Greetings lovelies we are now moving into the season of red elder flowers in the pacific northwest, for those who have access to the blue or black we still have to wait a couple of months.
All the websites mentioned on the show have now faded and no longer exist - however all my contact info for herbal and other inquiries can be found here and any resources mentioned can be found here.
Elder is a profound and important being and a wise timeless mother and accompanying this series of elder Herb Hunters will be excerpts of one of my most important essays, Hylde Moer - Elder Mother. that will start nest week but for now I will leave you with the introduction and the illustration which was one of the most direct “downloads” that I have ever gotten with a piece of art.
Elder Mother - Hylde Moer
sambucus sp.
It's hard to talk around my big toe. Or maybe it's my heal? Either way, I have my foot firmly lodged in my mouth and the words are as clumsy and as sticky as primordial ooze because it's about that far I’m going back here. Back at least six million years when the salmon swam fresh and young and bright buttoned eyed up the river under the reflection of the dancing triad of elder trees, red, black and blue. And all those other Old Ones. Holding forth. When the salmon spawned and danced for death and the fauns and dryads frolicked about in celebration of growth and the fey wrung mysteries of mischief and the Elder swung open the gates to and fro and looked upon the nature of things and held her stag pipes upwards. I'm going back to when the old magic was the only law and all knew their nature irrelevant of the dance they played around it. It's a different thing to know the laws before you be breaking them, rather than just for the breaking in of itself, there’s a reverence in that thats far removed from the politics of church and that's what the old magic speaks of and what we’ve long forgotten. And here I find myself, with elder looming large pushing in the telling, so, while I’m birthing this little offering of something that's lost behind the big mist of my modern mind I have to tell you, it's not a graceful or dignified thing. Rather like the time I was six and doing forward rolls on the living room floor in my nightie and my mother gently told me to go and put me knickers on. It doesn’t matter how innocent you are, there is still the nature of the thing and us poor gibbering monkeys, not wanting to look in its wrinkled, brown-rimmed eyeball. And I would like to blame it on our hairless speech or dexterous thumbs or just the fact that we are here to up-end the whole applecart but either way we still have the blessings, we still have the endless love of the wise, these ancient keepers of the lore, these million-year-old sentiment beings, that somehow keep tolerating us, so on I goes with my story of Mother Elder despite feeling like an ant describing the statue of liberty, the perspective being very skewed by what I know and I so small in this tale. And Elder, well she just be insisting on what I am……
This essay will be produced in five parts along side each Elder Herb Hunter episode
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