Earth Pathways Showcase

Let the small plant growing wild and brave in the dry rock sing to you of great movements of tectonic plates, of the heaving of the earth in birth of continents.

Let the small plant growing free tell you a story of fire and flood and rivers of fire. Of the way they created quartz and feldspar and granite, laid down in sparkling layers of rock.

Let the small plant tell of her root tendrils, nourished by rich minerals borne of aboriginal starfire.

Plant Teacher © Catherine Pawson 2022

Imbolc

The first stirrings of new life arise, tender and fresh. Lambs take their first wobbly steps, and the spring flowers emerge, bright from dark earth. Earth energy is still strong, while we awake, blinking, to the gently growing light outside. We may feel a call to move, to be outside more, stretching and finding spring’s strength in our bodies. Listen for the growing sound of birdsong as the birds get busy with building nests for their young.

Dreaming Rises - Feel your winter-dreaming unfurl. What dreaming have you cradled through winter’s darkness that now seeks air and space, and a tender hatching into the clear new light?

Plant Spirit Medicine - The first snowdrops nod their heads. Winter aconite and crocuses show up too. After winter’s muted colours, gaze at the brightness of early spring flowers. Let it gladden your heart, as all of your senses gently awaken.

Gratitude - Take a sketch pad and a comfortable mat or cushion. Let yourself be drawn to a plant or tree, and go to sit quietly with it. Observing it, offer your gratitude for its life, and for any gifts of food or medicine it might give you and your community. Introduce yourself – treat this plant as a new friend you’d like to get to know. Now sketch it in detail, noting how it grows – with others? Alone? In light or shade? What do you notice?

Imbolc © Catherine Pawson

Spring Equinox / Ostara

The element of earth gives way to air, as we reach the balance of light and darkness at the equinox. March winds blow our winter cobwebs away, and we notice colours of spring green, daffodil yellow, blackthorn white. Mark where the sun rises at dawn – this is due east. Invite your soul to rest in the balance, to feel the tipping point as winter’s slumber drops away and new energy bubbles up.

Dreaming Opens - Feel your dreaming unfurl now, as the light draws your spirit up and out. Look at what you’ve brought out from the womb of winter. What needs clarifying, clearing? Where is the strongest pulse of growth in your soul?

Plant Spirit Medicine - The flowers of some native British trees including alder, grey willow and blackthorn, rely on wind rather than insect pollination. The delicate blooms are often hidden by emerging leaves. Sit with a flowering tree and seek to know its blossoming energy.

Gratitude - Take some deep breaths, outside in the air where spring is stirring. Offer thanks for the simple miracle of breath. We breathe each other, we breathe plant-breath and ancestor-breath. We offer our breath in prayer and song. Air is the medium which bathes and infuses our bodies. Take a feather, and using the smoke from a herb such as sage, mugwort or lavender, clear the space around your home, making way for prayers as you speak or sing.

Spring Equinox © Catherine Pawson

Beltane

Now we can really feel the energy growing, as trees burst into blossom and the glorious bright green of new growth sprouts along hedges, in woodlands and gardens. All of a sudden, May fairs and festivals are here, inviting us out to sing, dance and gather with our communities. You may be lucky enough to live in a place where you can dance around the maypole, or watch Morris dancers welcome in the dawn.

Dreaming Sparks - Winter’s dreaming may feel far behind you, yet you carry it as a growing seed, rooted in the belly of those darker days. Where does your dreaming need energy and will, to draw it into form and action in the world?

Plant Spirit Medicine - An old folk tradition invites you to bathe your face with the dew from the hawthorn blossom, May blossom. Many is the tale of those waylaid by the faery folk, met under a hawthorn tree. What magic does the blossom offer you, early on Beltane morning?

Gratitude - Offer thanks to the sunshine. Go out early to hear the dawn chorus. Dance to the sound of nature – no need for recorded music. Listen for the flow and spark and song of the sap in the trees, the chorus of the birds. Let your body respond, offering a gesture, or a dance back to nature around you as a prayer of gratitude.

Beltane © Catherine Pawson

Summer Solstice / Litha

The element of fire rides high, with the longest hours of daylight drawing us out to bask in sunshine and wide skies. If the weather is kind to us, we can enjoy walking barefoot on warm soil, or plunging into rivers and seas and drying off in the sun. Nature is in full flood of growth, in leaf and blossom.

Dreaming Full Flow - There may be little time to withdraw into darkness and quiet. Fairs, festivals and fetes draw us into community, celebration. Grown in darkness, tended in growing light, share your dreaming, celebrate it and allow it to blossom.

Plant Spirit Medicine - The little spurs of golden St John’s Wort come into bloom at Solstice – it is named for old Midsummer day, St John’s Day on 24th, and used for cleansing, healing and divination. How does this plant speak to your heart? What medicine does it bring?

Gratitude - The night is shortest now. Can you keep an all-night vigil from dusk to dawn? Gather with friends to stay up and tell stories, sing songs through the night. Cook on a campfire. Or simply keep a candle burning through the night. How does sunlight reach you through wood or wax burning? Leaves gather light, bees gather nectar from summer blossoms, and through them an alchemy takes place. Offer thanks to the gift of fire, and how it nourishes you.

Summer Solstice © Catherine Pawson

Lughnasadh / Lammas

Light lies full and golden across fields of ripening grain, while poppies nod red heads and hedgerow plants have been setting plump seeds. Bellies and hearts are full with the fruits of the land, with the celebrations of holiday season, gathering with friends and family during the long days of summer. Traditionally, it’s a time for community games to celebrate the harvest.

Dreaming Gathers In - As the tide of full summer ebbs, our dreaming is infused with its sweetness. Turning to look over the last months of light and life in full flow, where has your winter-born dream seeded, flowered and fruited? Where might you tend your wild dreaming, with care and intent, now?

Plant Spirit Medicine - Yarrow’s white flowers grow in bright clumps at this time. This plant can take over two years to become established, but once settled in she grows as a perennial wildflower, withstanding neglect and harsh conditions. Long known for healing and protection in our old myths, what does she gift you?

Gratitude - Taking a handful of grain like barley, or oats or wheat, grind it in a pestle and mortar or a small mill, giving thanks for all the elements, for the bees who pollinate, for the farmer who grows. Follow the storyline of the grain back from harvest to seed. Bake the grain into bread or cakes and share with loved ones in a harvest celebration.

Lughnasadh © Catherine Pawson

Mabon / Autumn Equinox

We find a sacred pause again, here where the hours of light and darkness balance. Where sun sets now, on your horizon, is due west. The sweetness of summer may still be here in warm sunlit days, yet there is a chill in the air bringing a new season’s threshold.

Dreaming Full - The dream of the year is drawing to full circle. You have journeyed from quiet winter days, through the opening and flowering of summer. Now you are gifted a stillpoint, to review how you have shaped your dreaming, before carrying its gifts into the dark half of the year to sustain you with sweetness.

Plant Spirit Medicine - With berries and nuts bursting, it’s time to lay in stores for winter. Forage for berries and nuts, or take part in community apple-pressing days. Take a moment to bless this autumn bounty, and to offer a prayer or a song to the plants you harvest. What nourishment do they offer your body and soul?

Gratitude - At such an abundant time of year, give thanks for peace and make prayers for those who live in lands where war makes harvests impossible. Gather some water from your local river, spring or sea. Bless it with love and a prayer for peace across all lands. Release the water back into the land and imagine it carrying your prayers as it travels across our Earth in many forms.

Autumn Equinox © Catherine Pawson

Samhain

Earth energy gathers as the blessing of darkness cloaks our days. Our own energy draws inwards as hearthfires beckon. We may hear a call to slow down, finding moments of stillness even as we fill our baskets with the last seasonal colours. The land seems to flush with richness as the sun’s rays slant low over hills and through trees. It is time to plant bulbs for spring colour, or nuts for future trees.

Dream Visioning - The veils between this world and the otherworld are thin at this time. Call in dreaming visions – ask ancestors for medicine dreams for your soul.

Plant Spirit Medicine - Mushrooms are plant alchemists, transforming dead matter into life. Connecting to them can bring us the medicine of Earth’s mysteries. In myth, apples are connected to immortality, and have been found ritually buried with the dead. Even today many people apple- bob, in an echo of old divination rites. Apple medicine can bring us closer to the mystery of the cycles of death and rebirth.

Gratitude - Acknowledging both honey and sting of the medicine gifted you by your ancestors, create an altar that honours your blood and spirit ancestry. Who has left inspiration in their wake, for you to gather into your own life? Offer gratitude for the stories they have left you, the gifts that sing in your own life.

Samhain © Catherine Pawson

Winter Solstice / Yule

Earth energy is strong as the longest hours of darkness arrive. A stillness reigns over the land, as it sleeps and dreams, and it is there in the long liminal spaces of twilight. We are between the inbreath and the outbreath of the year, as the earth tilts her furthest away from the light and heat of the sun.

Dream Lies Deep - It is time to withdraw to our hearths, cradling our deepest dreaming in the silence and potency of darkness. The unwoven fibres of our dreams call us to stillness, to listen to their whispering.

Plant Spirit Medicine - The evergreens represent the bright thread of life always present. Ivy flowers provide bees with a late bounty of nectar and pollen and provide shelter for small creatures. Mistletoe symbolises the hidden current of fertility of this time of year, while holly’s scarlet berries bring to mind the vibrancy of blood, carrier of life, next to its glossy green leaves.

Gratitude - Practise staying open to the gift of darkness and cold, allowing it to embrace you. If you can, make a pilgrimage to a cave or burial mound to take your dreaming into the earth. If not, make a cairn of rocks in a garden, on a beach, in the woods or on your altar. Write or draw your dreaming on birch bark or leaf or stone and bury it inside.

Winter Solstice © Catherine Pawson

This is not our home, this hectic scurry of a life.
This fast-lane pace, switching, speeding, spinning.

We were made to dwell in the slow unfurling of a rose,
or at the point where the seed breaks open
to send forth the first wakening root tip.
We are breath and the slow tide of earth’s
reaching for the bright moon.

We remember how to break open to beauty,
to stand weeping in our own magnificence
even through the grief of it all,
to breathe and to cry and to split
our whole being in one smile.

This is how redemption looks.
This is how the slow healing begins,
at the place where we choose the roads that lead us
deep into our own singing cells,
and how they answer to the stars.

Redemption © Catherine Pawson 2021

Sometimes, constellations land into our veins, illuminating their branching networks with ancient starfire. Stop long enough for a ray of golden light to slant through trees and trick you out of your skin. Stay long enough for this love to catch you up. When it finally does, turn your face to beauty and surrender to your own weeping.

When that happens, the human skin slides off as a luminescence lights up cascades of scales, fur, claws, beating wings, soaring flight, slithering belly. All that’s needed is a slant of sunlight through trees, a subtle change in the trickling of stream-flow, to trick a human out of her familiarity, to land even momentarily into an entirely different realm.

When that happens, nothing is ever the same again.

Starfire © Catherine Pawson

As morning breaks
and you arrive, a guest,
into the new day,
offer a gift at her threshold.

Catch the night-bright dreaming
that still flits behind your vision.
Anchor it softly with breath
into the waking day.

Irrigate your thirsting soul,
pouring song into the waters,
whether of river or rain
or tears.

Let robin dawn song pierce your heart,
shining arrow,
cleaving a clear path once more
for joy

As the soft amber of sunrise
cloaks the swaying tree tops
bare your head to the blessing of rain.

Morning Prayer © Catherine Pawson

There are still some days so rushed and frantic that I don’t get outside for a walk. By the end of those days I am impoverished. My well runs dry, and something inside me feels shrivelled. My moods veer wildly, untethered and tetchy.

I’ve learnt that to create time for that walk is no indulgent whim. It’s essential medicine. My soul flowers in myriad conversations. Birds, breezes, rivers, conkers whisper to me. This is as ordinary as my morning cuppa. This is our birthright, to daily hold this sacred exchange with nature all around us. It’s a mutual sharing of stories, of sensual impressions.

On the days when I walk, my body feasts on images, feelings, nuances. In the evening, when I relax into the arms of my beloved, he becomes the oak root holding me. When I drink my favourite herbal brew, I feel the rush of the river revitalising me. When I breathe deeply, the scent of the forest floor fills my nose again, though I may be standing in the kitchen late at night.

On the days when I make that simple pilgrimage, I am anchored, deeply held. An abiding sense of peace within nourishes me through the many small storms of daily life.

Nature Nourishment © Catherine Pawson 2018

River, you are
Tempestuous torrent,
banks barely holding you.
Grey-blue and white, a fury unfolding
A headlong tumble to a faraway sea.

River, you are
Languorous eddies,
lazily wandering, slow downstream.
Silken flow against summer skin
A gift of refreshment as we jump in.

River, you are
Home to so many,
Teeming abundance of silver and green.
I call you kin, I sing to your waters
Life-giver, ever-changing, I give you my thanks.

River You Are © Catherine Pawson 2018

It is not only the double helix spiral of our genes that informs our particular shape, the creation that is you and me. That bright spiral has a dark twin, dwelling in the spaces and the shadows within the serpentine twist. This is the space into which creation flows like a mighty river, stellar tides inrushing. These two, the form and the space, are ever dancing, ever whirling together.

Tend the empty spaces within and all around you for they are precious and holy. Demarcate their boundaries with your fierceness, for it will take all you have while the world around you clamours for your productivity, your visibility, the marks of your belonging. While the world around you lurches in its addiction to brightness, to fire, to the certainty only of form, to simply give yourself over to emptiness is an act of rebellion and a medicine for these times.

Intentionally un-belong. Allow a delicious falling into the in-between spaces. Practise invisibility, don it like a costume and allow it to release you into a different shape. Knowing the deep belonging of your being here, on this planet at this time, what is it that calls you in that wide dark space, in the freedom of a chosen exile for a while?

Tend the Empty Spaces © Catherine Pawson 2017

My bones long for rock, as my blood responds to the whispering sea or the pulsating flow of the river. Deep in my marrow curve my ancestral stories, seeking echo in the ancient rocks that shape my sweet land of hill and mountain. Those ancient bone stories are a sonar homing call which booms way below the frequency of daily life, benevolently tethering me when the busyness of that life would unseat me.

From time to time I drop and hear the response call, the call from chalk or granite that confirms a belonging beyond my comprehension, a fitting into the long arc of time and place. When I turn to snuggle into rock’s response, every disparate dissonance of my skeleton is sung whole by a mother’s lullaby, the first lullaby, reaching my ears in those moments to remind me whose daughter I eternally am.

Bone Song © Catherine Pawson 2017

Today a tumult of autumnal leaves tumbled, hundreds of them lying golden as bright spilt coins on the dark rain-soaked lane I walk along. Each year, this leaf-tumble day arrives, a day when nature seems to me to decisively shift her mood from summer to autumn, and I wonder at the timing of it. As I wonder, I find myself tracking the ancestral lines of those golden leaves in the lane. From their windblown backs I drift upward, backward from earth to twig. From twig tip inward, my senses seeking sap lines running towards ancient heartwood. I hear songs of the mother tree, her myriad of stories heard and whispered to the winds through the centuries, a hypnotic rising and falling of lives and loves and seasons ever turning.

A glimpse, an acorn lying glossy in a wood long ago, in an autumn long past. Enfolded within its tiny package lie kaleidoscopic unfurlings of grace and might and beauty. Lost in this acorn’s nut-brown dreaming I stumble upon this very moment, this moment of my standing and wondering. Behind this moment, an infinity of seasonal doorways, each opening on to another, of long-ago autumns, of feathery frosts and wild rains birthing ancient springtimes, the changing of each circling season impeccably wrapped in an earlier turning. This circular songline is both unfathomable to my quicktime mind, grasping for the definition of endings and beginnings, and deeply kindred to my own beating heart.

Autumnal Tumbling © Catherine Pawson

It is time, friends, to take to the road
To sing again to old bones,
To seek out the old places,
And find each other once more.

It is the moment, sisters,
And we are the ones,
We are all chosen.
The ancestors are holding the door.

We know each other, women,
Not by clothes, nor the trinkets we wear,
But by our naked souls
And the way they glimmer in the dark.

Take my hands, brothers,
And drop the old story
To make space for the ancient songs,
To know what our ancestors knew.

It is time, family, to root ourselves deep,
To wind love around rocks,
To plant hands in the earth,

To make beauty with our bodies.
It is time, It is now.

It Is Time © Catherine Pawson 2016

This, she understood now, was a still point. In the days before, she had chafed against the bars of an unseen cage, pushing forward, eager to know the next unfolding, and now it dawned on her that far from being stuck, she was being freed. Being freed.

Little by little as she moved more mindfully in that narrowed place, knots inside her unravelled and new spaces glimmered around her. The future fell away from her mind’s fevered grasp and she no longer cared.

She came at last to recognise the value of stillness, of the beauty of simple routine and the repeating rhythm of her breath. She ceased to wait, and immersed herself in the infinite velvety depth of the moment that is now.

Still Point © Catherine Pawson 2016

I am immersed in deep ritual twice a week. It is an alchemy, a co-creation of earth, fire, water, air and the mystery that is my mood, my attention, my spirit at the moments of creation. It is a manifestation of rhythm, of time and of the containing intimacy of routine, repetition.

I was never one for routine, nor repetition. But this has me, this deeply domestic spell. For this ritual carries ancestry, a trace of lineage down through my motherline, though for sure they had their own ways in this tradition.

It’s not a secret, this alchemical entrancement of elements. And yet it does breathe of mystery, for sometimes the results are just as I imagined them to be, and other times, well let’s say they perfectly reflect my distraction, my impatience, my inattention. Just like any other magic.

And so again I reach for an old pot. Inside is a greyish cold gloop; you’d not guess it held a spark. I empty it into a larger pot and I add rye flour and warmed spring water and a little song. I cover it and leave it in the dark to gestate. In the morning it’s alive, bubbling, already growing. I take a little out, to return to the old pot, and then I add other flours, seeds, herbs and water. My wet hands slide the dough into tins which contain its fermentation, and covering it again I know it will work its magic, slowly rising till just perfectly ready to meet the flame of the oven.

Two hours later I sit, cup of tea and a crust of new-baked sourdough bread in hand, at a sunny window. It’s the most fulfilling, deep down domestic enchantment I know.

Sensual Spell © Cathi Pawson 2014

Don’t touch me.
Don’t pat me down.
Nor soothe me, nor lay any part of your sympathetic arms around me
Because I will growl, and more. I will snarl.

This sob-wrenching grief for lands and waters poisoned
Hearts broken and losses shattering
Will not be contained. Cannot be borne in proximity with another.

This wild wild grief needs to raise its ear-piercing screams to the hills,
Needs to reach the grandmothers
who have known loss of children and land all their long lives .

This woman will not be silenced, nor prettied into comfort
She is hag-hung with snot and salt tears, wailing and keening into the mud.
Uncaring unfeeling of her body because
if she does not keen then she will not live.

If she does not mourn the dead and dying, the wounded and poisoned
Then she herself dies and with that a clamour of grandmothers grows cold,
If all her relations cannot come to the party then come none at all.
So she brings the torn and broken ones,
The hopeless and whimpering ones,
The pleading and hollow-eyed ones.

Don’t smother their wailing with your love,
Stand with this woman and hear with all you have.
And if this breaks open your own dam of grief
Then we will wail together as women will.

Leave the peacemaking now, leave the talking
And tend to this tide of grief or it will drown us all.
You were born to breathe in salt water.

So dive
Dive deep for your lives.

Wild grief © Cathi Pawson 2014