Getting to know the Land - Foraging

Yes, you did understand correctly!

There's nothing quite like foraging to let the landscape sink in, both literally and metaphorically speaking.

Get yourself a good guidebook, a course if you can is even better, and get put there and find what edibles grow on your doorstep. If you're unsure it goes without saying: don't eat it! But after a while even he scarediest of cats will learn to recognise some edibles. Fruit is certainly one of the easiest things to learn. Mabey's 'Food for Free' is a good place to start ( though some of what he decides is edible I've never been at all keen to try - cleavers?! Eeew) . Even if you can't bring yourself to the eating side of things, just learning what things are and where they can be found brings you closer to the living reality of the land.

Lammas is celebrated by lots of Pagans, but it was never something that had any real meaning to me. And, let's face it, if it's not real then what is the point? That changed for me when I first started foraging as a means to find the Spirit of Place. 

Lammas, Anglo-saxon in origin, is Hlaf mass, or the loaf mass. Essentially a harvest festival. But living in a world that has little to do with harvests I didn't really get why there were three harvest celebrations in the Neo-pagan calendar (a post for another time), and Lammas in particular didn't stand out. 

When I started my foraging adventures it dawned on me that in my part of the world (very much an Anglo-Saxon area) Lammas coincides with the time that the trees are giving over their ripened fruit. Now even a little googling will tell you that Lammas is also known as the festival of first fruits. 

*light bulb moment*

Are you surprised at how very dense I can be sometimes?

And suddenly Lammas has a very real meaning to me. Around about Lammas you will probably find me making fruit leathers from wild plums... Yum!

Now while you're at it, watch out for other notable plants you see. Go home, find our what they are, and what they do...

... And obviously make a map! Where are all the apple trees? Where are the cobnuts? Where can you find comfrey growing wild? All these little things slowly build up your awareness of the land, and almost without you noticing it you start to become more sensitive to the Spirit of Place.

Connecting with the land - Mapping

Getting a sense of the Spirit of Place is something to do layer by layer. I shan't insult your intelligence by writing a long winded post that tells you to go spend time in a place. You've already been doing that.

One of the most helpful things I found when building up my feel for a place was mapping. 

By which I mean drawing my own maps. Not just the one, but a fair few, with different aims. Here is a list of some of the map exercises I set myself that I found gave more depth when trying to sense my home town.

1. My very first map I made was of places of importance, places that felt special to me, that made me take notice. Don't worry too much about being accurate with scale. Rather than label these places on my map according to what they might be called in reality, I named these places for how they made me feel and why they were important.

Give it a go! Maybe some places you can name easily, where as others will have you pondering for ages. There's no need to rush.

2. The second map I made I decided to look at the physical area of the immediately local land. Where are the rivers? The flood plain? Where are the forest, or beaches or fens? Where are the valleys and the high points?

When you are next out walking around, can you remember any of these details and orientate yourself within the physicality of the land? Stop at given points in your day and see if these physical pointers in the landscape can tell you which way is east. You need to be familiar with the land to build up a sense of it.

3. One of my favourite maps to draw was my map of my town in the past. You'll need to do a bit of research for this map! Use what ever resources you can get hold of. I spent hours looking at local history books O.S maps and archaeological reports at the local library, then I threw myself in to marking locations that seemed relevant to me. Are there any ancient church yards? How about barrows? Has there been an ancient horse sacrifice discovered? Ancient wells? Find those places that were important once upon a time. Is there any continuity? What do the places look and feel like today? Rather than look at each site on this map independently, look at the as a whole. See if there is anything significant to their placing, is there anything significant in the physical landscape going on too (a river confluence for example)? Consider why people in times distance chose this particular place for a barrow, or an iron-smelting site. And never immediately disregard anything as unimportant - for example, even metal working had its religious connotations in the British iron-age.

For me this was by far this richest map I drew. There is something I personally find incredibly moving, and thus a source of connection, about discovering the people this land knew such a very long time ago. 

4. The last map I want to mention was my "homeland map". For this I spent more time considering than I actually did drawing. I wanted to consider the wider area that I inhabit. Where does it wtop feeling like home? This was as much about what was in my heart as what was in the land. For me I found it was basically the counties of Norfolk and most of Suffolk, and a large part of Cambridgeshire. This is where I aligned myself with. Once that was decided I repeated #2 and #3 again but on my new, larger scale, and considered my 'homeland' as a whole.

Happy mapping!

Spirit of Place

Spirit of Place, or the genus locii, is something Pagans talk quite a bit about currently. It can be taken two ways: the Spirit of Place is the land itself, or the spirit residing within the land. The distinction is a subtle one, and needn't always be either/or.

That's rather a dry and bare description of the Spirit of Place though. That I use to have two blogs called 'A Sense of Place' and 'A Journey into the Land" will no doubt give you an inkling that this is an important subject to me. I think in this (as in so many other things) I shall always be a seeker.

Getting a sense of the spirit of a place is a little like getting to know a human in many respects. You might hit it off straight away, but the chances are that it will take a while to build up some sort of 'picture' of the Spirit of Place. Just like making friends with anybody it takes time for you to get a feel for them. You know... A feel...

Probably you know exactly what I mean, but if not imagine your bestest buddie. They are more than the shape of their name in your mouth. More than lines and curves of body and face. All the many aspects of this person converge in your mind to create quite a distinctive feel for who this particular and unique person is. The land feels much the same. Never a two-dimensional image but a living presence.

Without being aware of it it's likely you already sense this in different places. When this was all new to me I was surprised when I realised the river to the north of my house was not the same river I walked along to the south of my house. It just didn't have that same feel to it. Of course I was fairly smug when I checked my map later to confirm that they were indeed two different rivers. There are no words to describe the shape of this feeling-sense. None that I have that are sufficient, at least.it's like trying to describe the feeling of love.

And what is the Spirit of Place?

I don't think the question is really as important as the sensing. The distinction between Spirit of Place and Goddess seems to have been a little hazy in the past. For instance, Sulis. Nymph of the hot springs in Bath? Goddess? Spirit of Place? All the above? Maybe the distinctions are not all that important in the end?

In the next few days I'll be posting a little bit more on connecting with the Spirit of Place, and building up that feeling-sense.