even cream cheese for the proper frosting. I am to bless it, and make it with intent, as taking the 'medicine' of the wild carrot into myself.

I thank her then, and as offering breathe on her, as both the gift of carbon dioxide and a little of my own life-energy, my spirit. I think she is pleased.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Mugwort

I've been aware of mugwort all this season; it is, these days, considered one of the witchy herbs par excellence: it's ubiquitous, especially aligned towards the visionary and dreams, and pretty mild, so a good place to start, so I've heard. You probably can't hurt yourself on it, barring an allergy.

So I've been picking it, and using it for the most part as infusions to cleanse and consecrate a crystal or two; and not too long ago I made a batch of flying ointment with some. I am assuming that the best way to approach this as a beginner is to just use one herb at a time per recipe, so that I can learn about that one herb before I try to combine several at once. I need to know what each one does on its own.

I tried the ointment, but it didn't do much for me, I didn't think; the vision was a bit jumbled and maybe even nonsensical. I'm not sure. It may be one of those herbs that doesn't really work as an ointment.

But the more I thought about it the more I thought I had been rather rude. I hadn't even said hello, really. Yes, I'd thanked it when I picked it but I was getting the distinct feeling that this particular herb wanted to be formally introduced.

So I picked some more the other day and sat down and sketched it; then tonight I painted it, like I did for the greater celandine a couple posts down. I haven't really heard of others approaching herbs in this manner, I mean as part of a ritual shamanish (as I like to say, given that I do not claim to be a shaman) getting-to-know process; but it makes a lot of sense for me, given that I am an artist. Because in drawing something you really have to look at it, at both the whole and the details.

This was the impression I got from mugwort from drawing it:

It has a precision to it, a not quite fineness, but a clarity, like you are looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope. It is very sharp, too, though not in a harmful or cutting way--it's more of that precision. And it reads as regal, to me, very much so. Perhaps it's the pointed leaves that look like the tines of a crown, or maybe it's the Tyrian purple running through the stalks; but though the stuff is very, very common in my area, still, it reads as a Queen. And yes, as very definitely female.

So I prepared myself tonight, and dabbed a little honeysuckle flying ointment on, as I still hadn't formally introduced myself and didn't want to use the mugwort. This is what I Saw:

My Guide, well I suppose I can say it in shamanic terms, my spirit husband, because that is the relationship we have, takes me to the Tree; to the right of it there is that little herb garden, the same one with the circle of bricks in the square of stone walls. It is a sunken garden, on three sides at least; the back wall leads down hill. There in the very center, on a raised platform or dais, is a very large mugwort plant.

I think about the name, mugwort, one of those old ugly Anglo-Saxon names; even the Latin name Artemisia vulgaris, has common, vulgar, right in it. Yet she feels royal to me.

I say, out loud in this vision, "Hello. I would like to speak with you. Would you like to talk to me?"

I get no response; no feeling one way or the other. With the greater celandine, I got a feeling of warmth.

I tell her then that I have made a painting of her, in honor of her and that I hope she likes it. Still nothing.

Then I say, "I fear I have made a mistake and that I have been rude. I have been using your herb, but I did not ask first, or even say hello. If I have been rude, I apologize."

Then I feel a bit of warmth. I mention the painting I have made again, and 'show' it to her in my mind's eye. Then she says, in words, "Oh those buds are darling."

I look at her. She is very much a Queen, and I mean in human form, which I was not expecting. She is sitting there, in the middle of the garden, on a silver throne; she is dressed all in grey silk with a silver crown, with, of course, the deeply divided mugwort leaves wrought in silver. Her hair is long and silver, though she is young, with a round white Moon face; I wonder if she is young now because the mugwort in my area (and hence the bit I'd just painted) is in bud, not bloom, buds being a maiden thing. Her eyes are a light gray-green.

I say again, "Hello."

Then I ask her how I should approach her. She says, "As ritual."

I then ask if I may have permission to harvest her herb. "Yes," she says, then adds, "take as much as you like." I thank her.

I ask her if there is something she would like me to know about her. She says, "I am common and I am Queen."

I ask if there is anything else she would like me to know about her. "I don't bite," she says quietly. I take that to mean she is approachable, but she expects a certain amount of politeness.

I ask if she is harsh. "I am when I need to be," she says, and that sounds fair to me. Then I ask if she is fair. "Yes," she says, and her eyes become a perfect neutral grey.

I look at her. "You are an introvert, aren't you?" I ask, because I'm getting the feeling she just looks aloof.

"Yes," she says, smiling. Okay. We have that in common, then. "Conversations with you go right for the depths, don't they?" I ask her. "Yes," she says, still smiling. Okay. That will be good to keep in mind when using that flying ointment, and that makes sense.

I ask her one more time if there is anything she would like me to know about her. She says, "I am of the Moon, the Sun, and the Sea."

Then I ask if it would be all right with her if I shared this conversation with others, particularly in writing (by which I mean here). She says, "Of course."

I thank her, then, and take my leave of her.