Hawthorn, Flint and Always Coming Home

Reflections on a month of travel

Atlantic Coast, Boscastle, A Craig

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet 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 and you are so welcome here. 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.

Each time we travel to the UK, we begin and end in the West Country, arriving in Plymouth and spending the last few days of the month in Cornwall. At both ends of the month the hawthorn in Devon and Cornwall has been luxuriant.

We're always delighted to arrive at Caroline's farm near Boscastle — organic, a haven for wildflowers and grasses, overlooking the Celtic Sea that seagues into the North Atlantic Ocean. She greets us with home made bread liberally sprinkled with sea salt and rosemary, a pot of fresh pea soup, and we cosy into her barn listening to the wind.

It's a staging post for home — early in the month we returned to friends in Wales, my Celtic home for 20 years. Soon we will be back in Brittany, our Celtic home of coming up to 5 years. Cornwall is the liminal space between the two, a sanctuary between the home I feel nostalgia for in Tanygrisiau and the home I love in the forest in Finistère.

Da — the word for good in Welsh and Breton and Kernowek (Cornish). It is good to be here.

It's been a long month. The highlights have been wonderful — bendigedig — one of my favourite words in Welsh. The first event for Cinnamon Press's 20th anniversary at Beltane in Ivybridge was magical. A warm and welcoming indie bookshop, superb and generous readings from Cinnamon poets Gill McEvoy and Dana Littlepage Smith. Amazing hospitality, meeting Arthur the lurcher, and the gifts of a hand-made Beltane wreath, two poetry collections.

Then a hellish journey to Wales — over 7 hours, most of it sitting in stationary traffic on the M5 and M4 before we finally escaped and tacked across country. It was so good to stay with friends. So good and so sad — a friend we love living with the increasing symptoms of motor neurone disease and all that means for the whole family. Then on to Bristol — a brief sojourn and a lovely evening with other members of the same family before lupus caught up with me. A flare that had digestion and skin on fire, joints inflamed and wanting only to stay still. Sadly, it meant missing the next Cinnamon event before heading to Glastonbury to meet up with my herbal mentor, S.

There I stocked up on herbs for the coming season for my own practice and also found a hawthorn essence (for external use). My heart herb and companion since childhood. Strongly associated with May when I was born. Herb of resilience — physical and emotional, a herb that will hold us — solid and steady. Hawthorn feels like home wherever I am.

And S brought me another essence — made of flint she'd collected on the Jurassic Coast. It's the most unusual herbal I've ever taken and S wasn't sure why she chose flint, only that it was such a strong intuition.

I'd been writing about making decisions from heart and gut, about not allowing my over-thinking brain to rationalise me out of following intuition... and S's intuition was so right. Dorset flint has warm amber tones, is not only resilient but also screens out UV light — I've been struggling with sunlight more and more since the diagnosis... and the durable strength of flint was something my joints were aching for. A siliceous rock of the Upper Cretaceous, part of the White Chalk group and microcrystalline quartz, flint makes tools and ignites fires. So apt for the season of Beltane. So right for my digestion as well as for creative fire, which felt pale and weak as we constantly went from one place to the next.

I knew none of this when I began taking it, but could guess that it would be an essence for both resilience, grounding and security — a balm that held me as the month progressed. And an essence that reminded me of the canvas home we used to erect each day on the same bit of coast at a home education festival when my children were young.

Next to family — the whirlwind and delight of grandchildren, my daughter in London and more delights. Another Cinnamon event, another superb indie bookshop (Clapham Books), seeing friends (many of them Cinnamon authors) who I hadn't seen in person for years, superb readings from the poets Sue Lewis and Alex Josephy... The next day meeting my daughter's girlfriend, A, and visiting an exhibition with them.

Home. What does it mean?

The Korean artist Do So Huh was an extraordinary discovery. He works in sculptures made of paper rubbings, in large pieces on textured paper covered in complex pictures made of thread, in delicate fabrics that become gauzy nests modelled on places he's lived in Seoul, New York, Berlin, London... Always he is asking questions about home.

How do we carry home with us?

Is home an idea or a place, perhaps an emotion?

How do we explore the relationships between architecture, space, the body, memories to construct 'home'?

Drops of flint essence on the tongue.

Drops of hawthorn essence on pulse points.

Exquisite depictions of how we carry home with us.

Always coming home — to a place, to a feeling, to the self.

At a time when so many are unhomed, made refugees, given no sanctuary. A time when the gifts of hawthorn, flint, home should be for all.

In Edinburgh, another three Cinnamon poets — GW Colkitto, Jane McKie, Jay Whittaker — delighted a packed audience with their reading. I wasn't able to be there, but the recording is wonderful.

And so to Cornwall. Sea and wind. A sudden summer storm on for a quiet birthday. Rest, hawthorn, flint. New memories to hold, to carry home to the forest, where the alchemy happens.

And a small ask

Substack is a wonderful place to connect and I’ve been working on widening that connection. I’ve recently been writing daily notes to expand visibility for Alchemical Wonderings and I feel that this is helped by sharing my story as a flavour of this space. I’ve got one note I’d love to see reach more people which does just this — if you can take a couple of minutes to like and restack the note it would be a huge help. If you can also spare time for a short comment that would be an extra bonus.

You’ll find the note here

Thank you!