4/2015*
The forest was evil. It held no beauty, power, or goodness; it never fed her cells when she walked in it.
A Faerie, she could perceive subtle energies. The forest was evil.
It hadn’t always been. But she’d secretly watched the change:
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Blog posts tagged in oak
Traditionally, oak symbolizes strength, prosperity, protection, and overall blessings.
Oak is a standard wand for witches, druids, and others, since it represents power.
Lore tells us oak is a door to Faerie realms and their mysteries. The name of the Ogham letter that corresponds to oak is Dair. To the best of my knowledge, Dair relates to the English word door.
When I think about making incense cones and sticks, I usually see wood (a base material) as the simplest and most reliable ingredient in the blend. After all, it’s the base material that provides the heat to evenly burn the other ingredients. I generally use a simple formula when creating a pure wood incense: 2 tablespoons of wood powder, 1/8 teaspoon of gum binder, and about 1 tablespoon of water. Simple right?
When it comes to woods, Oak is a wood seen as sacred by multiple cultures. It is fairly easy to powder and has wonderful burning properties. Most of us are familiar with the pleasing smell of Oak burning in a campfire. These facts make Oak seem like a natural base material to use for many different types of incense. Occasionally, Nature likes to teach us humility by showing us that we aren’t nearly as smart as we think. Oak has been chuckling at me for decades, but I think we have finally found our middle ground.
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.
Across the North, the two preeminent sacred trees of Midsummer's are the ("male") oak and the ("female") linden.
On the linden, whose spicy flowering perfumes the longest nights of the year, more in a future post. But for today, the oak.
The Oak is the tree of Thunder, most virile of gods,* whose thunderstorms rumble spectacularly across the prairies at this time of year—the Ojibway call July "Thunder Moon"—and, they say, "holds fire in its heart." (In his youth, the Horned hid the fire of the gods there after he had stolen it from Thunder's hearth, but that's another story.) Fire drills used to be made from oak, and their "cradles" from linden wood. Extinguishing all the fires in the village and kindling the New Fire from wood on wood is an old, old Midsummer's tradition.
