Blackthorn

Folklore and fairytales

October’s New Moon came on Saturday, just as it grew dark here in Ireland. The dark moon by the old ways, only turning new when it appears as a thin crescent in our skies. This moon came alongside a lunar eclipse, the first of two this month. They always fall on the new or the full moon. The energy has been fraught, sleepless. I cannot watch the news for crying. I can’t breathe with it. There is so much to say and so much I feel I cannot say. So, I go outside to pray. I do not believe in an all-powerful male God. But I do believe in energy. In the Earth. I believe in people. In inherent goodness. And I believe in freedom. There cannot be peace without freedom. My ancestors scream this down the centuries. More recently too. Women, strong women who refused to live on their knees. And so, I pray, to them. Forces of nature who know of violence, who know of oppression, who stood against it in any form. I pray to this land, soaked through with the same. But I feel helpless and heart-sick with it all. I lay by the fire and weep. It is all I can do to find love. Love in any moment I can find it. I want to reach out and gather all those I love safe and close. I think of the dreams I wrote of here not long ago, dreams of war, obliteration, and it is too much to carry. For my own sanity I must earth it down. The rest of this post seems futile in the face of it all, a privileged indulgence but I hope it will act as a form of earthing, grounding, however small. From a land which knows, so deeply knows. It is quiet moments of love, of the shifting light and an ancient grounding in the woods.

It’s been mostly clear and crisp here. Finally. Golden days and nights with every star whirling overhead, an extra blanket needed on the bed in this old house on the edge of things. We woke to the first frost of the season this morning (Sunday 15th October), a skiff of rain frozen overnight, everything diamonds and gold in the early light. My boy is resisting bedtime with every ounce of Irish stubbornness in him and so we’re often outside long after dinnertime to watch the first stars appear. We see the last of the crow scouts heading back to their rookery, beyond the bog. We wait for bats. Barefoot still on the cooling, damp grass. The darkness is gathering. It’s dark when we wake in the morning, it's dark when we go to bed. I light candles, quietly in the morning, at noon in the kitchen, making lunches and dinner, for his bath, for my late, so very late-night flits to the page, with the fire at my back. They are Irish beeswax, the most local I could find (Dublin, not very local but at least from Irish hives, supporting Irish beekeepers, Irish bees). The house smells like warm honey with it, and so my boy dreams of bees. There’s a hive above the bed he says, above where I sleep. There’s one in the pantry cupboard too. I find his toy bees there, tucked in on top of the jars of honey. His small wooden Chough (a crow-like bird with an orange/red-ish beak and feet, more common in the coastal west here) stands guard atop my blackberry jam.

He's near constantly in the ever-swirling waters of his imagination these days. He demands stories at all hours, usually about our new house, North of here. We sit under the huge old Saile tree (willow, the gaeilge for willow is Saileach, the Latin is Sailx, so around here it’s called Saile) and tell stories of the great Oak in our new garden. The renovation is still in the early stages but each day my son is already there in his mind, particularly with that tree. Sometimes I think I bought the tree and the house just conveniently happened to be there, to be dealt with in order to be with that tree, and the easy walking distance to a school and beach. But of course, I didn’t buy it, it has possibly been standing longer than the house, and will hopefully outlast our tenure there, we are guardians of it, for now.

We’ve been walking in the ancient oak woods too, not far from the new house. One of the last vestiges of Irelands native forests which could once carry a squirrel from one end of the country to the other in its branches. Oak and hazel and holly, sacred native woodland spared the axe as it was believed to be a fairy place. (It is probable that it was an ancient ring fort and there is a standing stone outside it, in the shadow of the local mountain). It is still held as a fairy place locally, a fiercely guarded secret, not to be added to the tourist trail, so much so that the forest service signs are consistently removed.

In an ancient Irish poem, it is said that the secrets of Samhain were learned in oakwood’s from ‘spirits and fairy folk’.^[1]In ancient Greece and Rome the oaks spoke through priestesses in prophesy. But I’ll write more of oaks for the Oak Moon in December, today’s plant, for my ongoing project Writing Down the Weeds, is another ancient of the woods, in the same territory, Samhain, and the ocular opportunity of the deep dark drawing close, the Cailleach of the Woods, Blackthorn.

Blackthorn

Draighean Modern Gaeilge

Straif Old Gaeilge

Prunus spinosa Latin