Warrior
On breaking free from spiritual good behaviour with a spiky tree
At the turn of the millennium Mark and I began our ‘tree dialogues’ in Oxford, hanging out with trees, learning to recognise them by their barks and branches, encountering their myths and medicine in our follow-up ‘seeings’. Two of these, Oak and Crack Willow appeared in our book 52 Flowers That Shook My World. Today’s post is the first of three unpublished winter chapters: Box (south of France) and Peepal (India) and the prickly evergreen, Holly, first visited in an ancient churchyard,
One of the challenges of holding a metaphysical inquiry is dealing with conventional or new age spirituality. Spiritual beliefs held by people tend to dominate and supress open-hearted communication, particularly in a ‘normal’ set and setting. This sharp-leaved, red-berried tree showed us how these invisible forces might be confronted. In one of the more awkward supper parties we were to be invited to in those Plant Practice years…
holly
holywell churchyard, oxford 2000
ALL THROUGH THAT AUTUMN AND WINTER I visited the trees, collecting their ‘keys’ as instructed by Old Man Willow. I sat beneath the black poplars by the River Thames, I sat beneath the great redwoods and London plane in University Parks, beneath the Persian ironwoods and black pines of the Botanical Gardens. I collected crab apples, sloes, hawthorns and rosehips from the hedgerows, and made all kinds of rose-scented tinctures and jellies. In my passionate pursuit of English apples, I began to climb apple trees, and then all sorts of trees.
To sit in a tree is to know its energy and character in ways that are hard to describe. Your hands learn to recognise its bark, your body its structure, your eyes its shape; you can sense its inner nature, its warmth and presence, even in the depths of winter. By the time you jump down you are full of energy, My favourite perch was in the fork of an old gnarled ash tree, where I could see the great river Thames flow by below me. From this vantage point, I was always able to get clear. People sometimes looked up as they walked by the tow path and were surprised see me there, aloft in its mossy branches. You don’t expect une femme d’un certain age to be swinging in an ash.
Back in the house, during the seeings, the tree council took their places within two circles. An inner ring comprised nine native trees - oak, yew, ash, black poplar, willow, alder, rowan, holly and beech, an outer ring a collection of smaller trees, such as hawthorn and hazel, and naturalised species. The inner heart ring was commanded by the generous and silent oak, the outer by stately and severe silver birch. The keys opened the doors of the trees – portals to certain knowledge – and the collection of them engaged our complete attention, until the lilies heralded the spring.
Engaging with the intelligence and form of trees was a radically different experience from the flowers. The territories they addressed had a far greater range and influence, and we often found ourselves in real-life situations in which their energies were dramatically revealed. Though the trees were individuals, they always acted within a collective sphere. Working within their field, you looked not to yourself but out across the planet, through history, into deep time; you came to understand your own individuality within the framework of a wildwood. This wider vision demanded a more complete engagement.
The pavement dandelion is quick. Your mind can assess its “medicine” in a matter of minutes. You visit, you see, and onto to the next! The churchyard yew is very slow. It speaks with the wisdom of centuries. Your whole being needs to pay attention, as you absorb its influence. You observe its bark, its sentinel presence as you pass the tree by. A sprig of its fine needles and red-berries sits for a long time on your writing desk. One day it comes in a dream. At some point your knowledge of the tree is put to the test. Does the theory match the practice?
You can sit in an ash and feel secure and warm in minutes, become clear as you gaze at the river flowing past, but can you maintain this clarity and warmth in a cold and confused city? High above on a red branch of a yew, the obsidian berries of belladonna shining at your feet, the ancient flints and bones of the dead all around, it is easy to connect with the core of your fiery spirit, but can you hold this knowledge of time beyond your lovely solitude, can you see the spirit of things moving within the collective, in the fabric of physical daily life? Can you speak of spirit at all in a world governed by ego?
Holly came from the circle’s inner core. Most commonly recognised as the red-berried branch that decks winter parlours among the ivy and the mistletoe, or as a spiky dark garden hedge, it is not so well known as a tree in its own right, even though its triangular form can be seen in the hedgerows and woods throughout the land. Close up it is a most handsome tree, with a grey smooth trunk, bearing fragrant white flowers in June, and distinctive sharp shiny dark green leaves throughout the year. If you are lucky enough to find a mature holly, it is one of the most exciting and vibrant trees to climb into. When you sit in a holly, many things can occur to you at once. Its energy is fast, active, direct. The spikiness of its leaves are its signature. If you are open it will activate all the natural spikiness in your own being, as you keep watch within its crown.
Traditionally the holly is known as a warrior tree, commanding the second half of the archaic year, the time of the descendant dark. The willows had told us the regeneration of the Earth would happen only when we planted trees on the old battlegrounds within ourselves. The warrior holly was about to show us how to let go of the antagonism and defensiveness of our warring selves, and put our assertive, aggressive, active qualities to more constructive use.
O for goodness sake Charlotte, push that bloody gate! I growled to myself as I stood by the entrance. I pushed it hard and it swung open. I laughed. Holly already. Feisty, fierce, get on with it.
Holywell Churchyard was one of best tree territories in central Oxford – a quiet nature reserve as well as a graveyard, surrounded by mature box and yew and held in those days in the everlasting arms of a vast cedar of Lebanon. Many churchyards harbour fine trees, especially evergreens, and are strategically placed on old crossing places and burial mounds, giving them a particular energy and spiritual focus. In the green hermitage of Holywell I sat beneath hazel, yew, Atlas cedar and cedar of Lebanon, elder, dog rose, mistletoe; later working among the snowdrops and primroses of the spring and eye-catching stands of belladonna. And it was here one October day that I came to find out about the challenges of the holly tree.
Like the red planet Mars that commands it, the energy of the holly is about action. It has all the characteristics of fire - moving and activating all the repressed, stuck and timid energies in yourself. In Holywell churchyard I can hardly sit still. Thinking becomes impossible. Later in the seeing I see that the life-force of nature is kept vibrant by the energies represented by the ‘dark’ aspect of the tree. The holly stands at the beginning of the second half of the year, the later cycle of our lives. It signals maturity, a time in which the challenges of the spirit come to the fore, a time when you need to be able to stand up for your self, speak out, take action and be backed by all your past experience. By adhering only to the young summery ascendant part of ourselves (the light half of the year, commanded by the deciduous oak), we neglect our fall. In this fall is our autumn and our winter - our fruit, our harvest, our nourishing dark; it is our link with the ancestors, with the mysteries of life, our ability to let go and regenerate our lives. Without the qualities these dark half alphabet trees represent we never become elders, the vibrant spiky evergreen guardians of the land.
We have been brought up to obey: to be light summery people, innocent people: young and shiny and good.
The holly’s warrior prickliness is its key energy: prickliness is the very thing we never want to show. We have been brought up to obey: to be light summery people, innocent people: young and shiny and good. We always want to appear nice and friendly, the ones who play by the rules. But the holly isn’t any of these things. It has no time for goody-goodies, for a quiet life, for politeness and form. It is a lover of truth and experience. The spirit of life that runs like the deer through the forest, challenges everything, questions everything, shakes everything up, especially those ideas you have been brought up to believe. When you work with holly you find yourself saying all kinds of off-the-cuff things your good, nice behaviour normally does not allow.
By the spring of 2000 we often worked with a particular plant or tree during the course of a week, taking note of how it influenced our daily lives. When you work with a plant in this way, you find yourself paying a certain attention to life. No longer adrift in the modern world, but tapped into the living systems of the planet, you often experience ordinary events from much deeper and wider perspective. Everything became significant. One of the most dramatic encounters I ever had was on the day I chose the holly tree.
*
We had been invited to supper with Humphrey. Humphrey was someone who came to our house in these Oxford years and took part in various joint explorations into consciousness. Unlike the young and dreamy A girls however, Humphrey is in his fifties, and testy. On his last visit he had brought a friend with him, an astrologer called Lynn, Lynn used an unusual astrological system, based on the Mayan calendar. We had spent the evening looking into faces. This was a seeing exercise devised from our work with peyote that enabled us to contact other aspects of our beings without the aid of power plants. It is a simple procedure that everyone can do, so long as you all have the right intent. Each person allows the others to gaze into their face until the physical features shift and reveal what is happening beneath the surface in other dimensions. This particular attention exposes any hidden energies that block and thwart the free flow of your spirit. Mostly these are artificial belief-systems that we have unwittingly inherited. Everyone had them. We called these “aliens” the gatekeepers as that’s what they often looked like, cruel and omnipotent gaolers. That night after Lynn has spoken about his astrological system, we decided to use the structure as a basis for our seeings.
All astrology is a way of comprehending the balance of cosmic forces that operate within each human being. Taken at a deep level it can describe our individual and collective purpose on earth. Each culture has understood this complex art from different perspectives, according to their relationship with time and what is understood as the universe. Indo-European astrology is based on the solar year and the planets and constellations that move around the sun. It operates within a vast wheel of time, marked by the precession of the stars.
The Mayans have a more complex, intricate calendar and a different understanding of cosmic time that is anchored within the movements of the planet Venus. The harmony and beauty of the spheres in their system is perceived to be held by different cosmic ‘tribes’ or types of human being. These tribes correspond to the 20 Mayan days of one week, and are further influenced by a tone which correspond to the 13 days of another (the Mayan calendar has three different weeks). Each tribe has a distinct way of interacting in the world. Mayans call the human being winclil which means vibratory root. These human roots vibrate in the fabric of life at different frequencies and with their various tribe actions and tones keep the cosmic harmony in play on earth, Most modern human winclils are deactivated. Lacking connection with the living systems of the planet, they vibrate only when artificially stimulated by sex and war, which creates an incoherent low frequency. Mayan spirituality activates these cosmic life-forces in order to create a high and coherent frequency. In short, instead of making noise, human beings make music.
The 20 tribes are divided into four categories represented by colours: the initiating red tribe, the refining white tribe, the transforming blue tribe and the ripening yellow tribe. By serendipity the four of us were of these different colours: Lynn was a Red Resonant Dragon, Mark a White Self-Existing World-Bridger, I was a Blue Rhythmic Night, and Humphrey a Yellow Spectral Warrior. We sat in the position of the four directions and proceeded to look into each others faces. Into the fabric and frequencies of our beings. Into ourselves on a karmic and cosmic level. At those false non-intregal parts that intercept and make dissonant the essential harmony of our beings.
The most beneficial aspect to these kinds of metaphysical encounter are that you get to know people, even perfect strangers, on a radically different basis from that permitted by conventional social discourse. You do not have conversations about holidays or houses, stimulating your small winclil with the odd sexual intrigue or political argument. You go for the big winclil. You speak about karma and transformation and cosmic responsibility and what kind of harmony you are bringing to the planet.
This has its advantages. You don’t waste your time with dreary small talk. You get down to the business of soul and spirit where all the interesting and noble aspects of our beings dwell. But it also has its disadvantages. Karma and transformation are all very delightful topics when you are being superficial. However the Mayan world-view and peyote cactus are not superficial things. If you are using the Mayan calendar and a divination method given by peyote, the cosmic responsibility of the winkl takes on a very real slant, wherever you are, even in Oxford on an autumn night in 1999. “Stuff” comes up fast, and you have to deal with it, whether you “know” people or not. Sometimes this is all right. It was all right that night. Both our visitors were mature and intelligent men with adventurous spiky spirits. Our rainbow four-way cross ensured a stable base for proceedings. However it is not always like that.
I learned a good deal about stellar energies looking at those Mayan tribes, in the faces of the people sitting around our table: about powerful red dragons, about white world-crossing bridges, about the dark blue storehouses of night. But mostly I learned about golden warriors, how they ask questions, not because they want answers, but to get things out into the light, to activate the life-force, to quicken proceedings, and most of all to challenge false assumptions. I didn’t really think about the holly warrior tree much before I went that night to Humphrey’s, and perhaps this was just as well, as I might have hesitated if I knew what was in store.
Mostly I learned about golden warriors, how they ask questions, not because they want answers, but to get things out into the light, to activate the life-force, to quicken proceedings, and most of all to challenge false assumptions.
*
It was a perfectly nice evening: pasta, red wine, Humphrey, myself, Mark, and a dark-haired woman from Germany who was studying homeopathy. We talked at great length about belladonna, one of that system’s principle plants; Humphrey talked about Mother Meera, an Indian guru whose darsan he had just received in Germany and the hands-on healing course he was taking part in. It’s all about love and turning situations around, he told us. He then went on to talk about someone who had visited his flat recently and told him about some extraterrestrial star-system working with The Government. He didn’t seem at all impressed by this visitor’s conspiracy theory, however felt compelled to repeat it in every exhausting detail. The story seemed to go on forever. The atmosphere in the room became oppressive, quite the opposite to the kinds of cosmic harmony the Mayans calendar had once shown us. I started to feel inordinately agitated and had terrible desire to run about the room, laugh and shout all at the same time, and before I knew it I had blurted out:
“Hands up who thinks Humphrey’s star story is really boring!” And I shot my hand up in the air and roared with laughter.
Humphrey stopped in mid-sentence, grew immensely red, and then exploded with fury. “I have never been so insulted in all my life!” he yelled and seemed to teleport himself to the other side of the room and fling open the front door.
“Get out of my flat now!” he shouted, waving a poker furiously in the air.
None of us moved. I felt my fellow guests weighing up the possibilities of getting past that poker unscathed and at the same time stunned into inaction by the force of Humphrey’s outburst. I however felt unusually energetic and clear:
“We are not leaving,” I declared. “I think this is a perfect opportunity to put the Mother’s words into practice, and let love turn the situation around.”
I don’t know what got into me. I am not rude or commandeering by nature. But I have no patience for alien conspiracy theories, especially ones that drag everyone’s energy down, and suddenly I’d had enough of this blah-blah spiritual clap-trap. Humphrey kept yelling for us to leave and I kept quoting back what he had said about love. The others kept quiet. Finally Humphrey closed the door and came to sit down. Normally other people’s anger makes me shake and tremble, but I felt calm, collected, razor sharp. In that moment of clarity I remembered I had picked the holly before I had come out.
Holly demonstrate what requires challenging, from your friendships to your belief systems. Most of all it will show you where you are wasting your time. In the middle of a situation you will suddenly become aware you are absolutely not on the right track and need to change directions immediately and act. Do you really want to be doing this with your life? demands the tree. Do you really want to listen to this crap? Spiritual platitudes cost nothing but have you the balls to move through tonight’s karma and land on the planet? Anyone can talk about love turning situations around but when you are faced by those situations, can you actually deal with them?
Sometimes we need a fair fight to get clear and sometimes we get them. Holly tree of action, tree of let’s cut the crap, precipitated such a fight. All warriors, all plants and people governed by the fiery planet of Mars, have an energy that pushes static situations into active ones. This warrior energy challenges us so that reality can take place, so we don’t live in an artificial world of social niceties and conspiracy theories, So we can look each other in the eye and answer clearly, yes or no or maybe.
Prickliness is part of holly’s nature. Humphrey, the yellow warrior, was very prickly indeed. But better prickly and true than soft and phoney. As he waved the poker there was something very real going on. Something that our warrior spirits recognised and eventually acted on. Our social interactions are rarely real. Rarely do we cut to the chase and say out loud what we feel is going on. As a result everything gets bogged down in politesse. But in the spirit of a fair fight you can get clear. You don’t waste time. You don’t squirm or get bored and drunk at the dinner table and wake up the next day with resentments, furies, disappointments and so and so’s karma and cosmic responsibility knocking on your door, pursing you in dreams for the rest of your days. Do you love me? No. Well that is clear. Shall we be friends. I don’t think so. That is worth a lot. Waking up the next day without any fall out.
Of course a fair fight depends on your adversary. It depends on your both being able to stand your ground and not be intimidated by the house rules, by the gatekeepers, and by feelings of things going horribly wrong. The holly had given me the wherewithal to do this, and by extension it seemed everyone else.
“Do you want a hands on healing?” I smiled, as Humphrey sat back down at the table, flushed, completely out of breath. It looked as if some part of him had just crash-landed.
“No!” growled Humphrey. “I really think you should go now.”
But we hung on. For about two hours we talked and the atmosphere slowly shifted from hostility into neutrality. By midnight we had managed to turn it around. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t feel good. We wouldn’t see each other again. But we were no longer hostile. If there was anything left there was a sense that none of us had killed each other and there was a kind of satisfaction in that, greater indeed than any spiritual ecstasy felt in the company of divine mothers or star confederations or special healing hands. For one night four human beings courageously forged and held a harmonic between their warring, dissonant selves and did not sour and poison the world.
These are small victories.
But for a flower warrior, a small victory is everything.
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