A new offering for Spring: A Missing Witches meditation, incantation, sidelong anti-capitalist motivation type thing. This one is inspired by the Japanese Willow in Risa’s garden, a Mayumi Oda Painting called Willow Kannon, and by the fierce and gentle strength of you.
The full text is below.
With additional audio from: https://freesound.org/people/chris_dagorne/sounds/425315/
Mayumi Oda painting:
https://mayumioda.net/products/willow-kannon?_pos=2&_sid=6186a7d3c&_ss=r
The Japanese willow is wild by end of summer, taking over that whole corner of the garden and you have to push through it with both hands to round the corner up the stone path to the woodsheds and the road.
She eats the path and makes a complex passage in a way that makes one of her beloveds, witch mother Hecate, happy, I think, and sometimes she whispers to you in there.
But today, end of March, she is still buried to her slender necks in snow. I see her sturdy, older branches grey-brown and patient lifting up their chins as mist and wind whip-round and all her young new shoots so unlikely in the snow dance in every direction bright orange against the grey sky, grey snow. They know.
They know.
They know.
They know.
They know you are a willow spirit. And you know it too. Don’t you? When you see a willow doesn’t your heart sing and sigh with a nostalgia that goes back before your earliest memories, DNA memories. Some trees wear their hearts on their sleeves.
Some trees wear their hearts on their sleeves. Willow bends but doesn’t break. She’s used for instruments, and cricket bats, and living weavings, and leaky baskets, she seeps past her usefulness, weeps past containment, laughs past productivity and speaks right to your rustling heart. When Monet sees her, he sees her kinship with the sunlight and the water and the gentle movement of dresses and bodies in the garden.
Mythology is rich with women turned to willows but you’re not trapped in a tree for want of a lover to rescue you, no. You are willow kin whose genes remember what it is to sway, to weep, to swing your hopes and sorrows with equal grace, to take over the garden, to intimately know a place and feel the passing heartache and happiness of every life that passes through your embrace.
You are a woman in Mayumi Oda’s painted world smiling, eyes closed, half-dressed in the warm air, turtle at her feet, long willow strands glancing against her, talking to the Her that exceeds containment in gentle movement, the spiral of spiritmind, mindbody that gently glows from belly, breast, breath. The wheel of Dharma turning.
You are willow spirit kin whose body remembers the shushing murmuration of every part of you speaking with the wind, as wind, in wind.
You are willow spirit kin.
You are willow spirit kin.
You are willow kin.
Today, you feel in all your small hairs and gentle fingers willow wisdom. You are growing in unlikely places. Even when parts of you are in the deep cold, whether the weather is external or inside, even in the grey mist you have a yellow and orange shoot of laughter that sparkles off the top of your head and surprises you, and with a curled smile you know again — though you keep forgetting — that your unfurling is inevitable.
Your unfurling is inevitable.
Your unfurling is inevitable.
Your unfurling is inevitable.
Today your inevitable unfurling may be an imagining, just a quick new shoot in the cold, just a spark in the dark, but your imagination cracks ice and stone and knows the pink spring comes at last. You crack past ice and fucking stone with your roots unseen in the dark, you gentle bowing willow kin. You weird tree spirit thing.
You are of willow people and you bend and you weep and you take in the breath of all the wind. And it gives you a different kind of resilience, you weep and laugh and dance and cannot be contained, and you are unbroken by your past.
This is what the willow spirit knows, she always weeps and dances both. You, her spirit kin are walking around unrooted, remembering the wind in strings of pearly leaves, carrying her seeds and songs and embodied way of walking through the grey days with grace.
Feel the breeze of your mind move through your dendrites and nervous system, feel your breath like a wind in your internal world of bright shoots and long swaying leaves and know in all your old-growth bones this truth alongside all the others. You are willow kin.
They know.
You are willow spirit kin.
Your unfurling is inevitable.
You are willow kin.
