I have been bed-bound for a week with a severe lung infection. Everything is on hold, everything must stop. My world has shrunk to the island of the bed and the shelf beside it where my medication—both western and spirit—lays side by side, inhalers and pills in a line next to my my rattle and medicine bag.
I thought about what I should post today. What I could write to you, my core of supporters? What do I say when I can’t write coherently? The pills I take change the way I think, and making meaning is on hold until they are out of my system.
I don’t discuss my work as a hedgewitch openly. “Hedgewitchery” is what I call my shamanic practice. I am deeply indebted to First Nation people who taught my teachers, and to ancestors and spirit teachers and many teachers in this world and the world beyond the haws—the otherworld. I share with you a poem I wrote after a recent medicine walk. These poems are not ‘for public consumption’ so to speak but act as spiritual mnemonic devices.
I post it here for paid subscribers as a reminder of a time when I could walk out into the world, even if that walking felt hemmed in an circumspect at the time.