Image: Chloe Dominique Allen
It is the season of the Dark. Technically the beginning of Winter in the Northern Hemisphere. The time when leaves fall and the last berries are plucked by migrating birds. Here, the rains came after months of dry drought. The Firethorn is heavy with bright Vermillion berries. Her thorns are slippery with raindrops. Her medicine is a distant ancestral cousin to Hawthorne. She reminds me of that which is bright red in me, that which tends the fire of my heart, the courage of my soul.
In December, the bluebirds will come to feast. The bluebirds who bear the same blush colored rose on their breasts. They will sing and they will fatten themselves with her life giving berries.
I’ve made a few strings of dried beads from her offerings. In the dark cabinets above the stove are my elixirs: an oxymel of firethorn berry and leaves, cardamom and cinnamon, clove and anise; a tincture of firethorn berry.
These berries feel connected to my work with Vassalissa and Story tending. The red of them, like the Red Horse, like the Red Sun, like the Summer Fire, like the Desert Rocks, like the Desert Drought. The Red of Blood and courage to venture beyond the comfortably numb and known. To venture into the unknown territory of the Baba, the Yaga, the witch of the forests wild and unpredictable edges and secreted mysteries.
Wildness is as Wildness does. We cannot contain its meaning or messages. It cavorts and cascades and prances and dashes and scatters and scythes and romps and galavants. Wildness Wilds the Seasons. Some stories churn us into the exact gesture we are meant to find ourselves in smack dab directly in this moment.
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