SPRING: MAIDEN

Spring at La Paperie, the time when light begins to grow from crescent to full moon, the youthful, Maiden phase of a woman’s life.  The Maiden represents beauty, fresh potential and new life: innocence, exploration and discovery.  In cycles of Nature, Maiden is associated with dawn, sunrise and spring.  She is the Greek Goddess: Persephone and Artemis, the Celtic Goddess: Rhiannon and the Nordic Goddess: Freya.  The moon is the universal image of the eternal Goddess and is symbolic of feminine power.  I’ve been lucky enough to be introduced to Goddesses by Jill Amison (Thank you, Jill 😊)by going to her workshops and Walking Wild Ways with her and other Wild Women.  And since, I’ve done lots of reading and studying on my own too.  I’m currently taking an online course with Sharon Blackie: Sisters Of Rock.

Outside of patriarchal social structures, women have always supported each other.  I recall how a group of women I met years’ ago, when I was a first time Mother, had banded together, as you know, you are among my FB friends.  Our friendship endures still sharing thoughts and feelings, talking on the phone, meeting for meals or drinks, celebrating good times together or offering a shoulder to cry on and a sympathetic ear when a crisis comes around.  We have been party to most of the defining moments in each other’s lives.  I consider these women family.  And over the years, I’ve made lots of new women friends too.  Meeting these women in on yoga retreats, workshops, at MOY, through my creative writing practice and in virtual communities: The Mythic Imagination, Sacred Trees and the Wild Woman Moon, kindly set up by Jill.  I was reading a post on our group chat the other day about a workshop I’d signed up for: Empower & Nourish: Wise Woman Support, I got to thinking… 

The new spiritual sisterhood have experienced an awakening of consciousness. So, that now, in the twenty first century, The Triple Goddess of ancient times: Virgin, Mother and Crone, has been extended to the Four Phase Feminine Way, an evolution to include: Wild Woman.  Wild meaning to live a natural life. (A concept explored in Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarrisa Estes.) The Four Phase Feminine Way, therefore, is:  Maiden, Mother, Wild Woman and Crone.  Cycles which mirror the four phases of the moon, the four elements and the four seasons.  I think I will explore these stages of women’s lives in this blog, if you’d like to accompany me. 

As Jill says, our rhythms and cycles change as we age: changes in body, emotions, hormones, attitudes, roles, mindset.  And that yoga teaches us to honour and support where we’re at; this has proved right for me.  Yoga has been invaluable in all sorts of ways.  I have learned, over time, wisdom and creativity resides within me; I need to tune in via: rituals, ceremonies, yoga and creative practice and, of course, having the support of my sisterhood helps; they mean so much to me.

 Clarissa Pinkola Estes says that when women reassert their relationship with their wildish nature, they are gifted with an internal watcher, a knower, a visionary, an intuitive, a creator, a guide, one who supports their inner and outer life.  La Paperie offered me this gift of reclaiming my wildish nature.  And it’s the place that has born witness to my aspirations, hopes and dreams, the place of so many of my memories.

During spring I woke to the sound of the dawn chorus, the song of a blackbird, song thrush, great tit and robin, a symphony of trills and warbles, coos and whistles, a biological necessity, male birds singing to attract mates and mark out territory. 

Poet, author and photographer Melissa Harrison has noted the unfriendliness of March in the UK.  It was at La Paperie too.  We had sleet and snow, hard frosts, hail, but luckily sometimes warm sunshine too. Every cloud has a silver lining.   It was the time of year when the ash trees in the fields were studded with sticky, black buds.  Parliaments of rooks gathered in untidy, twiggy nests, flapping their ragged wings, cawing.

I watched hares boxing: small, dark-tipped tails, long, lean legs, all muscle, with huge, floppy ears standing on hind legs, the doe hitting the buck with her paws: an eruption of power and energy, testing to see if he was a worthy suitor. Sprinting twice as fast as any human being.  Speed is one strategy the hare use against predators.  Another is to lie flat against the ground in a depression known as a ‘form’, ears down, completely still.  The doe gives birth to her leverets in open meadows in a form in the grass.  According to Walter de la Mare, hares are witches in disguise.   Yet, I’d read that Buddha was a hare in an early incarnation.  Apparently, he lived in a forest with a river the colour of lapis lazuli running through it.  Hares, so rich in mythology.  

As March moved into April, billions of migratory birds, embark on epic journeys from Africa.  Around the spring equinox, when the day and night are nearly the same length, they arrived at La Paperie.  For me this marked the true arrival of spring, the most eventful season of the year, a time of great activity and urgency.  Days lengthened.  The earth warmed.  The air was suffused with scents.  Luminous-lime leaves and buds uncurled and unfurled as enzymes turned food starch into sugars, pushed sap, enabling growth.  In the hedges, birds were busy nesting.  Flowers were blooming.  Bees were buzzing.  Insects clicking.  Then at last they arrived.  I dashed into the garden to watch the swallows explode over La Paperie’s roof, showing their royal-blue backs and scarlet throats. 

Folklore has it that if swallows don’t return yearly to the eaves of one’s house, it foretells that ruin will come to it.  Luckily, the swallows always returned to La Paperie where they had just what they needed, mild springs and warm summers.  Eaves where they built their mud cup nests and an abundant supply of insect hatches, to feed the fledglings.  I loved to see their beaks peeping over nests, adult birds flying to the young, feeding them all day long. 

As I watched, I breathed in the scent of primroses, growing in clumps all over the garden, wandering into the fields, glistening with dew drops of sunshine.  Primula Vulgaris, delicate, lemon petals with egg-yolk yellow centres, green rosettes of leaves, literally ‘first flower’ and my mother’s favourite.

And as day and night moved towards equal length Oestre, the Goddess of Light, is welcomed into our lives: the festival of new life, balance and awakening.  

A wren often built in the rectory wall.  I’d see her darting jerkily, between the stones, tiny tail cocked, singing incredibly loud despite her small size.  And most days I saw a great spotted woodpecker, a male because it had a red patch on the back of its head as well as under its tail. It made my day to see it; I felt grounded by the wildlife.  Years later, reading Owl Sense, Miriam Darlington, I strongly related to what she wrote: ‘There must be something about this contact with wildlife that lifts the veil of separation between ourselves and other species and helps us heal and bring out our sense of connectedness.’ p. 231

In the middle of the field at the bottom of our garden sometimes there was a rank stink: foxes’ scat, which marks their territory.  One summer morning, I saw a dog fox in our garden.  Like a character in a Beatrix Potter book he was standing on its hind legs, plucking raspberries from bushes. His brush was darker than the rest of its pelage and was rich, long and full, ideal for balancing.  In spring foxes have been known to climb trees and steal fledglings from their nests, but I’d never seen any. Yet, on January and February nights, when we were snug in bed, we’d hear the high-pitched blood curdling screams of a vixen.  It’s a haunting sound but thought to be a ‘love song’ during mating. 

I believe gestation is fifty-two days.  So, by spring, the adults have cubs, usually four to six in a litter.  The vixen has six teats so she can’t feed anymore.  Their eyes are shut at birth gradually turning from blue, to amber, when they open.  As further time passes, their fur grows full and rich and red, dark front legs that look like long elegant gloves: Audrey Hepburn style in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.  Many times, I’d observed a vixen grooming herself, one eye on her litter of fluffy, downy- brown cubs chasing each other over the fields, bounding and leaping, play-fighting, testing each other’s reactions. 

I was led to thinking how foxes are depicted as sly and cunning in literature: a trickster. Edgar in King Lear refers to the fox as ‘sneaky’.  However, there in the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the fox is shown to be generous, offering knowledge and guidance to The Little Prince who has fallen to earth from an asteroid, warning him to be aware of men because they have guns and hunt.  More recently the artist, designer and writer Caroline Bickford-Smith published The Fox And The Star.  And like the Little Prince, far from being shown as sly and self-seeking, this story also illustrates a different side to the fox.  He is a vulnerable creature, living deep in a dense forest with only one friend, Star.  Star lights the forest paths for him each night.  But then one night, Star is not there.  Fox faces the forest alone.  It’s a poignant story, one which endeared me even more to this multi-faceted, glorious creature.

Sometimes there were cows in the back field, ears and tails twitching, the occasional soft fall of muck and moo.  They gawped at me with treacle eyes as I walked by, through grass awash with primroses and cowslips.  Occasionally I came across a scatter of feathers: a decapitated woodpigeon, a sparrow hawk’s kill.  When hunting, they fly low, flipping over hedges, piercing, bloodthirsty eyes searching for victims, surprising any unsuspecting bird.  I always felt slightly unnerved by their ferocity.  The female is twice the bulk of the male, dark, greyish-brown, whilst the male has a blue-grey back, pale breast with red barring.  The males tend to hunt smaller birds.  I once saw one plummet from the sky.  Landing on the roof of the lean-to, snatching a blackbird right before my eyes.  Here one minute, gone the next. 

First thing in the morning, I’d open the salon’s shutters.  Once, not long after we’d moved into La Paperie, I was opening there was a clatter and a scuffle in the chimney.  As I turned around, a little owl landed in the empty grate startling me as much as it startled him.   He rolled onto the rug.  Brown, streaked white, the bird lay there, frightened its wide eyes following my every move.  I left the windows and shutters wide open and retreated outside, not wanting to panic the little owl further.  From the sun terrace where I sat, I heard it scratching and flapping about inside.  When the sound ceased, I went back inside.  He had gone, but left guano splattered on the floor.  I cleaned up glad the bird has escaped unscathed, reminding myself that if a bird poops on you or your home, it’s a sign of good luck and riches to come.