Sensitive Creatures

finding a rhythm to honour our bodies

Sweet flag in the pond at Reagh

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest in Finistère. 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.

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Until a series of workplace assaults ended the phase of my life that was ministry, I was rarely sick. But if I ever came down with anything it was a sore throat. Voice was vital — conducting weddings, funerals, baptisms, celebrating weekly services, giving voice to the story of a community.. If I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t work, instead I was forced to rest.

I’m in Ireland, at Reagh, the most magical place I know with it’s Owl House built over the river, a garden of secret spaces, an oak tree grove, a faery fort, a maze… In the pond, the sweet flag (Acorus calamus) are tall and proud, generously spilling their gold. She tastes like nothing else. A hint of sweetness, a strong, aromatic spiciness, slightly citrussy, an undertow of bitterness. The powerful combination is followed by heat, a deep, suffusing warmth.

She is the herb of voice. One name for her is ‘singer’s root’, easing vocal cords, numbing pain when the voice is exhausted, but also increasing the range and energy of the voice with a combination of stimulant and relaxant properties.

I have not lost my voice. But I am nursing something and she’s a calming herb, helpful for those processing trauma, without being sedative. Sweet flag reminds me that I am a creature, roots me in time — breathe into your body, she insists.

Growing up, my best friend’s dad, a warm-hearted Scotsman, would joke: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’

Lupus has made me more aware of my body than I’ve been since I was in the phase of pregnancies, breastfeeding, mothering young. I’ve restructured my workflow, the shape of days. I listen to the herbs, deeper and deeper with time. And for all that, from January to May the volume of work spiralled — a landslide of those knotty ‘small things’, those ‘could you just…’ jobs that are never unreasonable until one piles on another on another…

So I draw a line in the sand, let everyone know the dates I’ll be away, make sure there are no loose ends that can’t safely wait till I’m back. Breathe deep.

We have a few days before travelling to Ireland to prepare, daydream about the Roscommon silence, walking the maze, reading, writing.

Each of the first four days, ‘could you just...’ emails arrive, several mentioning they know I’m away, but… Several knotty things that are not so small even taken singly. A lifetime of conditioning. Every fibre of me says I should just do the work, bargaining that it’s easier to do it now than let it linger.

It isn’t.

I don’t.

We become reflections of what we attend to.

At Sally’s barn conversion in Coolgreany I drink in the beauty of her garden, tended by Lolo, her 96 year-old mother, who lives in the upstairs of the barn and is completely deaf, but otherwise hale and whose exquisite paintings hang on the apartment walls. We only have a couple of days here. We’d missed the first days getting a ferry three days after we’d planned, after... But the place works its magic. I’ve brought work for a course on Celtic and Druid spirituality and lose myself in it between walks around the garden in moments of shade.

And so to Reagh. A journey of under three hours. But there’s a road closure and another and a third. It’s a scorching day and I plough through bottles of water. We make it in five hours, turn around to shop for the next few days, reading every label for fat content. Who knew bread could be so full of fats?

The next day I’m 65. Adam gives me a gorgeously designed poetry book, a small, soft blue-green hardback with a silver line drawing embossed into it’s cloth cover and poetry in Breton and French. The poet, Anjela Duval, lived from 1905-1981 and only started writing in 1960. The writing is delicate, precise, transporting. And there are line drawings throughout, plus colour pages of abstracts, the work of a contemporary Breton artist, Corentin Canesson. Le Brûle-fougères — ‘the fern-burners’, a type of frost that bites so deep the ferns look charred and burnt.

We walk the hedge garden, riotous in summer, some of the paths hard to navigate, so alive --

periwinkle

creeping buttercup

chestnut

nettle

herb robert

daisy

pink campion

wisteria

guelder rose

hawthorn

angelica

elderflower

In the maze, the grass is long, but the hedges are maintained – hawthorn and yew around a central hazel.

I make Moroccan stew with chickpeas, tomatoes, apricots… wholewheat cous cous with middle eastern herbs, a green salad with watermelon. And afterwards, a concoction that is between porridge and crumble – apple, blueberry, rhubarb, a porridge topping made with oats and oat milk and flavoured with nutmeg. Low in fat.

The night before we are due to travel to Ireland a pain worms beneath my right rib, acidic and burning. By morning I’m vomitting, even when there’s nothing left to bring up. I’m briefly feverish, but mostly my temperature’s lower than normal, with bouts of shivering. Pain spasms and twists. I talk to an emergency call nurse, then a doctor who tells me to go to the emergency department at Carhaix. Now! When I arrive, the admitting nurse is expecting me and from the distance of a haze of pain I marvel that my French is always better under pressure than when I’m trying to think about what to say, when it dribbles out of my ears. The nurse taking seven vials of blood and leaving in a line – just in case – has no English at all and I manage without a hitch, despite being clammy and shaking. The doctor who sees me knows exactly where to palpate to get a positive response to, ‘Does this hurt?’ And then there’s a wait and an x-ray and painkillers and a wait… and the emergency department begins to fill. I read 60 pages of a novel about what we do to bodies that take up too much space with a bizarre metaphor of people who grow and grow and are launched into space… It’s the seventh hour before the doctor returns, aware we should be on a ferry to Ireland in a few hours, but I’ve already messaged Adam to change the date of our tickets, so the doctor says he’ll order an echograph.

‘We’re looking for… oh there they are! See them?’ Yes. A whole clutch of them. Big. Multiple gallstones. How long have they been growing and growing? No, they can’t be dissolved. Yes, your gallbladder does need to come out. In a month, maybe two… I take the results back to the consultant, who shrugs – you might go a bit longer, let’s see.

At home I make an appointment to see my GP as soon as we’re back. For the next three days my body feels like it’s been kicked by horses, from inside. The ferry journey is a torment. What I know is that I need to drink water constantly to flush out that bile that’s backed up into my kidneys. That I must only eat food with very little fat.

Listen! To heart. To body.

One of the ‘could you just…’ emails had pointed out that we live in a ‘Now Culture’. Things must be done now. Things we want must arrive quickly (or sooner). The unspoken question: had I really meant to be away from work?

I had.

Our first evening at Reagh the sky is still not dark at midnight. On every other visit here, in other seasons, the sky has been a deep slate, stars bright and clear, the night a dark pulse. But we’re on the tail end of a Lunar Standstill, something that comes every 18.6 years and is marked on ancient stones from Callanash to Stone Henge. The moon is wide and low, the suspended brightness of the sky lit from below, sky pearled, uncanny and beautiful.

I was born under a fat waxing gibbous like this one, on this night. No wonder I’m a night owl. The owls in the forest at home would sing riotously to this moon, but there are no tawny owls in Ireland, and even the moon-faced barn owls are scarce. There may be short-eared owls over the peat bogs or rough grazing, more likely long-eared owls in the shelterbelt of conifer plantations behind the house, though they may have moved away since the wind farm was built. The whumf-whumf thrum of the turbines alter airflow and change how sound travels across open land, particularly at night. And species that hunt acoustically can be especially sensitive to background noise since they depend on extremely fine asymmetrical hearing to locate prey.

Sensitive creatures.

A world that persists in functioning as though all of us, owls, humans... do not inhabit a world where pressure is sensed, where bodiful creatures are affected...

But we are.

The eradication of vole-heart rustles, snow-muffled movement, wind-sense and micro-sound for owls.

Bodies too often tuned to sympathetic mode when digestion needs parasympathetic, in turn affecting liver metabolism, stress increasing inflammatory signalling for human creatures.

Bodies don’t hum to ‘Now Culture’, but to cycles and rhythms. A diseased gallbladder prefers gentle, steady rhythms.

Don’t we all?

If you are simply here to read, you are so welcome.

I’m no longer taking paid subscriptions on Substack and am holding my paid offerings on my own site with a forum on Mighty Networks — quiet, gentle spaces for Alchemical Gatherings, including monthly writing together Calmly by Candlelight, seasonal generative workshops and the Omen Days midwinter course.

If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you — everything continues as is until your next renewal.

Here’s to tending our stories together.