Hello,
A warm welcome to this week’s newsletter.
The little one and I have had a niggly cold this week – nothing serious, just feeling a bit under the weather. We’ve been relying on lots of homemade remedies, like herbal oxymel and elderberry syrup. We made some onion honey earlier in the year and Iris instinctively chose this to soothe her cough and cold. Here’s how to make some of your own…
Slice an onion thinly and place in a glass jar. Top up with raw honey to cover the onion. (If your honey is solid, gently warm to make it liquid.) You could also add thyme, sage, ginger, garlic, turmeric and marshmallow root. We kept ours basic. It’s ready to use after a week or so and we’ve kept ours in the fridge for nearly a year, so it lasts for ages! This image shows the version created by the wonderful Sarah Coleman of The Kitchen Apothecary.
Want something even more potent? Check out Luise Vindahl's Ginger & Turmeric Honey Bomb.
Anyway, I was really happy that my daughter chose to dose herself up with onion honey. I love when that happens; intuitive medicine. I find that even from a really early age, kids can choose their ideal remedy.
What We’ve Been Up to
Learning Celtic Tree Ogham Songs
I went to a talk about the Celtic Tree Ogham with Yannick Dubois and the Children’s Forest the other night. It was really interesting, I learnt lots, including a new tree song! Scroll to the bottom to find a link to the ivy song, which is a celebration of the union between divine masculine and feminine (holly and ivy). Anna Richardson spoke about how we weave them together at this time of year and bring that harmony into our homes, in the form of wreaths. A warming thought!
Yannick talked about the Ogham and how it’s the oldest written language of these lands. He explained that whilst it was used for writing, it was also used for divination. He explained that there are around 50 different Oghams, including plant, animals, crystals and colour, offering a multi-layered divination tool. For example, crow is connected to hawthorn, lapis lazuli, the element air, and the colour deep purple.
Yannick has worked with Children’s Forest to craft a set of Tree Ogham cards that can be used like Top Trumps! You can pre-order a set on their crowdfunder page, and your pledge will help the charity to plant more trees, with more children. Iris and I went to a multi-generational tree-planting session with them a while back, and helped plant an area of hazel across a steep Sussex hillside - it was magical.
