writing(with)plants

by Wendy WoodsJanuary 14, 202311:49 am

Feel invited to join one or more of the 3 new writing(with)plant sessions early February.

The world can look dark, especially in January for the people who live in the northern hemisphere. The days are short, the winter holiday decorations and cosiness fade away. Nature seems asleep or dead, except many humans, always in a rush in this accelerating society. We get tired, isolated, stressed.

In 2021, I started to organise virtual roundtables, first on rooting and belonging, both in Flemish and English. I invited always a plant to be part of these online circles of wisdom. Towards the end of the 2021, the writing(with)plant sessions grew out of these circles. These are small moments of community, creating female and posthuman texts. In the meantime, we had already different writing(with)plant sessions, programmed when my intuition and body has rested enough. We invited peonies, hemp, holly, hogweed… and now in the first two weeks of February, we will organise 3 circles and invite 3 new plants.

Writing(with)plants – what is this?

Last year, I wrote some thoughts about dating with plants, plant companions and then we organised some writing(with)plants sessions. Please find here some thoughts about phytographia or writing (with) plants we wrote in winter 2021. Often we underestimate the power of plants. We, humans, think often that we are the only stewards or helpers of the earth, but plants can be our allies too. Therefore, we organise virtual circles where we can remember their roles and our relationships with these plant – through some creative practices of knowledge and healing. These practices create meaning. The space is open for everyone. The beauty is that not only the plant, and the theme, leads to very different dynamics and even (artistic) outcomes, but that also the human participants, with their own masteries and wisdoms and experiences and memories and stories, make it always different. In a session on hemp, the circle became very political with thoughts on taboo and social change, while the session on night-blooming jasmine started with confusion and then got infused in the end with thoughts on the dark feminine and tricksters. There is always a core of 3 humans (Vitalija, Sugir and me). We welcome people who only join once and who join when they can and want. There is no obligation or expectation that you attend every session. These sessions are for free:

Our 3 guest plants in February 2023:

SNOWDROP and the theme: Returning after wintering

The snowdrop… which plant can be a better host in the time where the first light, first milk, and first flowers are arriving in the northern hemisphere. The plant can be a poison, but also a cure. There is a lot of folklore around this plant, as well as scientific facts. Please join us if you like to get to know snowdrop and want to reflect on returns after wintering.

Vanilla and the theme: Sweet violence

Many people might associate vanilla with its sweet taste. Often it is used as synonym for normal, innocent. However, the story of vanilla is also the story of hidden violence. This will be a session where we will reveal the ugly and the violent, but we will also talk about guilt and shame when we realise some of our consumption choices lead to violence and exploitation of other creatures (humans and nonhumans) elsewhere.

An epiphyte and the theme: co-dependence – just before Valentine’s day

There are thousands of epiphytes, but we have not selected which one who will be our guest. We might invite mistletoe, a semi-parasite who is considered by some as epiphyte, by others are parasite. In the days before Valentine, we are often bombarded with advertisements targeting coupledom. Coupledom itself is not bad, unless singles are treated as less because they are not part of a couple, or when people stay in toxic relationships. We will reflect when a relationship is more epiphetic or more parasitic. What can plants like mistletoe teach us when we are in questions on our singledom, coupledom or any co-dependence we want to examine, because something feels off?

Here are the dates and the ZOOM links. This is Brussels time.:

Wednesday February 1st, 15.00-17.00: The snowdrop – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89401824356
Tuesday February 7th, 19.00-21.00: Vanilla – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88395272800
Monday February 13th, 15.00-17.00: An epiphyte – https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85135107097

We are also talking with an illustrator to join these sessions in 2023 and make visual draft/notes on what she hears. This is materials for a possible scientific paper (in 2024) on the method.

The next writing(with)plant sessions will be in April.

This event is organised by Health Gardens Brussels, International Forest Therapy Days and Woodwebstories. We have also a googlegroups where you can find same-minded humans.

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Doug Hulmes on January 16, 2023 at 10:04 pm
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Hi Wendy, I have been following your work for several years since you commented on my paper Sacred Trees of Norway and Sweden. I was excited to read about your zoom writing with plants and was especially intrigued when you mentioned mistletoe. I attended a wandering symposium on story telling in Norway in the summer of 2016. One of our assignments was to share through story one of the Norse mythes. I chose to share my interpretation of the Death of Balder, and mistletoe. I waited until the last day of the symposium when we were well above treelike to share my interpretation of the myth. I asked the same question that you have asked and I find it especially serendipitous that we have both asked the same question, How can a poison also be a cure! I will copy and paste my outline of the story I shared, as well as the connections that I have made.

I am hoping to join the zoom call, so I believe that will be 4 am my time.
To be Continued,
Doug Hulmes

Norse Myths: The Death of Balder
Interpreted by: Doug Hulmes
For
The Wandering Symposium
August 8 – 13, 2016

When attempting to interpret the Death of Balder for a story telling exercise with the Wandering Symposium, I became more fully aware of how even through translation to another language (English for me), there are a magnitude of considerations that must be made in the variable meanings of words that cannot be easily translated. Kunnskap for example, is translated as knowledge, but as I came to understand, knowledge can be significantly greater than the understanding of facts, especially when referring to how the runic letters of the Norse alphabet mean significantly more that the letters of the Latin alphabet. I am in no way a scholar of Norse Mythology. The context of my conclusions are based on those of a Professor of Environmental Studies at Prescott College who has spent years examining my Scandinavian heritage in relationship to my teaching a course Explorations of Norway Nature and Culture (see An Autoethnographic Exploration of Norway, Nature and Culture « Journal of Sustainability Education). During this four-week field class, with 10 students we examine the following questions:

1. How does landscape influence culture?
2. How can the study of Norse mythology, and Norwegian folklore and history influence modern perspectives of nature such as Friluftsliv, Deep Ecology, and Sustainability?

The Death of Balder has been a story that I have read in English many times. It was not until selecting the story as an exercise in story telling that I read the Norwegian version. My ability to read in Norwegian is reasonable however there were many words that I needed translated, which helped me understand the complexity of my challenge as the story teller, because I did not feel my ability to speak Norwegian was good enough to tell the story, so opted to tell it in English.

I created the following outline for creating the story.

I. Balder has a nightmare that was a premonition of his death and shared it with his family.

II. All the gods came to an agreement that Balder would never be killed because he was the most beautiful and loved of all the gods.

III. Frigg, Odin’s wife and mother of Balder, Thor and Hod went to all the world including the stones, water, air and stars, and all of the living world of plants and animals, and they too agreed not to harm Balder.

IV. A great feast and celebration was held, and to prove that Balder was shielded from death, and possibly because of the mead consumed (my interpretation), the gods held a contest. They all took turns using their weapons, stones and axes, but none could hurt Balder.

V. Loki did not like this test and perhaps because he was jealous of Balder he shape shifted into an old woman who approached Frigg and asked if All of the plants and animals had been asked to pledge never to kill Balder.

VI. Frigg responded that only the mistletoe was missed, (possibly because every species of mistletoe is unique to the species it is parasitic to, and also imitates the leaves and needles of the host plant). In any case, Frigg believes the mistletoe is not a threat.

VII. Loki convinces Hod, who was blind, and did not partake in the games, that he could shoot an arrow and the Loki would direct the bow towards Balder. But Loki did not reveal that he had dipped the arrow in the berries of the mistletoe, and when Hod shot the arrow, it hit Balder in the chest, and he dropped dead.

VIII. This was the worst event that had ever happened to the gods and humans.
Frigg became distraught and none of the gods could move but only wept. For Odin it was even worse, for only he knew the depth of the loss of his favorite son.

IX. Questions:
1. What is the symbol of Balder, the god that everyone loves? Joy? Beauty? Youth? Life without Care? Carelessness? Other?

2. Why does Frigg feel it is important to protect Balder by going to all of nature including the plants and the animals?

3. Why does Loki believe he must kill Balder?

4. Why does Loki choose Hod the blind god to kill Balder?

5. Why was mistletoe the only thing that could kill Balder?

6. Why is mistletoe being used to treat cancer? How can a poison ultimately be a cure?

7. Are there similarities between Thor’s efforts to control nature and the world of the gods similar to those of the assumptions of Modernism that through knowledge and technology we can control nature? How does this relate to Norway and other First World Countries with respect to oil, climatic change and the Gulf Stream?

I ended the story by sharing my mother’s vision prior to dying of cancer and how mistletoe could have saved her. Her vision described heaven as a beautiful garden of flowers and trees and the flowers were pumping water like mad, and changing all of our negative energy into flowers. She also said that a sacred bird would come to her and take her away. I shared a series of remarkable events that followed her death and brought me to meet my Swedish family. These included receiving a catalogue of Viking jewelry with a Viking pendant of a pigeon with the same profile as I saw outside my mother’s window just before she passed. The pendant had been found in a Viking grave in Blekinge, Sweden. I later learned that the Viking was Olaf Sommerfogel, and recalled how my mother’s caregiver had described a butterfly on my mother grave when she went to water the maple tree I had planted for her, and that the butterfly landed first on one foot and than her other before being blown away by a gust of wind and then returning to land on my mother’s name Sylvia. I finished the story by asking the question, How can mistletoe, a poison, also be a cure? And that through all of the serendipitous connections I have made on my own personal journey, and the stories that I have heard, that I am reminded that there is a sense of the profound that can be experienced if one is sensitive to the openings, occurrences, and people we meet along the way.

Later that evening, I was told by two of the participants, that at the end of my story, a rare Skog Duv, or forest dove began calling. They also said that they rarely are seen above treelike~

Dougstorytellingnorway.jpeg

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  Wendy Woods on March 13, 2023 at 9:36 pm
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  Hi Doug, first of all, my apologies for reacting so late. I wished I had read your story much earlier. It is so powerful. I believe in serendipity, and that it happens when you are open for it.
  Interestingly, in that session we talked about epiphetes. In the work of Monica Gagliano, one of the circle participants shared, that these plants more sensitive than any other plants. She wondered if they are hypersensitive so they know balance, to know when it is too much, too little…. and then there is the talk if mistletoe is more parasitic or epiphetic.
  Maybe your mother was also a hypersensitive person who sensed more than most other people did. That is why she got the message about the ‘sommerfogel’? That is why she felt affinity with the mistletoe? I don’t know.
  
  During the writing(with)mistletoe session, different kunsskap was shared. It would have been great to have you there, but there might be other moments. I made some notes and I can share them with you, if you want? But I wrote a lot of words, which perhaps does not make sense for someone else.
  
  When I reflect on it, are Loki and the mistletoe not the same? Some sort of trickster archetypes?
  It breaks, challenges…
  Is Loki really the bad guy?
  
  Perhaps Balder represents some order that needs to be broken. Sometimes I compare Balder with Apollo, which was also some god of light and order. But I do not like Apollo. I prefer Dionysus, especially after reading the work by Sophie Strand about rewilding masculinity. And when I think about it, I am not sure if I liked Balder. I was also never attracted to Thor. Too much violence. I liked the Vanir, was always called more by Freya and Freyr, and intrigued by the story of Njord and Skadi.
  
  Some words I noted during this session:
  Mistletoe
  Where are the names coming from?
  Parasitic or not
  Balder story
  Greenness is a mask, so more parasitic
  Clean up ?
  Break up?
  
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