Blessed by Nettles

In her beautiful book, The Sense of Wonder, alongside the reflective photography of Nick Kelsh, Rachel Carson writes of the importance of those adults who hold space, cherish, and nurture children's relationship with nature. In stories that centre around moments spent with her young nephew, Carson wonder-fully expresses this truth, which I have also experienced in my children's lives. While children are born with a natural belonging and familiar awe for their world, the adult who notices and appreciates alongside them, who values the pictures in clouds and the faint scent of blossom, found things on walks, the minute moss forests; is confirming the connectivity that the child feels. My children's Granny, my mother, has perhaps offered the greatest cradling of such awe. They have also both been blessed with amazing experiences of 'forest school', and this nourishing, for my youngest, is an ongoing weekly celebratory adventure.

One day my hands became suffused with gratitude for these adults, who are in their spirit, mothering the child and the earth at once, as one. So, first in soft movements in the air between my palms and fingers, and then with stitches and cloth, I began to respond to a being, an earth mother who became the world itself, of fields and flowers and oceans and sky, and who, at the same time, encircled this world in her arms, with her cloak, and carried wee beings in her skirt. Her form reminded me of those spirits who spin the creation into being, and of womenkind, its our most tender nature. Her structure suggested the possibility of puppetry and story telling....

And then she called for a blessing crown

And I recalled the delicate pattern of the nettle string that both my daughters have learnt to make at their forest schools and so I asked my youngest to teach me

Here is how she showed me

Find some nice long nettles

pick one, as long as possible,  being careful not to get stung 

hold the nettle firmly at the top with your protected hand and cut off the leaves with a downward stoke of the knife, make sure that you do not peel away the skin of the stalk, as you will need that fibre 

bash the stalk to loosen the skin fibre

gently peel away a brown green length of the outside of the stalk, this is the part you will need

fold it in half and give a little twist to the middle 

twist the underneath fibre away from you

and without letting go, so that it doesn't untwist, bring it down over the front fibre,

the front and the back threads will now have swapped places, and you can twist the back one away from you again and repeat 

In this way a string starts to form 

It is important to hold the end of the string where you are twisting, to keep it tight

Soon your fingers will get used to this pattern of 'twist away, bring down' and you will have a nettle string, the thickness and length will depend on the stalk fibre with which you began 

the fibres of the string will curl apart a little as they dry, this makes the string very beautiful 

And so this earth mother was blessed by a crown, fitting in its nature

And she played 

Dancing love around the world

remembering again and again, it is really barely me

Last night just before bed I was searching through a small bowl of bird's egg blue. This bowl holds what I lightly call my fairy soup. It is full of tiny fairies for unexpected visitors, and treasured beings in their becoming, not yet fully fledged. To call it fairy soup is not, you understand, an indication of the edibility of fairies! It is more born of an initial giggle at the mix of colours in the bowl, and then a gentle delight in the metaphor of nourishing warmth and of the delicate mix of ingredients and materialising subtle flavours in soups as in nature. 

Last night I was looking for a particular baby fairy when my fingers came across something which I had quite forgotten. I lifted it out and I saw what I held. Perhaps this being had become since I had placed the rose in the bowl in the summertime, perhaps my eyes have become more sensitised in the intervening time, perhaps I had already almost seen her when I laid her in the bowl, laying the trace for my soul to now thrill in the awe of recognition. 

See her green bonnet asks only for me to contribute the tiniest soft silk face, and perhaps even that will be too much. She will be a Valentitnes gift for one my daughters. Quite probably she will fly, with so many other fairies who have come, from the mobile in my younger daughter's room, because the eldest now has a minamilist white feel to her growing up space. 

But before being given to my girls, she has been of herself, a gift to me. She has spoken to and thereby nourished the part of me that knows that these beings who meander or rush or slip or fly, who breath into cloth through my grateful enchanted hands are really barely my doing - they are the life of the elements forming my eyes, meeting my fingertips, dancing through the imaginal layers. 

When I listen and await in love, they come. When I trust and simply follow, the become into the form that my hands are able to birth.
When they flow through other hands in different ways, it is still they who come to be seen and held and loved, because...

It Felt Love

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened.' ~ Hafiz (trans. by Daniel Ladinsky)

So parents, grandparents, family friends, do please let yourselves find moments to create fairies and gnomes and elves and sprites, in your own way for your children who will recognise them. Let your children know you greeting the living beings of rock and flower and sea washed twig with your hands.

Do this for your children, that they will sense how to do it for their children, so that the elemental beings may continue to have access by which to permiate our material and our senses, to remind us again and again to wonder in awe at what life might be in the unfurling petals of a rose.