Meeting in the Midnight Orchard
Wild Wisdom One – Sunday 29th February 2016
As I had missed the Saturday’s gathering I had a feeling of being allowed into the cooking pot some hours after the process of creation had begun. All the ingredients had been picked and chopped, so that the stew was already bubbling nicely. I listened with awe. I had clearly missed a powerful day.
But Sunday was a wonderful day in it’s own right. We listened to Sam talking about the part of the calendar between Christmas and Easter. I learnt that 6th of January, as well as being Epiphany is also the date of the Baptism of Christ. As we listened we were invited to draw and sketch, I drew pools of water and moving into Easter the theme of cleansing seemed strong. We reflected on Ian Bradley’s presentation of Celtic Christianity as being about Presence, Poetry and Pilgrimage.
After that Sam took us on a contemplative walk. A short pilgrimage or our own. We walked in silence with our attention on all of our senses; through the village, past the ancient historical pub with meaty smells of lunch wafting through an open window, we squelched across fields, kissed at kissing gates, touched and smelt flowers and herbs, tumbling into the woodlands, scrambling over branches…to a pool of water, several of us felt watched there but who was watching us? And back through the woods and along the lanes to Juliette’s warm house where soup was waiting and Juliette and Janet had laid the table.
In the afternoon I introduced the group to some basic reflexology techniques. As a 
newly trained reflexologist it filled me with delight to see how much joy everyone took in an opportunity to learn and to simply touch, hands to feet. I read Hilary Llewellyn-Williams poem from her collection ‘Tree Calendar’ and for our date the tree was ‘Ash’.
‘In the encircled heart
Something vibrates from skin to skin – and how
Those blackstopped boughs curve upwards into blue,
Fingering the invisible stars of spring!’
Our day finished with silence and ceremony. We each spoke of what we wanted to include, what had felt important to us; there were stones and holes in stones and winds and birds and archways and wishes for the Spring….
Written by Clare Viner
Photos by Sam
reminded through reading this of why it is important to be putting voice to the divine feminine, even though since the weekend I have been finding the term challenging for its risk of becoming conceptual and disembodied. As a female growing up in the Judeo-Christian world – particularly actually being brought up a Christian – it is easy to unconsciously take on the view that women are inferior. How can you not if all the stories you hear are about men who live interesting and full lives, and have important spiritual insights to share, while women are simply their wives? Not to mention the glaring fact that a male pronoun is used to refer to God, and male images to depict ‘Him’. Regardless of whether we have more female priests these days, if these priests are still telling the same stories, then we will still live the same old stories. For me, hearing the voice of Sarah was incredibly moving and inspiring because it reflects something to me – something about the stories of women being of value, being worthy enough to be in God’s house, being worthy enough to be remembered by us.
Inanna’s descent to the underworld – a fierce and wild story and one that I relish with delight for all its curves and crevices, and motifs not acceptable to the present day image of the feminine. She is very very different to our quiet and unassuming Mother Mary, and I relish the contrast. What I love about mythology, as my experience grows, is the developing mosaic of images that these stories offer. I no longer only have one image of being a woman, rather I now have multiple images reflecting the multiple ways of womanhood – images of anger, of passion, of intimacy, of rejection, of joy, of lust, of love, of violence, the list could go on. They all speak to me on some level, and I feel more whole as a result. That doesn’t mean that I want to mimic the behaviours represented in mythology – who would do that?! But I feel more in touch with the different dimensions of myself, and more awake to how they manifest in relationship to the world around me. In the myriad representations of women in these stories, the wholeness of womanhood is acknowledged and honoured. The dark and the light are in relationship with each other. For me, this mosaic is very helpful to me as a human being trying to navigate this turbulent ocean of life.
experience of mythology is totally unique, and that really is the beauty of mythology. It doesn’t present us with a singular truth – ‘the moral of the story’ if you like. Mythology invites us into relationship, and no two relationships are ever going to be the same. The question is how we work with our different experiences as a group and as individuals… and that perhaps is a question at the core of Wild Wisdom School. Can we hold safe space for each other to journey along challenging paths and in these stony paths reap the collective wisdom? It’s certainly not easy, but the journey is fascinating to me.
