gathering time

The gathering time is here again,

To gather with our plant friends deeply drawing in their smells

While they breathe in ours . . .

The sharing time is here again,

To share with our plant friends a smile, a laugh, a touch, a listening

While they speak for hours . . . .

I love this time of year when the smell of propolis is strong up above the spring, mixed with pine, and we’re stopping in meadows, sun streaming over us and our feet go cool into the creek and there, there there is water mint, sweet and refreshing to be with.  Sitting for a while, awareness sharpens, bee sounds are suddenly loud and then become part of the in breath, out breath, woodpecker hello!  There’s a lilting voice and a chatter mixed in with a squeal every now and then, part of the cadence, the new rythym since our arrival, the old makes way for us, generously giving space to life and we join in, doing our water dance in the creek, while a trout darts by a few times and the ants go back to doing what they’ve been doing long before we came . . . .

It’s that time of year but it’s not the same even though it’s that time, a funny thing this wheel turning us around or are we turning it around or neither nigh-ther . . . . last year we gathered baskets of juicy chickweed and cleavers catching on our clothes, furry burdock leaves, comfrey stalk, flower, and leaf . . . not this year at that time, instead we go play in the fields of fresh blooming red clover blossoms before they’re moved down after which their sweet smell lingers on and we taste it in the milk from the farm on that side of the valley below, and while we gather the clovers sing to us to pick the ones the bees leave, the bee kissed ones, so we do, and we take them back to tincture, to dry, to steep in honey for green mead in the autumn, to infuse oil, and in queen of hungary’s water (to which i’ve added peach and strawberry leaves, chamomile, comfrey, and a mixture of fresh rose petals) . . .  is it even the queen’s water anymore!?

happily we leave much of it to the bees and turn homeward, to motherwort.  she’s so stately this year: tall, filled out and bushy and lightly flowering on top though the bumble bees haven’ t found her yet . . . once they’ve worked her over, then the heat dries her to yellow from the inside out and she looks half baked, parched, spent, changed.  but at this moment she’s in her full glory and whispers of how she can help me later in those long, sunnless days when my temper grows inside me like thunder coiled up keeping me hot when it’s so cold all around, snake rising rising energy that can be spent, discharged in useless words and anger, leaving me parched, half baked, or stored where it becomes an internal heater during the hibernation time yet a challenge to keep in check, so motherwort says she’ll help me with that part and into a jar she goes . . .. yes it’s that time of year yet it’s not . . . .

What lies ahead, I wonder, as I watch small hands gather beside me and notice with a start that some of those hands are no longer small but the size of my own, a woman’s hands, and rounding the bend a truck slows down to a crawl and the driver’s a young fella who honks and lifts his hat and smiles and winks and his gaze is upon my daughter, who picks blossoms with care, dagger tucked in her waistband, a warrior, a maiden, no damsel in distress her eyes flash and her nostrils flare as though she’s aware with her flashing skirts, barefeet, and basket of flowers the picture she makes in the green green grasses!  The wheel turns and turns and I plunge the dasher, churning churning, turning turning all that cream into butter . . . .