Sensitive Earth Healing Arts

❈ “It has been said, with some truth, that our English summer is not here until the Elder is fully in flower, and that it ends when the berries are ripe.”
 — Maude Grieve, A Modern Herbal, 1931 

Sambucus nigra. Black elderberry. An equinox portal.

How many of my ancestors fingers were dyed purple as they carefully picked each berry from every dendritic stem?

How many marveled at the matte black of each fruit— a depth, a plump portal at hand? Especially since these dark berries, ripening at summer’s end, have long signified a descent into the darker half of the year.

Did they help grow the fire by blowing through a hollow elder branch? For the name Elder seems to derive from Æld, ‘fire’ in old English, connected to this use of the plant.

Did they too sit with the beauty of the deep indigo those black skins emit when first steeped in water boiled on the fire?

All of these remembrances echo like a dream in my bones, simply in this act of handling these berries to make them into syrup.  I remember that although the beloved Hawthorn served as the portal to the Otherworld for my Irish ancestors, the Elder served this role for my majority Germanic and English ancestry.

/// to dive deeper into Elder myth & history within northern european culture, read the latest missive in the Sensitive Earth sub/st@ck, featuring:

1. equinox portal of elder
2. Arthur Rackham’s Elder Mother Tree (1932), an illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s retelling of this folk story
3. no filter fresh Elderberry steeped color magic
4. 170 pages of ancestral medical knowledge pertaining to Elder alone
5. dendritic umbel post-berries
6. Mother Elder by Hilary Jane Morgan, from The Golden Wonder Book for Children (1934)
7. a limited edition Elder potion coming your way night market in catskill on 10/4
8. lynx in bio to read