Hazelnut Wisdom: Journeying to Ireland

We are almost finished designing Hazelnut Wisdom: Journeying to Ireland. Here is the cover. It’s an old painting of the Irish myth of the Salmon of Knowledge eating the hazelnuts that are falling into the Well of Wisdom. Pegi Eyers of Stone Circle Press and I hope that the book will be out by the end of November! There are ten pilgrimage stories along with eight stories about seasonal celebrations on the Irish wheel of the year. It is illustrated with some 25 color photos from our travels. Many of you played a part in this book by attending these celebrations, or through Dances of Universal Peace, or through helping with the editing.

What would I most like known about this book? That this book has some Irish points of view that are not too common in our culture like: the Earth is sacred; nature is imbued with spirit; embodied spirituality is vital; human creativity via intuition and imagination is essential; the divine feminine archetype is all-important; imaginal and spiritual states of being are as real as the physical; and subtle energies move through, enliven, and connect all beings. Hazelnut Wisdom is a celebration of human creativity.

I want to tell you a story about how the spirit world has helped me with the publishing process. For many years I have studied Ancestral Medicine, that is, healing through ancestral wisdom, with Dr. Daniel Foor. During the past two years I have been learning how to be a practitioner of Earth rituals and animism in order to help people reconnect with nature and with older relational ways of knowing that we all still have in our DNA. Tracing back, we see that all of our ancestors were originally indigenous to their homelands.

When I talked to Daniel about publishing the book, he suggested that even during the challenging process of publishing, I can continue to include and connect with the ancestors and spirits of the land. So I want to give a flavor of this animistic work.

The back story is that I had a pretty emotionally traumatic childhood. Any time I had something I was excited about or wanted to tell my father—you know, like a child typically shows who they are by telling what they are interested in—he would ignore me and change the subject. I could never even finish a sentence. I felt the stinging shame of worthlessness. As a result I became practically mute, and by high school I would dissociate and blank out in the midst of trying to tell someone something.

The introverted work of writing and photographing is where my comfort zone is. But when one has written a book, the next step is to tell people about it. I knew that just talking about, let alone actually promoting the book, was going to be hard for me. My next task was to send the book to people and ask them to write a back-of-the-book blurb or testimonial. You know, ask them to read the book and say something good about it. An over-the-top amount of anxiety came up at the thought of doing this. Thinking about asking people for an endorsement activated a deep, trauma-level fear of being shamed.

I realized that this was a clear example of what Daniel had counseled: that we can take the opportunity to practice calling on our healthy, loving ancestors and our other resources (plant and animal spirit helpers) to be with us and assist us with our Earth-spirituality pursuits–for compassion and for reminding us that this work is not about us, we are just the messengers transmitting what Life has given us to do in the best way we know how. And we don’t have to do it alone. The vision that I describe next is similar to what we help each other practice in our training sessions.

Ancestors

My O’Driscoll grandmother’s lineage traces back to Germany. Daniel’s method is to let your intuition go back through a lineage as far as you need to go to find a healthy ancestor. That well ancestor is the one who does all the healing of that lineage. I had to go back very far to find her, back to indigenous tribal fishers and gatherers, back to when women and children lived together separately from men. I found Germama up near the Baltic Sea in what is now Germany. She is the elder of a women’s collective of herbalists and midwives. Their sisterhood is such that they will stop at nothing to safeguard their women. The healing of their women is paramount.

Writing in my journal about the anxiety I was feeling, my last thought was, I need lots of compassion around me, and I need to let the book go, be taken out of my hands as it enters into this new phase. Then a spontaneous vision arose:

The book is being received, like a newborn babe, into the loving hands of Germama’s women. They swaddle and hold her tenderly and begin to gently introduce the new child to her relatives. Others of Germama’s midwives tend to the woman who just gave birth and who is vulnerable, who needs nurturing and protecting. Other women in the collective watch over the woman’s other children. The women are all fiercely protective of the mother, the baby, and the children and let them know they are not alone.

The women are introducing the child to her plant relatives—to the Hazelnut Trees, in particular. They are introducing the child to her animal relatives—to the Blue Fish and the Hawk, in particular. They introduce the child to the stones—to the Milky Quartz and to Amber, in particular.

They are asking the hazelnuts if they will be willing to care for this child and help her grow. The hazelnuts—having been so well honored in the book—agree to, with pleasure. They carry the child to the river. The blue fish, feeling so well-honored, through drawings and stories, agrees to, with pleasure. They carry the child to the fish-hawk family. Feeling so well-honored, they, too, agree. They carry the child to the Baltic Sea and ask the amber relatives if they want to help this child grow in any way they can. They enthusiastically make a necklace for the child, stringing themselves on a strand of underwater grass, which also wants to join in. Finally, they take the child to milky quartz, which asks to bring its medicine, a healing and protective connection with its relatives, the Subtle Energies.

The women who are tending the mother apply herbal poultices to her wound and to various places on her body, heart, and mind. They tell her that when the wound is well-healed it will be time for the herbal steams that will purify and protect her body and soul from any harmful intrusions. They apply warm herb-infused poultices with various properties for circulation of lymph and blood that is now returned to her own body from being shared with the child. And they apply other warm mineral muds to the muscles and joints of her pelvis and to her stomach muscles, which have worked so hard. And a warm rose-petal poultice to her heart, which will miss the child no longer being inside her; and to her hara to ease the grief and the fear of letting the child leave her protective womb; and to her smiling face to support the joy of the birth of this strange new being who is no longer hers alone.

The whole community of women is enlivened and busy with these preparations, making these medicines, cutting the wood for the fires, making the food for the Celebration of New Life Ceremony. The child’s name will be Little One Who Gives Hazelnuts By the Stream.

Well, after this healing vision was over, I easily sent off requests to people–with no anxiety!

I need the strong protection of Germama’s women with me, so I can feel safe enough to be excited about Hazelnut Wisdom, so I can do the kinds of things one does to promote a book. Can I let it go out as a gift from “the Others” while living in wonder at this collaboration of people, plants, animals, and spirit?  Like the children of us animals, it was created by mysterious forces, not by myself. I nurtured it, yes, but other forces brought the experiences that created it.

Again I envision Germama’s group. I am just one of them, doing a totally natural thing, birthing something created by nature and spirit. I realize that the right to feel pleasure and happiness about the book, in order to promote it, is irrelevant, especially if it is hard for me because of trauma triggering. The appropriate response is gratitude and celebration. Gratitude for the miracle of human creativity that happens when spirit, Earth, and the human heart and hands join together. A celebration of the creativity that’s in all of us, each in our own way. This is simply the creative energy of Life that wants to be birthed. Perhaps it is especially hard for women to delight in something we’ve created, given subjugation by the patriarchy.

We women–and men–who are supporting creativity, our own or that of others,’ need to know that we are not alone. Our loving ancestors and the whole natural world are with us, just waiting for us to join them in showing the world how much we love it.

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