Foxgloves, Ferns, and Frustrations
June 2024
I’ll start with the frustrations as they will also suffice as the “living life” part of this monthly update.
The headline news is that my parent’s house is still not on the market. This is down to the fact that the final 5% of getting it ready for estate agent valuations seems to be taking FOREVER because most of them are things we need professionals to help complete and thus we have to wait for gaps in their schedules. I am doing my best to remain patient and calm; “it doesn’t matter how small the steps are if we’re still moving in the right direction” has become my new, oft-repeated mantra.
Since I am also very much a “if the sky’s awake, I’m awake”1 sort of person this time of year is always tricky because of the sleep deprivation. Unlike when I was in my twenties and thirties, if I want to be functional these days I need at least 8 hours of sleep a night2 so when the sky doesn’t get properly dark until gone 10pm and starts getting light at around 3:30am that’s never going to happen. When you combine that with the house stress, the ridiculousness of the news cycle thanks to the UK general election, and a week of warm nights (no one’s bedroom should be 28 degrees at 2am) I find my sanity hanging on by the slimmest of threads.
When that thread inevitable starts to fray I either scream into a pillow or, more helpfully, take myself to the woods and spend some time becoming one with the moss and the trees and wandering the foxglove dotted, fern flanked paths.
This time of year, even more than the bluebell filled spring, makes me think of fairies. Or rather it makes me think of the folktales about the plants and flowers that have been fairy-touched.
When I was little, my Gran was the person who introduced me to the folklore of plants. Not in so many words, of course, instead she told me stories about all the things we saw on our walks in the woods and fields that surrounded the village where we lived.
The story she told me about the foxgloves and ferns that covered much of the wood, towering above the path (and my head) at the start of the summer went something3 like this:
A long time ago, when the woods were new, this stream was a roaring river, and the world of the fairies and the world of humans was one and the same, there came a time when the first fox hunt happened. Now the fairies didn’t like the hunting any more than you do, since they knew the foxes as their friends and companions and understood their necessity in the world, so they were determined to put a stop to it. Thus when the hunt rode out for a second time the fairies stood against the men, turning their horses and hounds against them.
However the men, being wily creatures who hated to be told no - especially if that no came from the mouths of those more beautiful and powerful than them, took to hunting with horses shod in iron shoes, dogs with iron clasps on their collars, and wearing belts with iron buckles. Thus the fairies - to whom iron is a deadly poison that clouds their minds and saps their strength - could not interfere with the passage of the hunt. And since the men’s minds and hearts were already iron hard the fairies could do nothing to turn them to compassion, either, and so the hunting resumed.
However the fairies refused to be defeated, turning their attention from stopping the hunts to shielding the foxes from the viciousness of the men. They hid the foxes passage and their dens whenever the hunt set out and for a time they were successful in thwarting the violence and cruelty. But, as the years passed, the hunts increased in number and spread across the land to such an extent that the fairies, who were already being pushed to the margins of the human world, could not be everywhere they were needed.
Yet once again they refused to abandon their friends. If they themselves could not be everywhere the foxes had need of them, they decided they would give the foxes the means to protect themselves. So the fairies came together and placed their powers into two of their favourite plants, plants that grew everywhere that foxes live, so they could always find what they needed to keep themselves safe.
And that is why these beautiful stems of bell shaped flowers are called foxgloves, for all a fox need do to hide their tracks and scent each day is to slip one flower over each of their paws first thing in the morning, when the flowers are full of dew. And all a fox need do to hide their den and keep their cubs safe is dig them into the banks where ferns grow, for the fairies put the power of invisibility into each feathery frond, giving safe harbour for any friend of the fairies who might have need of it.
If you have a favourite piece of folklore about a tree, or plant, of flower, please feel free to share it in the comments.
In word-herding news there is one new post up on my website, titled Two Years of Tiny Tales; a celebration of the fact that last Monday I wrote (and shared over on twitter) a micro-flash fiction for the 104th consecutive week in a row.
I continue to flitter about in journals, creating fragments and scenes of the many stories that all seem to want to be told at the same time, and remain unable to produce anything that resembles a fully formed essay or original story. I have - after mentioning last month I was trying to - made peace with this rather slow and apparently disjointed method of creation. It feels necessary, somehow (I couldn’t explain how if you paid me) and, crucially, it is enough for me that I am enjoying the process and content to see what happens if I keep on letting the words flow as and when they want to.
To this end I’ve decided to take a small break from this newsletter as well. Call it a summer holiday of sorts if you like. I’ll only be gone a month so, while there will not be anything popping into your inboxes at the end of July, I hope you will all forgive the pause in transmission and I promise to be back in August!
My committing-one-poem-a month-to-memory project continues to bring me joy, although I will admit that the ones which do not rhyme don’t seem to stay in my brain as well as I’d like and I do keep having to refresh my memory of them. I have to find the rhythm in each poem to get it to stick and rhyming words just make it that much easier4.
I hadn’t chosen a poem at the start of the month and wasn’t sure what to pick until I was reminded - thanks to a random tweet - of a poem my English teacher used to recited from memory in the summer. She usually repeated it the first time it was so hot in the portable hut she used as a classroom that we were all begging to have the lesson outside in the shade of the trees at the edge of the hockey pitch, where the banks were covered in tall grasses that whispered in the breeze. Given the heat here in the UK last week, it feels like a highly appropriate choice:
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
As always, I’ve drawn a tarot card from my Prisma Visions deck to offer some insight into the months ahead:
As we move into the second half of the year it is time to acknowledge all that has transpired in the last six months, both good and bad, and set down any of the burdens that time has laid upon us that we no longer need to carry. Let us life our faces to the sun, take a moment to balance ourselves, plant ourselves in the world as it is at this time, and then take that grounding with us, inside ourselves, as we float onwards into the brighter days ahead.
So, to tide you over until August, I offer you this blessing:
May the second half of the year bring the insights needed to allow us to move towards our goals and dreams, and bless us with both the energy to pursue them vigorously and the time to rest when we need replenishing.
Yes, I did nick that line from Frozen. No I will not apologise.
Which is one of the reasons I also find my bouts of insomnia so much more debilitating now.
Obviously these are my words, not my Gran’s, but I’ve tried to keep as close to what I remember of her story as I can.
I’ve always been this way, finding it much easier to learn the songs than my lines for theatre group and school plays.