In honour of the Autumn Equinox, my partner, Mark, and I took a trip to Manitou Springs. We have been there a few times, but typical of people who are (sort of) local, we hadn't given the place much thought. It's a small mountain resort with nice boutiques and a good vibe, a fun change from our daily lives. It was only toward the end of our last trip that I noticed the Cheyenne Spring font on the main street, tasted the water, and all the pieces of the puzzle fell into place in my head. "Oh, Manitou Springs!" So we decided to dedicate our next visit to finding and investigating the springs -- and bringing jars.

Although I remembered to take the jars, I forgot my camera, so the gallery of photos below are not mine. They are from other people's blogs and articles, or from the website of the local Mineral Springs Foundation, who produce a free brochure, including photos, a map, and an analysis of the mineral content or each spring. They have done good work in renovating and decorating many of the springs around the town, inviting a number of artists and sculptors to design fonts. The result is a great deal of variation in the ambiance of the different springs.

Back home in Scotland the "places of interest" seem to be so thick on the ground that you are tripping over them. Lots of wells and springs, ancient monuments and places of natural beauty. To me, it feels very easy to find places that help me to feel close to the gods, to the spirits of nature or people of the past. Yes, the trees and rocks and soil are sacred everywhere, but I feel less resonance here. I hoped that these springs might be a good place to feel something like that, but I'm not sure.

The town of Manitou happened to be rather busy when we visited, with some sort of festival going on. There was a very friendly and slightly crowded atmosphere, which I enjoyed, but it wasn't conducive to quiet moments of spirituality. At each spring we visited we ended up chatting to people. A few were locals, getting water from their favourite spring, and happy to tell us about its benefits. Most were other people "doing the tour", but hardly anyone liked the taste of the water. Except me. I thought some of it was excellent. Each spring varies quite a bit in its mineral make up, but most of them are naturally carbonated, and have a high mineral content, which I enjoyed. One or two would take some getting used to. Iron Spring, for example is rather salty tasting and with its high iron content, reminded me of the taste of blood. I particularly liked the taste of the water from Wheeler Spring, which was fizzy and refreshing, and has a more traditional style of font, too.

It must be the Druid in me, but I found people's jokes and face pulling about the taste of the water a bit frustrating. I find the stuff that comes out of many a household tap completely disgusting. I don't like many mainstream commercial beverages, either. What the earth was offering, via these springs, tasted so much better to me, but people seem to me to have lost their discernment. Too much soda-pop and Miller Lite, I guess. Visiting the springs was just a box to tick, and a funny story about how bad it tasted to be told later.

I haven't delved too deeply into the history of Manitou Springs. Manitou means "spirit" in the Algonquin languages. Spirit both in the sense of what we might call gods and of the spirits that inhabit all things in the animistic sense. Several local plains tribes, such as the Cheyenne and Arapahoe peoples, held the area as particularly sacred and knew that the waters had healing powers. Because of the high mineral content of the water, some of the springs had formed natural mineral basins which were ideal for bathing. When European explorers found the area they quickly began to develop it as a spa, with great emphasis put on its healing potential and romantic associations with the local tribes. These settlers, too, valued the water, and the beauty of the area, but had rather different ideas about what was sacred.

Over the course of the 20th century the "spa" concept gradually gave way to a more general type of commercial tourism. The area has many tourist attractions, including Pikes Peak and the Garden of the Gods, and the springs at Manitou became a minor sideline which I don't even remember hearing mentioned. Manitou Springs became known for its enormous amusement arcade, cog railway and vast selection of motels.

Looking at the photos of Soda Spring, below, in 1870 and the present, I know which I prefer. However, I'm glad that perhaps something of the dignity and original reverence for the springs has been revived by the Mineral Springs Foundation. Water in Colorado is rarely a source of peace. It is generally seen as a scarce commodity, bought and sold for unsustainable agriculture, use by growing cities and for sporting and recreation. The saying "Whisky's for drinking, water's for fighting" refers to the legal wrangling that is almost always ongoing over water, somewhere in the state. Yet holy wells and holy water have gone unnoticed...

Because the town was built around the springs, most of them are along the main street or along major traffic arteries. The atmosphere when we visited this time, while pleasant, wasn't great for, say, a few moments of meditation. I would like to go back on a weekday in the off season, and see how it is then.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like The Divine Connection of Water and Mother Nepesta.

These photos can all be clicked to enlarge, and the captions link to their original sources, which are often quite interesting in themselves.

This morning the alarm woke me before sunrise -- and I actually got up! Maybe I was energised by a trip to a group of sacred springs yesterday. The moon is just a few days past full, and was silver, high in the sky. I went to my grove of trees. I took with me some sage, incense, homemade bread, water I collected from a spring yesterday, a candle, and a copy of this poem - which I wrote a few days ago. As I crossed the pasture, the horses came to say hello.

I felt happy. Summer is not my favourite season and I'm looking forward to the cooler weather ahead. In my mind, the moon, still visible as I walked, although it was now light, represented the coming longer nights, while the sun, not yet quite up, represented the summer we are leaving behind. The pastures, and the wider landscape are a mixture of green and gold.  We have been in drought for several years, but it broke in July and has rained quite a bit. July and August are the most common months for rain here, which means that autumn often sees a growth of green grasses and forbs among the already mature and dried-off stands of grass. Maybe that was in my mind as I wrote the poem below. I was really longing for the broad leaf forests of Britain when I wrote it.

My little grove of cottonwood trees are very dear to me. They are huge and gnarled, and there is a lateral irrigation ditch running beside them. My boundary fence, the grove and the ditch are all oriented east-west, with the trees between the ditch and the fence. They actually straddle the property line between my neighbour's land and mine. It makes the space feel all the more liminal...

You can read more of my poetry in my latest collection.

Sometimes, it's wise to question whether swimming against the tide is worth it. I'm beginning to think that "the Mabon thing" may be one of those instances. The Autumnal Equinox is nearly here, and my social media world has been filled with references to the day as "Mabon" for several weeks. Many people new to Paganism, and some who are not so new, simply accept that name without thinking. If I were to enter a new culture, I probably wouldn't question the names of the holidays, either. I'd assume that these names had been in use for centuries. However, the fact is that "the Mabon thing" has no venerable history - the practice was begun by Wiccan author Aiden A. Kelly in the 1970s. Anyway, why should we care? Wiccans and Neo-Pagans are forging new territory, right? Surely we can call our holidays by new names.

The main story of Mabon doesn't give us a great deal to go on in understanding who or what he really is as a deity or personality. A couple of other Welsh tales have similar stories of the abduction of divine babes, most notably the story of Rhiannon and Pryderi. An interesting discussion of these tales and what they might mean can be found in the excellent Mabon ap Modron The story of the Divine Son.  Another worthwhile link, discussing various early literary mentions of Mabon is Mabon ap Modron "Divine Son son of Divine Mother".

Finally, my thanks to Brian Walsh for his excellent article Mabon - A God of Spring Misplaced.

Have a good one! Whatever you call it!

Hedges have not always been a part of the landscape. The very earliest hedges were created by neolithic farmers when they cleared woodland for crop fields. Narrow strips were sometimes left to delineate territory, and these became the first hedges through a natural process. There are still remains of some of these strip hedges along parish boundaries in Britain, where they often harbour rare species of flora and fauna.

As the neolithic gave way to the bronze age, farming practices became more elaborate and settlements more permanent, and hedges began to be planted to contain livestock as well as to mark boundaries. By the 12th century the enclosure of land was becoming increasingly formal and legalistic, a process which expanded slowly for centuries, and then with much greater force and speed from the mid-18th until the mid-19th century. More and more, hedges were about keeping people and their livestock out, rather than just keeping animals in.

Many of the old hedges we see today are remnants of these periods of land enclosure. Many miles of hedges have since been removed to make way for agricultural changes and urban development,but happily, many miles remain, thanks to land owners who saw no reason to get rid of a good thing – and hedges are a very good thing. Where a post and wire fence may control livestock, it doesn't provide a windbreak for them to shelter behind – nor a habitat for birds and small animals, nor shade, berries, flowers and of course oxygen. While doing their work of separation for the common good, hedges truly support us all in many tangible ways.

Hedgerow
A separation of territory or ideas that works for the common good.
A shelter for those in need.

view of May Hill and hedgrows, Bromsash, Herefordshire by Jonathan Billinger

If this card occurs in a reading, it might be pointing to any number of things which limit us in some way, but also provide us with positives. One example might be the way a responsible and loving parent controls their offspring. The parent might say “You have to be home by midnight,” but they also provide both material comforts and other kinds of support. The card might also point to the importance of physical boundaries, such as property boundaries, and of finding the right balance with these, such as allowing rights of way or use on the one hand, and respecting someone's privacy or personal property on the other.

When I lived in Scotland I often enjoyed the bounty of the hedgerows, particularly at bramble picking time. It also gave me elder flowers and berries, hawthorn leaves, rose hips and a few raspberries if I was lucky. The lanes around East Lothian, where I rode my ponies, were lined with hedges, which offered the ponies a chance to select plants as they felt attracted to them. Animals can be very wise about what herbs they need to keep themselves in balance, if they are allowed access to a wide variety. Animals kept in hedged fields also have an increased choice of healthy nibbles.

Hedges that haven't been trimmed for awhile usually yield the best harvest of berries, and so as I picked brambles I was often facing a wall of greenery, fruit and thorns. As I became absorbed in my search, I could have been anywhere, or in any time. It was a meditative task, and one that easily slipped over into the liminal space of edges, for being so absorbed in the hedge/edge I could easily forget the lane at my back and the stubble field in front of me, as the hedge-world became all.

Hedges can serve as a sort of portal in time (at least of the imagination). Not only is the act of harvesting fruit or medicine plants a timeless act, but the hedge, with its history of increasingly enclosing and excluding us throughout history, perhaps represents a distantly remembered longing to go back to a greater freedom to roam, to be allowed in to remembered places now forbidden. Yet, at the same time, we reap this bounty because of its existence.

If you find my writings valuable,  please consider supporting my work.
Click here to visit my Patreon page.

Today is Wakes Monday. Celebrated in parts of England, mostly the north, and much fallen into disuse now. However, it is still the date of a famous annual fixture in the calendar of traditions - the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. This is a sort of morris dance performed by six men carrying reindeer antlers accompanied by several other mumming characters and musicians. No one is sure how old the dance is, but the reindeer antlers they use have been carbon dated to around 1050AD. It is unclear as to whether the dance is this old, or indeed it could be even older, some believe that these are actually replacement antlers. (Did they wear the first set out??) Another theory is that the hobby horse (one of the mumming characters involved) predates the horn dance element, which might have been added later. Yet another possibility is that the dance is a relic of some kind of shamanic rite which might stretch back into pre-history. I like that theory, but that doesn't make it true...

Meanwhile, I have just started reading a recently released book called Elen of the Ways, by Elen Sentier. So far I'm enjoying it. The quality of writing is high, and if the content is as good as I expect, look for a review of it on this blog in due course. Elen of the Ways is a female deer deity. In a typical display of synchronicity, I heard of her for the first time a couple of weeks ago, when someone referred me to a piece by historian Caroline Wise, also entitled Elen of the Ways, which references the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance. [Update: Caroline Wise published a book Finding Elen in 2015.]
 
Here's a nice documentary piece on the dance from BBC 4.

I also wanted to share a video of Thaxted Morris performing a possibly more traditional version of the dance. They dance to the old 19th century tune, which I think is very lovely. Although this tune was in use at Abbots Bromley for nearly a century, it is not as old as the dance, which has traditionally been done to "popular dance tunes of the day".

Finally, here is a link to a third video, not as well photographed as the first two, but rather evocative for being danced in a forest! This is Lord Conyers Morris Men. Like the Thaxted dancers, they appear to be carrying fallow deer antlers. Embedding is disabled on this one, so just click the link.

Happy  Wakes Monday!
_______________________________  

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Oss Oss!