M ‘airiuclán hi Tuaim Inbir
ni lántechdais bes sestu
cona retglannaib a réir
Gobban durigni insin
conecestar duib astoir
mu chridecan dia du nim
is hé tugatoir rodtoig.
Tech inna fera flechod
maigen na áigder rindi
soilsidir bid hi lugburt
ose cen udnucht nimbi.
In Tuam Inbhir here I find
No great house such as mortals build
A hermitage that fits my mind
With sun and moon and starlight filled
Twas Gobhan shaped it cunningly
This is a tale that lacks no proof
And my heart’s darling in the sky
Lugh, he shaped the roof
Over my house rain never falls
There comes no terror of the spear
It is a garden without walls
And everlasting light shines here
~ Sweeny the Mad, Buile Suibhne
Botanical names: Populus tremula, American species Populus tremuloides
Family: Salicaceae
Ogham: Edad
Scots Gaelic: Critheann
Irish Gaelic: Crann creathach
Welsh: Aethnen
Message: An action without a thought means little. Take time to reflect. Find a place of quiet. Allow yourself time and peace.
Aspen leaves in the wind are one of the most hypnotic sights in nature. They invite you to lie back, to watch, to let your mind wander as the leaves speak an unknown language with the wind.
Edad is the name of this fid, but no one today can be sure what the word signified to the people who first used it. Some link it to eíth, the sound of wind. Others connect it to fí, the aspen wand used to measure a corpse for burial. (1) Truth to tell, the word is as unknown to us as the whispers of the aspen.
Perhaps a few things we cannot readily name and pigeonhole are good to have in our lives. We must stop and study that which we do not know, and a time to pause is something we badly need at times. We live in a world that glorifies ‘the hustle’, and we have since the days when Calvin laid down his impossible standards for work and life. We glorify the process of pushing ourselves to the breaking point.
The problem is, we are breaking. Chronic stress causes our bodies to release hormones called glucocorticoids, as well as cortisol and adrenaline. (2) In small doses, these chemicals can save our lives, but when they are in our systems constantly, terrible damage is done. Our ability to sleep is destroyed. Our hearts are damaged. We raise our chances for a number of diseases, including diabetes, ulcers, and a wide range of mental illnesses. (3) And the suffering will not end if we allow it to get its claws into us: several studies have shown that prenatal maternal stress has been linked to an increased risk of autism, depression, ADHD, schizophrenia, and reduced cognitive ability in children. (4) A study in 2010 showed that chronic exposure to a stress hormone causes modifications to DNA in the brains of mice, prompting changes in gene expression that were passed down to their offspring. (5) Stress can and will kill us. Yet we continue to laud the people whose faces are haggard with exhaustion.
What we have to remember is this: it’s the poets that have taken the time to perfect their words who create the finest work. It’s the farmers considering their land carefully who bring in the best yield. In The Triads of Ireland we read these words:
Cetheora aipgitre báise: báithe, condailbe, imresan, doingthe
Four elements of folly: hasty deed, hasty judgement, hasty temper, hasty speech. (6)
When we look into the storytelling traditions of Old Ireland, we find again and again the hero who seeks the hermit for knowledge, the heroes who retreat from the world in order to renew themselves and come back the better for it. Many things drive them to seclusion: grief, fear, curiosity, a love of the wild. At various times, many of the greatest figures in Irish myth sought solitude: Danu and Ogma, the Dagda and Dian Cecht, Fintan and Amergin, Finn and Ossian all had their time to seek the high hills and the quiet places. They may seem to be doing little, but what they learn in the wood enriches their community. Much can be learned in the quiet, and then much can be taught to others. This was true of Scáthach, the warrior woman who lived alone on the Isle of Skye and trained Cúchulainn in weaponry.
The aspen is one of the most flexible trees. It bends with the wind. Aspen suckers readily, forming stands of many trunks connected by a single root system. Individual trees are short lived: The grove allows individual stems to die and allows a new sucker to fill its place, growing from the roots. By renewing itself in this way, the aspen grove can live well into its thousands.
(7)
When we take the lesson of Edad and renew ourselves as the aspen does, we can be as resilient. But when we refuse to take this lesson, it will eventually be forced upon us. Perhaps this is why one of the names for the aspen in the Ogham tract is ‘Shelter of the Lunatic’. (8)
In the ninth century text, the Book of Aicill, we hear of a broken one who sought shelter in the wood. The text is Buile Suibhne, “The Madness of Sweeny”. This is the tale we learn from it:
There was once a small king by the name of Suibhne, who ruled the area where County Louth is today in Ireland. An honorable man was he, though hasty in temperament and easily brought to passions of all sorts. But he was a good lord with a touch of the Sight, and was well able to think ahead and plan for bad harvests, bad weather and all manner of troubles. He was a good leader of his people, the Dál nAraide. Scottish originally, the Dál nAraide held territory through the Counties of Louth, Antrim and Down. Some said they had been there longer than the Fir Bolg.
Suibhne lived in good days, but all good times have their end. In the fullness of time, war came to the Dál nAraide. It came to pass that Congal Cáech, king of Ulaid, could stand no more the cruelties that his foster father, Ard Ri Domnall II, was laying upon the land. Not only were his taxes high and hard, but Domnall was siding with the Christian clerics in banning the high holy days of Beltane, Samhain, Lughnasadh and Imbolc in the land. This Congal would not stand for, and neither would Suibhne. They agreed to fight at Magh Rath in 637 AD, but it was a terrible two-week battle. The lines of the poetry take us to that bloody field:
He made an onset on cruel Wednesday,
he wrought a harsh deed with horror:
so that by Congal Caech did fall
four score heroes by his hand.
He made an onslaught on dark Thursday,
so that defeat was wrought before his spearpoint:
and he slew fifty of the host,
that day he was no pitiable feeble man.
On Friday he set out.
It was a rare feat, it was a litter of wounds:
five score comely noble men,
wonderful was the round of wounds.
On Saturday to the battle came
Congal, before pursuing the spoil:
So that he slew a hundred famous nobles,
many were the lamentations for the dead.
For a blood-soaked week, brother fought brother and cousin fought cousin. There were good and honorable men in both factions. Some fought for their beliefs, some for the vow of fealty they’d taken to their high king. Both sides were right. Both were wrong. Both died.
In the thick of this terrible fight, it’s said that Suibhne saw twin brothers slaughter each other on Sunday. The noise of kinsmen shedding one another’s blood rang in his ears, deafening him. The horror of the drawn-out atrocity they were committing forced the king to his knees, for the greatest bond his people had, their lines of kinship, were being shredded before his eyes. It’s said that while he sat, he saw a reflection in a pool of blood of his own body run through with a spear.
That was the moment when Suibhne broke. Screaming, he raced from the battle field, ripping off the clothes that bore the blood of kinsmen he’d slain.
The tale tells us his madness and his magic twined around one another, giving him the feathers of a bird. For seven years, he wandered alone.
Slowly, he came back to himself in the peace of the land, eased by the natural world. In poetry, he spoke to one traveler of the peace he found:
“The bellowing of the stags
throughout the wood,
the climb of the deer-pass,
the voice of the white seas” (9)
In time, Suibhne Geilt, Suibhne the Mad, came to love the woods and their peace. He never truly returned to the world of men.
Suibhne’s tale is a bittersweet warning. There is peace in solitude, but if we retreat forever, we help only ourselves. Suibhne healed, but he never led his folk again.
On the other hand, another noble can give us insight on the solitude we choose rather than that which we are forced into.
In 660 there was a king of Connaught named Guaire, and his best advisor was his half-brother Marbán. But Marbán did not sleep in his court. The other man had ‘turned his back upon the
world’, as the Irish phrase is, and lived out in the wood. We are lucky enough to know this because a work was recorded and translated by Kuno Meyer in 1901 as “King and Hermit; a Colloquy between King Guaire of Aidne and his brother Marbán”, being an Irish poem of the 10th century.
In this text, we learn of a king who, when he was weary of his work and his court, would seek his half-brother in his simple woodland home and stay for a time, calming himself and taking his ease with his dearest companion. There is a gentle teasing between these brothers that still rings true today. Guaire jokingly asks his brother:
Marbán, hermit,
Why will you not sleep upon the quilt I give?
More often you sleep stretched out,
Your head upon the pitch-pine floor.
Marbán replies:
I do not sleep upon a quilt
Though it might be for my health,
I find the restlessness of night
Shares with me better thoughts
The king comes to the hermit to refresh his soul many times, and his brother welcomes him again and again, easing his mind with the joys and the gossips of the wood where he lives:
A tree of apples – great its bounty!
Like a hostel, vast:
A pretty bush, thick as a fist, of tiny hazelnuts,
Branching, green.
A choice pure spring and princely water
To drink:
There spring watercress, yew-berries,
Ivy-bushes of a man’s thickness.
Around it tame swine lie down,
Goats, pigs,
Wild swine, grazing deer,
A badger’s brood.
A peaceful troop, a heavy host of denizens of the soil,
Atrysting at my house:
To meet them foxes come,
How delightful!
Fairest princes come to my house,
A ready gathering!
Pure water, perennial bushes,
Salmon, trout. (9)
Whenever Guaire grows weary or sick at heart, Marbán will be there to welcome him with a quiet smile and a soft bed of rushes and heather.
Take an afternoon. Sit beneath an aspen tree. Watch his leaves flutter.
“There is time,” he whispers, “time enough to sit and gossip with the wind. The time is there, if you choose to make it.”
- Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom, Laurie, Erynn Rowan, Megalithica Books, 2007
- Coping with Stress, Health psychology-A Handbook, Cohen, Bethany, and J. Williamson, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, 1979
- Effects of chronic stress on dendritic arborization in the central and extended amygdala, Vyas, Ajai, Savita, Bernal, and Sumantra, Chattarji. Brain research 965.1-2: 290-294, 2003
- Perinatal environment and its influences on metabolic programming of offspring, Tamashiro, Kellie LK, and Timothy H. Moran. Physiology & behavior 100.5, 2010,: 560-566
- Epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of altered stress responses, Crews, David, et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.23, 2012,: 9143-9148, 2012
- The Triads of Ireland, Meyer, Kuno, ed. Vol. 13. Hodges, Figgis, & Co., Ltd., 1906
- Trees of Britain and Europe, Rushforth, K, Collins ISBN 0-00-220013-9, 1999
- Ogam: Weaving Word Wisdom, Laurie, Erynn Rowan, Smashwords Edition, 2011
- Being the Adventures of Suibhne Geilt: A Middle Irish Romance, Suibhne, Buile, Trans. and ed. London: Irish Texts Society, O’Keeffe, J.G., 1913
- King and Hermit: A Colloquy between King Guaire of Aidne and His Brother Marban; Being an Irish Poem of the Tenth Century, edited and translated by Meyer, Kuno, London: David Nutt, 1901