Sensitive Earth Healing Arts

when it rains, it fruits / touching mushrooms

⚷ yarrow & this chiron cazimi eclipse (19° aries)

Hardship leaves us with a suit of armor.  We crafted it to fight the battle.  But our innate wisdom reminded us — craft a key.  That way, you can unlock yourself from this armor when you need.

Often though, we never feel safe enough to leave the armor behind.  The years pass, and we forget about the key.

In comes the myth of Chiron — maverick, wise centaur of the healing arts.  He learned his gifts sitting beneath a Linden tree, which turned out to be his own mother who Cronus had transfigured.

Despite Chiron’s aptitude to heal others, when he was shot by one of Heracle’s poison-dipped arrows, the centaur could not mend his own wound.  His agony led him down a destined path to a new phase of wisdom:  he entered the underworld willingly, giving up his immortality.  He embraced darkness, and through doing so, he freed Prometheus, the bearer of light.

Chiron— symbolized in astrology by a key.  A key to unlock the wisdom garnered from the hardship.  The key in knowing “the wound is the place where the light enters you”, as Rumi writes.

The key of Chiron asks— how can your deepest hurts lead you towards an understanding of your wider potential?  By coming to terms with your hardship, you can rewrite each story as one that teaches and strengthens you, rather than leaving you a perpetual victim.

This key knowing fills your own being with such inner fortitude that you unlock your armor and let it go, as now you’re stronger without it.

The strength you’ve gained is different though.  It’s not tough, guarded, and hardened like your old armor.  You’ve become soft, receptive— like how a deer attunes to the subtleties of their surroundings to sense a potential threat.  This sensitivity is your protection.  You don’t need to raise your sword and lash out on the unknown.  To that questionable other — you listen with your full body.

This kind of sensitive strength:  it has a name.  Old English ġearwe, also meaning armor or “gear”, and the etymological root of the word yarrow.

{keep reading about yarrow & chiron’s eclipse on my free sub-st@ck, 🔗 in bio}

❈ my somatic desire at this time of year is perennially subterranean. it revealed itself in a third-person perspective dream that felt both ancestral and contemporary. i rendered it as a short story you can read now on my sub/stack, or in your inbox if you’re subscribed to my newsletter.

a beloved winter solstice practice that rhymes with this story: on that darkest night of the year, turn on no electric lights. witness no screens. only allow the light from candle, fire, and the half-moon, if need be.

(an apothecary gift for dreaming, in spirit of this inward season, is offered in the letter 💌)

pictured muse: a beloved hawthorn tree in our rondout community garden ❄️🩸