Bowing to the old maple
There's an old bigleaf maple on my walk to the bus, trunk thick with moss and licorice ferns, easily two hundred years old. I've bowed to it every morning since we moved to Seattle. My neighbors think I'm very polite to trees. I am.
This morning there was low fog, and as I bowed, every leaf on the lowest branch let go at once. Not a gust. No wind at all. They just came down around me like someone emptying a basket.
Back home, a tree like that would have a shimenawa rope tied around it. Here it has a parking sign. I don't think the kami minds. I stood there in the leaves feeling very much greeted.
Asking the hedge first
Hedge-laying season has started, which means three months of mud, hazel stakes and the good kind of sore shoulders.
Before the first cut on any new stretch, I do the same small thing: hand flat on the oldest stem, three slow Awens, and a plain request out loud to lay it well and let it grow back thicker. A splash of water from my flask at the roots and a "diolch" to the hawthorn. No robes, no audience, just me and a nosy robin.
A laid hedge isn't killed, it's renewed. The cut stems keep living and send up new growth all along the line. Every winter I'm reminded that most of the good things in my life came from something being bent, not broken.
Three staves for the turning year
I cut my ogham set from fallen hazel years ago, twenty staves, each with its notches burned in. Every autumn I draw three: what to let fall, what to keep through the winter, what to plant in spring.
This year: Beith (birch, beginnings) to let fall, which made me laugh, because I've been starting new projects compulsively. Coll (hazel, wisdom) to keep. And Ailm (pine or fir, depending on who you ask) for spring: clear sight, the long view.
So: fewer beginnings, more finishing, and a long look ahead. The trees are blunt when they want to be. Back to my half-laid hedge, which I'm going to finish before I start anything else. Probably.