Autumnal Thoughts: Entwined Musings
“She had so deep a kinship with the trees, so intuitive a sympathy with leaf and flower, that it seemed as if the blood in her veins was not slow-moving human blood, but volatile sap.”
~Mary Webb, Gone to Earth
Later on today I’ll be hosting a workshop for the NYC Anarchist Book Fair titled ‘Reclaiming Medicine: An Obeah Woman's Guide to Plant Medicine’. It’s a free event and you can find the link and further information here.
I've been thinking a lot about this kind of stuff lately, that is plants, magic and medicine as well as those things that separate us and those that unite us and I wanted to just throw some thoughts around here. Bear with me, if you will.
Many of you will already know I am an animist, that I practise witchcraft and obeah, that I enjoy foraging, cooking and using plants in my spiritual and magical practices as well as in my everyday life and so I just wanted to talk about the connection between all of these things.
I hold foraging walks in my town. This simply involves taking small groups of people out, usually in a circular route that follows the river, crossing over and heading back on the opposite side before crossing again and finishing where we started. During these walks, I point out plants and their uses, encouraging people to have a taste of a rosehip or haw fresh from the plant or tree. We’ll discuss the importance of looking after the environment, of not taking more than we need, of paying back what we take by picking up rubbish, you get the idea. There’s always at least one person though who, during the advertising of these walks, doesn’t always understand what foraging is and ends up accusing us of destroying nature. It makes me wonder if they expend the same amount of energy fighting against the real culprits, that is Capitalism and big business, who instead of seeing the value of these wild spaces, see only pound signs. Of course they don’t. So much easier to try and pick a fight with the people who care about the land where they live. In fact only yesterday, a Wildlife Trust (an organisation that creates nature reserves) spoke out about the take over of one of their nature reserves by HS2, that is the developers of the governments high speed rail link that aims to get people to the capital eleven minutes faster. They rocked up without warning and now decades of hard work and conservation will be destroyed.
No, so much easier to try and fight against the little people. In a way I get it. After all, they’ve been raised in a system that makes people believe they cannot affect change, not on those larger levels. Part of the problem relates to the fact that they simply do not understand or cannot see the connection between foraging, the land and magic.
It’s often the same when I talk about the similarities between witchcraft and obeah. I get told to be careful about appropriation (seriously. I know, right?) and again, a lot of this comes down to people being unable to see the bigger picture. And besides, obeah and witchcraft do have something of a shared history. At the very least they were both bound by the same 18th century anti witchcraft laws. Both make use of herbs and plants. Many a slave master or overseer had reason to fear the poisons used by the obeah man or woman and to be caught in possession of certain plants and roots would be enough to be accused and convicted of practising obeah.
And witchcraft is no stranger to the uses of plants for malevolent and benevolent purposes. During my research for a talk I gave over the summer, I happened upon information about the root diggers trade. Gentlemen skilled in the art of identifying and harvesting plants as well as their uses would travel the country, knowing where they could find a particular plant. They would then sell them to cunning men and women, folks who treated those who could not afford a doctor or lived too far away from one. The last root digger was recorded in 1958 in Lincolnshire, the county that borders my own.
Both witchcraft and obeah involve work with the spirits of land. Both have animism at their core, at least the forms I practice do. Both see the world as alive and imbued with spirit, with soul. Within both practices, we, humanity are seen as not something outside of the natural world, but as part of it.
When we see ourselves as part of the landscape, only then, I believe we’ll put in the real work to stop the destruction of it.
But how likely is that do you reckon?
After all, we are in a sorry state where we are so separated from one another. Where people want to call out folks who are meant to be friends for things that don’t matter at all. When we can be so petty to those people we class as friends, what does that say about anything else? What does it say about how we treat those we do not know or those who hold different opinions to our own?
Obeah, witchcraft and animism are strands of my life that are not separate but instead are entwined and woven with all the other strands that make up who I am. They cannot be unpacked and packed away at will. It isn’t larp. And it’s the same with the wider issues in the world too. We do not live in a vacuum. Our actions and inactions resound through the world, some like the draught caused by the fluttering of a butterfly's wings and others with the power of a tornado. What reactions do your actions cause in the wider world. Something to think about, isn’t it?
So there you have it. Some of my thoughts. Perhaps I’m a little melancholic. The equinox has been and gone. The late summer has disappeared and as I write this, it’s dark outside and I can hear the rain pattering against my window. Autumn and the dark half of the year are here. I like this time, it gives us time to think, don’t you think?
“In the end, bless the darkness, hold the light, because the two aren't divisible.”~S.Kelley Harrel, Real Wyrd
EMMA KATHRYN
Emma Kathryn, practises traditional British witchcraft, Vodou and Obeah, a mixture representing her heritage. She lives in the sticks with her family where she reads tarot, practises witchcraft and drink copious amounts of coffee.
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