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Samhain approaches. In the northern latitudes of this world, the last berries are on the Blackthorn and the Hawthorn. The Apples grow drunk on the fermentation of their own fallen fruit before slipping into their winter dreaming. For White-tailed Deer of the forests I call home and the Red Deer of my ancestral home, now is both the season of the rut and the season when hunters come to cull the herd.

In the Otherworld, white blossoms open. The scent of the flower of the Hawthorn, which will bloom in this world at Bealtaine is a cipher revealing the connection between Samhain and Bealtaine: it smells of sex and death.

None of us, not even hermits like me, exists apart from each other and the world. Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all feeling the ripple effects of the pain and terror people are enduring in a time of fire, plague, earthquake, flood, and war.

No, those of us who are not living through these horrors directly are not suffering in the same way as those who are. But, still, whether we acknowledge it or not, the grief, fear, pain, rage, and despair of it all live in our bodies. And when we do not acknowledge them, they come out in unexpected and unintentional ways...

At one level, our choices may seem to be ours alone, but they do not impact us alone. Pandemic and wildfire make clear that we all breathe the same air, and we all deal with the consequences of what others put into it. No matter how much we want to believe in ideologies of individualism, none of us exists in isolation. "My body, my choice?" -- yes, and, my choices impact you and your choices impact me. I am not in favor of shaming people for their choices or of relying on the state to regulate those choices -- besides going against my own values these two paths have proven ineffective and counterproductive -- but I do think that it is essential for us to push back against the idea that individual choices are a purely private matter.

Why did Irish and Scottish people fight and die for the claim of an exiled prince with a claim to the British throne in the Jacobite uprisings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that culminated in the Battle of Culloden?

To be sure, religion was part of what drove them. Catholicism, with its veneration of Mary and the saints, allowed for a syncretic integration of old beliefs and practices that tied people to their ancestors and the land. But I suspect there were other factors at play as well.

The first imperative of survival is to move away from what seems dangerous to us. We keep trying to move away from it unless and until our relationship to it changes. Civilization has sought to move us further from danger by walling off the outside world. Beyond the boundaries of the first cities were the wild beasts and the people the citizenry thought beastly because of their rejection of the wall that divided them from the wild. But when we lock away the wild, we also lock away our own wild nature, cursing our own bodies and the body of the world. In this way, we separate ourselves from the divine. And from each other.

Preparing to be on a panel on lingering symptoms of COVID-19 with a group of herbalists hosted by the Matthew Wood Institute of Herbalism, I looked back at what I wrote in March, just before I got sick myself. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there is little I would change, but there are several things I would like to add, drawing from the lessons lived through my own illness and lessons learned through working with others with both confirmed and suspected COVID-19 infections.

St. John’s Wort is fading, giving way to Goldenrod. In the early mornings, Bears gorge on Blueberries in the fields up the road, while in the forest the Blueberry’s strange Otherworldly cousin, Ghost Pipe, blooms, and across the ocean in my ancestral homeland the hillsides are purple with Heather. Soon the Rowan will be laden with berries, both here and there. As summer dies slowly into autumn, the bright half of the year giving way to the dark, I mark the old holiday of Lughnassadh, festival of the first harvest.

Many Christian Churches celebrate Midsummer, as the feast of John the Baptist, blazing eyed prophet of the Jordan River, who prepared the way for a great soul to enter the world. But before there was John the Baptist, the Manx knew this to be the holy day of Mannanán mac Lir, son of the Great Ocean of Time and Space, honored by the people of Ireland and the Isle of Man.

Traditionally in Ireland, on the morning of Beltaine, the old celebration of the Earth’s ecstasy, when the Hawthorn was in bloom, dew shimmering on its blossoms with the splendor of the fine raiments of the Gentry, people would tie ribbons to the tree with prayers for abundance, and hang cloths from its branches that would be saved for use as bandages. But the thorns of the Hawthorn suggested the wrath that would be visited upon any who dared to damage it.

Hawthorn stands at the boundaries of darkness and light, death and rebirth, fear and ecstasy, this world and the Otherworld. In Ireland it grows along the edges of the last remnants of ancient Oak and Yew forests, beside sacred wells, and atop the “Hollow Hills” beneath which the Daoine Sidhe, the faery people, sleep. In this season of pandemic, it brings profound medicine.

We have mistaken balance for a static state, an absence of chaos, an imposed order, and so we have made our lives and our society rigid and precarious. But rigidity always gives way to flow. Every dam breaks in time – and when it does, after the deluge floods forests and fields, the soil left behind grows richer and seeds awaken. True balance is fluid in nature.

The ancient Greek word “apocalypse” means “revelation.” In that sense, the pandemic we face is truly an apocalyptic event – one that reveals what has been hidden: In a time when the boundaries of our remaining wildernesses are being breached, a virus spreads from wild animals being sold in rural marketplaces into the bodies of people living under an authoritarian regime...