Have you ever noticed how a question mark looks like a sickle? Well, this is the top of a massive Mullein plant which seeded in my polytunnel. Some people have a sword hanging from a horsehair thread above their heads like Damacles. Me-- I get a yellow-petaled mullien sickle hanging over me. Hmmm...that almost sounded like a chorus we used to sing around campfires when I was a kid. Anyway--back to "Mully". (And here you need to imagine Sean Connery or Jerry Adams pronouncing the name Molly).
I know, I'm totally digressing into anthropomorphism and pitiful puns at the same time. But, consider her. Please.
Her leaves are a like a flamenca's multistoried gown, teeming with industrious bugs, butterflies, bees and enticingly gossamer webs. She trembles with all their activity. And she sways to the rhythm of a sun so rarely seen in these parts. She simply embodies Mary Oliver's words: “Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.”
So, as I dig and plant away, she hovers and I find myself full of questions . What is she trying to say? Am I starkers or is she in fact trying to get my attention? First it was the green man, and now this? I'm back to blogging because I see a theme emerging in my life that feels like an adventure. So, I am going to explore this question in my upcoming posts. And I raise this question, as a sickle of sorts. Ideally I'd like my enquiry to be in the spirit of Sonraigh (the Irish word for "particularize, specify, define, perceive, distinguish). These questions have already been cultivated and harvested by amazing writers and thinkers, like Michael Pollen and a veritable pantheon of Herbalists like Rosemary Gladstar and Susun Weed, Stephen Harrad Buhner and David Hoffman. I see myself as a sort of gleaner, gratefully collecting those sheaves that are graciously left behind for my own nourishment and to share with anyone who might call by.
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