As we gather

in praise of tending to one another

Summer together, Adam Craig

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a forest. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are always free. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

You might find this easier to read in the app or online as some mail providers will cut off the text.

On Thursday, the day of Lammas or Lughnasadh, I gathered with a group to think about what gathering means. Lammas is the first of the Celtic harvests when crops were gathered. It was a pause to nurture and encourage, to list and tend to one another.

To gather. What does it mean to you?

Do you think of foraging or a table around which friends or family meet?

Do you think of gathering ideas or fragments of story for a project or shells and stones from a beach?

Do you think of an inward gathering? People used to talk of gathering their wits. And to 'gather myself' can be an act of calm and composure.

The Old English root gadrian has meanings of both assembling and collecting or storing. We gather supplies to see us through a winter, which might be as metaphorical as it is metorological. A word that refers to people, emotions, flowers, food... 

Who do you gather with?

The last time I gathered with every member of my immediate family was in the winter of 2019, before my youngest grandchild was born. Then came Covid and afterwards we were scattered to variuous locations. We gather 'virtually' at festivals and birthdays, but it's a very different experience. I cherish that for over thirty years we marked so many thresholds together in real time and in body.

What gatherings do you hold precious and/or significant?

Before Covid I gathered often with friends, old and new, inluding for various friend’s and colleagues’ book launches. The last one I did before the pandemic was in London and was February 2020, just before the first lock downs. Recently, I attended launch in a forest — the small group in a tiny bookshop-café gathered from Belgium, Wales, England, France, Germany (via South Africa) and Ireland. So many different stories intersecting...

What gathering recently nourished you -- online or in real life or both?

A gather is also a needlework stitch, a way of gathering cloth into folds — the thread bringing material together. 

What are the threads that fold your story into the stories of others?

Today, walking in the forest that surrounds the house, the gathering was of plants and butterflies, trees and birds, insects and animals, unseen, but there. I stopped to gather my thoughts and to gather with:

honeysuckle
valerian
cow wheat
royal fern
bramble
French rose
pennywort
enchanter’s nightshade
bittercress
bird’s foot trefoil
meadowsweet
marsh thistle
yellow pimpernel
campion
loosestrife
sweet briar
Welsh poppy

Increasingly, my ideas of community expand into the more-than-human. Each month has particular herbs that call, that gather with me on a healing journey, speaking to what needs to be tended to or shown tenderness.

In what ways do you gather with the more-than-human?

Beyond the forest, farmer's are busy gathering crops, the plants that will feed us. 

What are you currently harvesting in your life?

How does it feed you?

Is this the harvest you desire?

If you would like a different harvest, what one small, kind step can you take in its direction? (Remembering that sometimes the next kind step is to pause and rest).

Gathering is at the heart of herbal healing — coming together with plants who will share our story. It's at the heart of the healing we experience when we relate to an animal. It's at the heart of any nourishing circle we meet in, online or in person. 

Sometimes the gathering is with those we can hold and sometimes this holding is found in the pages of books or on a Zoom call. As F Scott Fitzgerald put it

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

It was wonderful to gather with some of you for the lammas 'gather listen tend' workshop and I want to do more such gatherings in this space — finding opportunities to gather for restoration and inspiration. I'm delighted that I will be gathering with some of you for four weeks of herbal healing workshops for the season of Lammas to Autumn Equinox, startting on Wednesday (and there is still time to join).

For all of us, there are times when we need to gather ourselves for whatever is next in life. And gathering ourselves can be enhanced by a community of people who don’t have the answers, but do have the grace to tend to one another. Sometimes we find tending and tenderness in real life encounters, sometimes in the pages of a book or in an online circle. To gather with those who nourish your life and whose lives you nourish can be part of getting through the day in a world with so much grief and just plain exhaustion. Our relationships, our connections, not only ground and nurture us, but also centre us as communal animals, who grow better together. Our connections make life more sacred — as Henry David Thoreau put it in his journal:

The field where friends have met is consecrated forever. 

Here's to gathering our stories — together.