Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth
In Which One Midwest Man-in-Black Confers, Converses & Otherwise Hob-Nobs with his Fellow Hob-Men (& -Women) Concerning the Sundry Ways of the Famed but Ill-Starred Tribe of Witches.
Oak Flowers
What is harder and more enduring than oak?
What is more delicate and ephemeral than a flower?
Oak flowers: a seeming paradox, but all those acorns must come from somewhere. The contradictory softness of the hard. The oak being Thunder's tree and all, one thinks of all those stories in mythology in which the Thunderer, most manly of gods, dresses in women's clothing. Clearly, he's not all bluster and bravado. Clearly, he too has his hidden depths.
Welcome to the season of paradox: the blooming of the oaks. You may need to expand your mental picture of what a flower looks like. But flowers they are, male and female, and they bear within themselves the oaks of millennia yet to be.
While visiting my cousin in Germany, I picked up some jars of oak honey at the village shop. It was amazing, the least sweet honey I've ever tasted, dark upon the tongue.
A spoonful of oak honey was like walking into a forest. It tasted and smelled of rich, moist humus, a bolt of brightness like a single ray of sunlight shafting down through the forest canopy.
That such sweetness should spring from a tree so rich in tannins that its bark and wood are used to tan leather only adds to the paradox, worthy of an Anglo-Saxon riddle like the ones in the Exeter Book:
Out of the hardest comes forth the softest,
out of the sharp, the sweet.
The bees are booming in the oaks. You can hear them if you listen.
The hard and the soft, the sharp and the sweet. Welcome to the season of paradox.
The oak trees are blooming.
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