I am imagining a path through the forest now. It is spring and the trees are growing bright green leaves. The herbs on the forest floor are sprouting up. Look there! Mugwort! A protective herb, and beside it, lemon balm. These herbs are leaning toward the center of the path to get the golden light that is not yet obscured by the leaves of the trees. Herbs of protection and joy according to the folk lore.
Mugwort grows almost everywhere around the world's temperate zones. If you look as you travel Mugwort is everywhere around us in the Northeast, USA. She grows in all the waste places throughout our cities and particularly along all the roadways. I don’t believe this is an accident. For two reasons: The first being Mugwort protects the traveler and so she hugs our road ways, watching out for us. The second: In these times of rushing around and living totally in the physical experience, human kind has never needed the gifts of Mugwort more. We need her gifts of dreaming to bring us into the spirit realm and teach us to live in balance in both the Spirit and the Physical.
Lemon Balm is bound to the moon and water, and it is associated with healing, health, friendship, love, and success. Often in the past, Lemon Balm was drunk as a tea to ease emotional pain after the break-up of a relationship or other personal hurt.
So on this forest path we are guided by healing and protection, emerging from the dark of winter finally, and into the new growth of spring, purified and hopeful, ready to pursue new goals, maybe even new love. Did you know people become more active and creative in the spring and the fall?
The Spring Equinox Rite of Passage is about Incorporation, Purification, Soul Retrieval. Persephone returns to the land as Kore. Kore is the name of Persephone as maiden. She is represented as the new seeds of grain. Persephone's transformation alludes to the connection between body and soul; from the Queen of the Underworld, the chthonic earth of the Greeks, she is reborn as the seed of the Fertile, material earth.
This this ritual is expressed in the story of Psyche and Eros.Psyche emerges from her fourth task of gathering beauty from the underworld. Psyche actually failed this fourth task on her own. She was to bring this box of beauty to the Goddess Aphrodite from the underworld without opening it. But her curiosity got the best of her and she did open it. Upon doing so, she fell into a deep sleep that only Eros, God of Passion, could wake her from. What is passion but desire? That will to exist and take joy in our bodies. This passage is a return to community, connection, from the loneliness of winter, isolation. We cannot emerge alone, we need community and love.
Spring is a time of nurturance and new growth. The rituals of Easter reflect this nurturance and new growth too with the symbols of eggs, flowers, and small animals that procreate profusely! We feel refreshed, as if we took a ritual bath in healing waters, ready to be loved and love again. Not surprisingly, that Lemon Balm along that imaginary path, was also used to convey messages of love!
John Raven Mosher said, "The four steps to a ritual are (1) A separation, (2) An ordeal, (3) A return, and (4) An investiture of “gifts” in the community and a call to the adventure of living a new role (and unknowingly beginning a new adventure of change)." Each of these steps of ritual, are also Rites of Passage of the human psyche that follow the wheel of the year. The Spring Equinox is "The Return." After the Ordeal of Winter, Dark Night of the Soul, "After the ordeal, the celebrant of a ritual must return to ordinary reality. This return journey may be slow or rapid, but it has its challenges too. The celebrant must incorporate the learnings of his or her ordeal and also purify him or herself of the grit and grunge of the passage" (Cycles of Healing, 2007, p. 262).
In order to complete this Rite of Passage, The Return, or Rite of Purification one must, "establish new membership in a community. They [the rituals]usually require some form of incorporation of new or lost elements of self and cleansing or purification for the individual to be made new for the new position in the community.They [the Rites] often deal with rebirth. They involve methods of emotional clearing and the construction of new or alternative structures for meaning. They are frequently necessary for changing personal myths of chaos and meaninglessness, bringing a new order, sometimes forgiveness, amends, or justice, and wholeness, and the mystery of life. They are associated with the element of Water" (Mosher).
So now at the time of the Vernal Equinox, when the light and dark are balanced, when new life emerges, look carefully at the forks in the path, at the possibilities. Nurture each step and carefully choose your direction with hopefulness, always looking at the signs along the way. My path may have been bordered with mugwort and lemon balm, but you may find other signs and portents along the way. Don't be afraid to make meaning of these signs and portents, the ancient ways, that we may now call superstition, are really just about reading the sign posts, being aware of opportunities, and most of all, connecting with the community of life around us.
