Flower of May: Sweet Woodruff

Excerpt from the May Day holiday e-book:

Sweet woodruff (galium odoratum) is one of my favorite plants. It is a low-lying ground cover with narrow dark-green leaves that grow in whorls around a central stem. It blooms around the first of May: small white flowers with four petals. Woodruff grows best in shade; mine is happy in a part of my garden which is rather moist. In Germany, it is called Waldmeister (master of the forest).

Woodruff does not have a strong fragrance until picked. But once dried, it develops a wonderful sweet aroma, a mixture of hay and vanilla. The scent comes from coumarin, a fragrant chemical also found in melilot and tonka beans. Coumarin is also an anti-coagulant and is used in blood-thinning medication.

Because of the presence of coumarin, the FDA only permits the use of sweet woodruff in alcoholic beverages (does that make sense?). Apparently large quantities have been known to cause vomiting and dizziness. It is probably best not to consume woodruff if pregnant or taking anti-coagulants.

Folk remedies call for the application of woodruff to fresh wounds; Rose speculates this would have kept the blood from clotting and prevent infection. Sweet woodruff was also made into a medicinal tea which soothed the stomach. It was recommended for heart and liver problems. The dried herb is wonderful for scenting potpourris, can be stuffed into sachets and tucked between linens to scent them. It is used to flavor May wine but it also has a reputation for provoking lechery, which may be another reason for its association with May Day.

Woodruff can be grown easily from starts. Mine came from my mentor and friend Helen Farias. Just dig up a little clump, roots and all. Plant it where it will get shade and its roots will stay moist. The plant spreads rapidly but is not invasive.

During my experiments with capturing the scent of plants, I was most successful with sweet woodruff. I let it sit in jojoba oil for about a week and now the oil is delicately flavored with that dry hay/tobacco/vanilla scent that I associate with lying in the grass at midsummer.

Image Credits:

The illustration comes from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany. The photo was released into the public domain by the photographer. I found it at Wikipedia.

May Wine

Excerpt from the May Day holiday e-book

May Wine is served on May Day. In Germany, May Wine is the quintessential summer drink. It is usually flavored with Sweet Woodruff (Waldmeister or Maikraut), perhaps because it improves the taste of thin, new wine. May wine is also the name for any wine punch flavored with herbs, fruits, berries and occasionally flowers.

To make May wine, pick sweet woodruff that does not have open blossoms several days before you want to serve the wine. Tie the stems with cotton thread and hang until dry so the sweet vanilla scent of the herb emerges. Then immerse the dried herb in a bottle of wine, usually Rhine wine, although Adelma Grenier Simmons uses champagne or a mixture of half Rhine wine and half champagne.

Some recipes advise you to leave the woodruff in the wine for days, even weeks. Others suggest removing it after ten or fifteen minutes, probably because woodruff contains coumarin, an anticoagulant and may cause headaches. However, it is probably not dangerous, unless you are pregnant or taking anticoagulants.

Michael Moore, writing about Northwest medicinal plants, suggests using vanilla leaf, another herb containing coumarin, to create a substitute for Polish sweet vodka, by putting a handful of the dried leaves in a fifth of vodka and steeping it for at least a month. He says it gives a nice green tint to the vodka, as well as a sweet flavor. Anyone want to try this with woodruff?

And Adelma Grenier Simmons says that a German friend of hers steeps woodruff in brandy year round, then adds the flavored brandy to the May wine. I have to say a little bit of woodruff goes a long way, and I probably wouldn’t leave it steeping in the brandy for much more than a week. Woodruff can also be used in the same way to flavor milk or apple juice if you prefer a non-alcoholic May drink.

The traditional Mai Bowle also has strawberries in it. Simmons garnishes her May bowl with fresh woodruff, Johnny jump-ups and violets. In Germany, the Mai Bowle is served every day during the month of May.

You can find more May Day food ideas, including a special minestrone and frittata served for May Day in Italy and a yogurt dish served for Hidrellez (the Persian celebration of May 1) in my May Day e-book.

References:

Rose, Jeanne, Herbs & Things, Grosset & Dunlap 1972

Simmons, Adelma Grenier, Herb Gardening in Five Seasons, Plume (Penguin) 1990

Creating Your Own Maypole

Excerpt from my May Day e-book:

In Wales, the Maypole was usually a birch, cut down in the forest, carried into town and planted in a hole dug into the village green. Friends who’ve attended the May Day ceremony at the former Chinook Learning Center tell me that the men brought in the tree while the women prepared the hole in which it was planted, the two groups working together with bantering and joking about the sexual innuendos of their actions as the tree was erected and settled into the hole.

I’ve also attended the May Day celebrations of the Radical Faeries here in Seattle. Unfortunately the May Pole is already set up by the time we process through Ravenna Ravine, leaving offerings for various deities, so I don’t know how the pole is secured in the hole. It’s important to make sure the Maypole is stable, as dancing around it, pulling on the ribbons, can sway it.

The one year we did a Maypole dance in our backyard, we tried to use a stanchion from a tetherball game to hold the pole but it wasn’t stable enough and one of us had to kneel at the base of the Maypole, steadying it while the others danced around it.

My friend, Maevyn, came up with an artful way of using and re-using her Christmas tree which creates a small, indoor Maypole. She cuts all the branches off her tree after Yule (they would be great for mulch in the garden) but leaves the trunk in the Christmas tree holder. Then on May Day, she attaches ribbons to the top and voila! A miniature portable indoor Maypole!

On the web, I found a suggestion of using a cardboard tube from wrapping paper and inserting it into the umbrella hole of a picnic table. Mrs. Sharp suggests making a portable Maypole by purchasing a large wooden dowel (two to three inches in diameter and at least three feet long), stapling long ribbon streamers to the top and hiding the staples with glued on bows and silk flowers. One person stands holding this pole aloft, while the others dance around it.

The usual length of the ribbon is one-and-a-half times the length of the pole and you must have multiples of four (that is 8, 12, 16, 20, etc.) for the weaving effect to work.

One song that is often recommended for Maypole dancing is Country Gardens. Any sort of country/contra music piece, especially one that can be repeated until the dancing is done, will work. I also think the chant about “Go in and out the windows” would help dancers dancing a Grand Chain. You will find suggestions for patterns to dance and songs to sing in my May Day e-book

References:

Breatnach, Sarah Ban, Mrs Sharp’s Traditions, Scribner 2001

More Resources:

Check out the antique May Day postcards posted by Barbara Marlow Irwin at this web site.

Martha Stewart has a wonderful series of articles about May Day celebrations at her web site, including instructions on making a Maypole (far more sophisticated than those described above), making the cones in which to put the flowers you hang on doorknobs, and three different kinds of Maypole dances.

20 Questions About Bhakti

by Sonya Lea

In January of this year, I celebrated my fiftieth birthday in India. Ten years earlier, my Zen master told me I needed to go to India. But I had resisted, mostly due to my fear of being overwhelmed by the place, the people, the sensations. But as my fiftieth birthday approached, I decided the second half of life needn’t be lived in fear. So my husband and I set forth on a month-long journey to India that included the ancient Hindu pilgrimage to the Ganges, the world’s largest religious festival – the Kumbh Mela, a tiger safari, a tour of Rajasthan, and an ayurvedic spa in Kerala. We were immersed in an experience beyond our ordinary minds, a journey so very consuming, that our practice became keeping our eyes wide open, and dissolving our beliefs about ‘how things should be.’ When I returned to Seattle, I wanted to stay inside the intensity of the way of life, and so I began a hundred-day practice of bhakti, the way of devotion.

India is a country of contradictions, a sometimes chaotic place where people manage to infuse every task, every day and every relationship with bhakti, a word that can be translated as devotion, although it means much more than that. Bhakti comes from the Sanskrit bhaj, to belong to, to be a part of. To express bhakti requires a fully engaged relationship with the Divine, one beyond ritual and tradition.

Bhakti is the essence of life in India. From the dawn bicycle ride to the temple and back each day before work, to the flower-stacked altars in homes, shops and even parking lots, to the mala beads worn smooth through fervent wear, devotion is as much a part of the day as the coffee break is in America. Bhakti emphasizes practice, a kind of participation with love. Bhakti brings one liberation through action. Bhakti is worship that has flooded the banks of the river of love — devotion as madhura bhava, the lover and beloved, a metaphor for the relationship between the individual and the divine. It is Radha and her love for Krishna. For me, it is Johnny Cash singing “Would You Lay With Me? (In A Field of Stone)” to his beloved June Carter.

I had heard that one hundred days of attention toward any practice would change one. I would start with a daily sitting meditation practice and then see where bhakti led me. I thought I would find answers but instead the practice offered me a wealth of questions.

1. Ever since the Bhagavad-Gita spoke of bhakti as a service to God, religious texts have referred to the devotee’s transcendental state as brahma-bhuta, somewhat like a consistent state of joy or bliss. If I practice bhakti, will I increase my capacity to live in this state of bliss?
2. Bhakti is about relationship, those between beloved-lover, friend-friend, parent-child, and master-servant. Bhakti practice can be in devotion to a spiritual teacher as guru-bhakti, to a personal form of God or Goddess, or to divinity without form (nirguna.) The idea is to illuminate the devotional energy within you, to see what arises, and to come into relationship with the Divine. If I don’t believe in God, can I use a form that represents the Divine for me, such as a relationship, nature, art, reality?
3. I chose Kali as my object of devotion. In truth, Kali chose me years ago, when I lived in a cancer center for a month while my husband recovered from a rare disease and debilitating treatment. In India, Kali and her devotees are everywhere. I realized I could embrace her openly. How will my life be impacted by inviting in the fierce Mother Goddess? Could this experience bring the kind of death and destruction that Kali is famous for offering to Her devotees?
4. I spend part of each day bringing Her an offering – flowers, songs, stories, candles. She says nothing. My life heats up, in a necessary, honest way. I’m clear about beginning a new novel. I speak my truth, even when difficult, to my kindreds. I stay silent and alone when it hurts. Still, I wonder about my offerings to these spirit teachers: If bhakti is about devotion, does it matter whether there is an object of that love?
5. I decide that my husband is going to become the benefactor of my bhakti practice. I do the little things quietly. I do the grocery shopping. I fold the laundry. I clean the urine spots around the toilet. Usually hated tasks that I let my husband know about, loudly. If I’m doing this as a bhakti practice, isn’t this less about my husband though, and more about wrestling with where I refuse to offer actions with love?
6. Einstein said, “Nothing truly valuable arises from ambition or from a mere sense of duty; it stems rather from love and devotion towards men and towards objective things.” Was Einstein cleaning the toilet?
7. What happens when we make a devotional offering of something we detest? I decide to find out by offering doing the taxes as bhakti. This results in offerings of fine chocolate to my belly. Stat.
8. Eventually I notice that when I devote myself to my husband’s desires, I feel submissive yet happy. Does this make me a bad feminist? Or a good kinkster?
9. If happiness depends at least partly upon our decisions (and scientists say 40% of happiness is based on voluntary choices that result in fulfillment or pleasure; the rest is genetic and based on conditions) then can I create happiness for myself by making choices that make other people happy? Is my devotional practice a great big boomerang of happiness?
10. In week four, I decide to offer all my cooking to a bhakti of my body’s desires. I enlist my friend Kathryn to help me discover what my body finds truly nourishing. I set out to prepare and eat delicious, nutritious food with gusto and pleasure. Is this body bhakti revelatory? Or is it merely self-indulgent?
11. Is it really possible to be anything other than self-centered? Try.
12. I notice how much gratitude my husband has for all these quiet practices. His precious thankfulness makes me want to do something every day, just to experience his pleasure, and the effects of it in my life. Does that make me manipulative?
13. On day fifty-six I read Krishnamurti. “You spend several hours a day in what you call the love, the contemplation of God. Is that devotion? …And the man who worships his work, his leader, his ideology, is also consumed by that which he is occupied…A man is devoted to his wife for various gratifying reasons; and is gratification devotion? To identify oneself with one’s country is very intoxicating; and is identification devotion?” I realize how identified I am with being the spiritual one, a holdover from the good girl archetype who slyly insinuates herself into my wild life as a way to keep me ‘safe.’ I want to release the concept of being the devoted one, to see what happens when my bhakti becomes messy and spontaneous. I wonder if I will continue practicing at all in this freedom, and whether that even matters. I am not interested in being accepted by a Zen master or a lover or my audience. I’m after the liberation that the truth brings.
14. Within Hinduism the powerful bhakti movement began in the middle ages, with the great mystical poets known as the saint-singers. They did not consider Brahmanic rituals necessary for salvation, and thus made self-realization accessible to all. Yet, despite masses of devotional literature, music and art, why hasn’t bhakti liberated India’s lower castes?
15. Anti-caste bhakti movements, including those of Mahatma Gandhi and the Dalit Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar remain popular, yet the caste system has shifted very, very slowly. Some say the bhakti movement developed its own hierarchies that kept people submissive. Does great fervor translate to real revolution? Inside either societies or myself?
16. My practice moves from sitting in the room to walking alone in the wilderness. I begin to realize that the lost relationships in my life have been dissolved on my behalf, because they needed to transform, not because anything or anyone was imperfect. Was Krishnamurti right? Is there love when sentimentality and emotion and devotion cease? Is devotion really a form of self-expansion?
17. On day sixty-three, I sit with Kali and simply stare. I argue with my husband about the chores. I am reluctant to declare this path a ‘failure’ and abandon it entirely, however, the process is more of a stripping away than I imagined. India as a whole had this effect on me too. Has this bhakti path been an illusion? Has the illusion been harmful to my husband and community? Am I worshipping an illusion, and in doing so, clinging to my own gratification?
18. Blind devotion doesn’t lead to God. There is no devotion without self-knowing. When I worship another, am I worshipping myself? Am I devoting to an image of my own thoughts?
19. Billions of people are following bhakti yoga: sravana (listening to scriptural stories), kirtana (praising/ecstatic group singing), smarana (remembering/fixing the mind on God), pad a-sevana (rendering service), arcane (worshipping an image), vandana (paying homage), dasya (servitude), sakhya (friendship), and at ma-nivedana (complete surrender of the self). Is devotion actually a description of the search? And, as such, is bhakti leading me farther from simply loving what is? Or have I reached the final stage of bhakti, the surrender of the self?
20. Day ninety. I sense that there isn’t any need for me to make offerings to Kali. Unless I find myself doing so. I see that my husband requires no tending in order for his gratitude to emerge – he is natural in his loving. My practice has resulted in more open-ended questions than answers. I feel I must live into them rather than force awareness. I’m not sure if India would like this way of bhakti, yet this is the teaching that has arrived. The questions pour forth: Is devotion an escape from reality? Has reality any symbol? Can a symbol ever represent the truth? Can we love without a desire to be in devotional pleasure or divine dissatisfaction?

Sonya Lea is writing a novel set in India and New York City. She has written for The Southern Review, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tricycle, and for films and television. Her essays have won an Artist Trust award, and her work can be found at her blog Working Wild.

Bringing in the May

Excerpt from my May Day/Beltane holiday e-book:

Many May Day customs involve flowers and green branches. Flowers are woven into wreaths to exchange as gifts between lovers or to hang on doors as decoration. Or flowers are placed in baskets and left on doorsteps for the recipients to find when they arise in the morning.

In Ireland, Beltane is the only safe day for wearing Irish lilacs (I’m not sure why). In France, the flower of May Day is the lily of the valley. Any wish made while wearing it comes true. The marsh-marigold or kingcup is called the herb of Beltane and is strewn against evil in the Isle of Man. Rosemary is another Beltane herb.

In England, there was a tradition of carrying about May garlands. At Horncastle in Lincolnshire, young boy carried May gads: peeled willow wands were wreathed with cowslips. In other parts of England, the garlands are small wooden crosses covered with flowers and greenery. But the hoop-garland is the most common: made from a framework of intersecting hoops so that the final effect is of a flower-covered globe. Sometimes a May Doll (sometimes said to represent Flora) is placed within or upon it. In Italy, the Bride of May carries the maggio, a green branch garlanded with ribbons, fresh fruits and lemons.

Sometimes flowers were given as messages: plum for the glum, elder for the surly, thorns for the prickly, and pear for the popular. In Lancashire, the flowers rhymed with their qualities. Any kind of thorn meant scorn (except for whitethorn or May), while holly was folly, briar for liars, rowan for affection and a plum in bloom rhymed with “married soon.” According to Porter, in Cambridgeshire, boys gave the popular girls sloe blossoms, while “the girl of loose manners had a blackthorn planted by hers’ the slattern had an elder tree planted by hers; and the scold had a bunch of nettles tied to the latch of her cottage door.” According to Hole, lime (which rhymes with prime) was a compliment and so was pear which rhymed with fair. The rowan (or quicken) since it rhymes with chicken was a sign of affection. But briar, holly and plum stood for liar, folly and glum while the alder (pronounced “owler” in some districts) rhymed with “scowler.” A nut-branch meant the woman was a slut, while a gorse in bloom implied her reputation was doubtful. Other plants you did not want to receive included nettles, thistles, sloes, crab-tree branches and elders. Obviously there are some contradictions in this list, and some unkindness as well.

I find it interesting that the three plants most often associated with May Day: Sweet Woodruff, Lily of the Valley and Hawthorn, all are connected in folklore with the heart. Summer is the time when Chinese medicine places the emphasis on strengthening the heart and the circulatory system. It also seems appropriate for the time of the year when we are focused on relationships and coupling.

For many more ideas on celebrating May Day and Beltane, see my May Day e-book.

References:

Field, Carol, Celebrating Italy, William Morrow  1990

Hole, Christina, A Dictionary of British Folk Customs, Granada Publishing 1976

Hutton, Ronald, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Oxford University Press 1997

Porter, Enid, Cambridgeshire Customs & Folklore, 1969, quoted in Hutton

Image Credit: The hawthorn illustration is from Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany

Daughters of the Witching Hill

I haven’t participated in a virtual blog tour before but I’m delighted to be able to feature Mary Sharratt’s historical novel, Daughters of the Witching Hill.  Yuo may not know this but I’m a devoted fan of historical novels (long ago I wrote historical romances under the name of Nancy Fitzgerald). For over fifteen years I’ve been working on a novel about a witch living in 1642, during the middle of the English Civil War, but I’ve had a hard time with the darkness of the plot and the themes of betrayal and abandonment. So I was eager to see how Mary Sharratt handled this material in her book.

I had even read one of the many earlier novels written about the very Pendle witches on which Mary Sharratt focuses. As with many earlier novels about witches, they are portrayed as evil women who gather in covens to plot the destruction of their wealthy neighbors.

The Pendle witches were victims of one of the first waves of witch hysteria in England, when James I came to the throne, following the death of Elizabeth I (who had her own astrologer on staff, the famous Dr. Dee). James had written a book called Daemonologie, calling for the denouncement of witches and describing how to recognize them.  The lurid imagery in this book informed the subsequent trials during which over 500 English men and women were condemned and executed.

I also read the books written by sociologists and historians trying to explain the witch craze. Unlike the fiction writers (who chose the most lurid of details, like naked dances around midnight bonfires, and thus accepted magic as real), these mostly academic writers never considered the possibility of magic. Instead they pointed to changes in society, like the dissolution of the monasteries which had provided care and healing for the sick, and the additional burden on society of the old and sick, especially older widows with no visible means of support. Accusations of witchcraft were blamed on cultural changes, misogyny and greed.

Sharratt has taken the middle way. She absolutely accepts the fact that Bess Southerns (also known as Demdike), the most notorious of the Pendle witches, the matriarch of a family living on  the edge of poverty, known throughout the area as a blesser, could heal the sick with charms, what Sharratt calls Catholic folk magic. She quotes several of these in the book; they remind me of the equally fascinating jumble of Catholic saints and pagan charms found in Carmina Gadelica, a collection of hymns and incantations collected by Alexander Carmichael in the Hebrides during the 19th century.

Sharratt also accepts as valid Demdike’s belief in her familiar, who sometimes comes to her as a beautiful young man, sometimes as a brown dog or hare.  Sharratt based her descriptions of the magical practices of Demdike and those accused with her on the account of the trial written by a court clerk. In deciding which elements to use in her story, she had to discern the true beliefs from wilder and more sensational statements which were probably coerced during the interrogations the accused underwent at the hands of the local authorities.

While Demdike first uses her powers for positive purposes, eventually she is asked to use her powers to harm and to repel, for instance, to protect a daughter from the unwanted advances of a nobleman’s son. Gradually she becomes as feared as she is appreciated. All the time, Sharratt makes it clear how precarious is her very existence and that of her family, totally dependent on the good will of others, as she has no property of her own, choosing to live in an abandoned, and reputedly, haunted stone tower. It reminded me of the homeless people in my urban neighborhood.  Contact with their poverty evokes hostility and fear as well as pity.

Sharratt captures the atmosphere of the place, the flavor of the time, and the sound of the language, both the dialect of Lancashire and the tone of conversation. She tells the story from the point of view of Demdike and her grand-daughter, Alizon, who tries to resist the pull towards using magic, but ultimately brings down the authorities upon her family when she curses a peddler who refuses to show her some pins and he falls down, paralyzed, obviously afflicted by a stroke. The language is colorful and authentic throughout, with a lilt to it and many old-fashioned expressions, for instance, “I made to follow,” “Upon a dark moon,” “Well important it was, that someone remained to tell young folk that the world hadn’t always been the way it was now.”

I asked Mary if it was hard to write the story, knowing the end, that Demdike, her daughter, and her two grandchildren would be tried and die, condemned as witches. She said; “Although it was harrowing to write of the injustice they suffered, it was my duty as a novelist to serve their memory and bear witness. And not just that—to me, their story is transcendent rather than purely tragic.”

If you’d like more information about Mary’s book, she’s created a beautiful book trailer available on youtube: Daughters of the Witching Hill. I’d love to hear about your favorite historical novel and why you love it.  And if you post your comment below, I’ll send one person, chosen at random, a copy of Daughters of Witching Hill.

This Unique Day

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Cesare, Parese, Time Alive

I wanted to use my beautiful Calendar Companion weekly planner in a way that would help me capture the essence of each day. I already have a Book of Days in which I record phenological markers, like when the locust trees begin to leaf out, or the first dandelion gone to seed. So I came up with the idea of using the weekly planner to record a unique event on every day: something that had never happened before and I didn’t think would ever happen again.

This rather casual decision had an unexpectedly delightful effect, by shifting my attitude away from expected pleasures. While in my Book of Days, I’m recording natural phenomena, in my Unique Event log, I’m more often noting human actions. For instance: April 5: A guy walks into Online Coffee and shouts “Have a blessed day. Jesus has risen.” OR March 14: The violin man outside the QFC was playing the guitar tonight. Other times, however, they are natural events like March 25: The leaves on the tree across the street are the exact same color as the bricks of the apartment building. Perhaps my favorite so far: April 7: Pepe (the Chihuahua) licks a pink cherry blossom that has been dropped in the parkway.

Of course, there are mnay unique moments in a day. That is more and more obvious to me (a creature of habit who loves routine). And I am especially intrigued by noticing what I find significant enough to record. I’d love to hear about the unique events in your days.