It’s Mid-September here in Ireland. The month started with a week of blistering weather. The heat predictably arrived when the schools started back, when summer was supposed to be packed away, all neat and tidy, in exchange for sensible shoes and new pencils. And yet for as long as I can remember it has been like this, and I love it. The beaches and woodlands finally quiet again and the weather beautiful for days on end. Now the mornings and evenings have turned crisp, and the Aurora has been dancing near nightly overhead. The leaves are changing in their autumnal hues, still on the trees. The light is low and sticky and dappled. The berries and fruits of autumn all ripe in the hedgerows. Apples, haws and hazelnuts, elderberries, and damsons in my own garden. Blackberries a daily treat. The mists roll in nightly from the bog and the river, surrounding the house on all sides, they burn off by mid-morning but soon they will linger. My mind has already turned to the equinox, less than a week away now, when we will tip into the darkness, and the final descent towards Winter beyond. Six months of more night than day. Each year it catches me off guard, even though I nightly watch its approach, even though I gather candles and hot chocolate and woollens and notebooks well in anticipation of long writing nights. Even so, the wheel turns.
And so, we wander. My boy and I. We chase the falling leaves, to catch one is to bring seven years good luck. We are still barefoot and mercifully, for another year, without an imposed timetable. This is our last September fully of our own. This is our last September in this house in the bog, house on the edge of the meadow, on the edge of worlds. And where I thought there would be relief there is a bittersweet grief. Next year we will be capitulated into a school timetable, uniforms and worksheets and we’ll be living in a town on the edge of the sea.
Next year we may not have our beloved hound at our sides. Some of you may have seen my note about his suspected dementia. He cannot settle until he sees my son and it is heart-breaking. There was a lightning strike close to the house too, it fried the phone lines and internet routers up and down the road. The engineer who called in unexpectedly said he’d never seen anything like it, the boxes charred black. (This is part of the reason this post is a week late, I apologise again. Thank you for sticking with me, your support is invaluable and I do a happy dance with each subscription notification. Thank you. )
The intensity of that storm, just one of several this year, and the constant news of flooding and wildfires, earthquakes and life-threatening heat brings me right back to my fears for the planet. All of it adds to a sleep deprived grief. There is no cure, it simply must be moved through. And so, I resolve to soak up the days, to play, to dance barefoot with the Autumn in the meadow, in all her moods. To eat the blackberries, straight from the hedgerow or mixed into breakfasts with honey or in those scones hot from the oven. Autumn wafting through the rooms. For me the blackberries, still so seasonal even in our commercialised world are bitter-sweet reminders that life moves in cycles, that it is a continual act of loving and letting go.
The blackberries are of course this month’s Writing Down the Weeds. The New Moon came in the early hours of Friday morning and so below is their folklore followed by a short story infused with their juice, dark and sticky. You’ve met her before here, this seer, healer, witch. Her story this time was born of course from the blackberry lore below but also in part from Ciara O’Hartghaile’s beautiful description of cleaning her grandmothers pot before making elderberry syrup and from a cherished book from my childhood, The Thorn Witch[1], the illustrations in which stayed with me into adulthood. They are evocative of Stanley Donwood’s illustrations in Holloway[2]. And of a particular folkloric or mythic way of seeing the world, as John Moriarty describes it “a world of worlds, all of them one world, all of them a world in which there is a coming and going between worlds.”[3]
I’ve written of this coming and going between worlds before. It is intrinsic to the Irish imagination. A fluidity of space and time, where not everything is as it seems. It is from this place that this character comes. It is from my own relationship with moving between worlds, between time; through shamanic flight, dreaming true, reading tea leaves and tarot cards, and more recently falling into the deep well of an obsidian scrying mirror. Well deep, bog pool black, and just as true. And so, this character comes, witch in the modern word, healer, seer of old. She’s constantly knocking when I sit down with the plant lore for these New Moons. Today her fingers are stained with blackberries as mine were beside the hawthorns earlier, and she is coming and going between the worlds in the closing darkness of Autumn.
I have included the Púca folklore in the Blackberry lore below but my writing nights have been lately waylaid by both boy and hound so I will instead promise you a Púca tale before Samhain when Blackberries are included in the feast and this malevolent otherworld being it makes its way between worlds to rampage across the countryside.
[1] E.J. Taylor The Thorn Witch (Walker Books, 1985)
[2] Dan Richards (Author), Robert Macfarlane (Author), Stanley Donwood (Illustrator)
Holloway (Faber&Faber, 2014)
[3] John Moriarty Dreamtime (The Lilliput Press, 2020, Amended Edition) Pg. 5
Blackberry
Irish: Dris (the Bramble) Sméara Dubha (The berry)
Latin: Rubus fruticosis
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