HAWTHORN BERRY

Photo's by my dear friend Sophie Rasheed 🤍

The Hawthorn trees have just began to blossom with the spring, ripe is the time to share my story of connecting with her medicine.

If I'm totally honest, I've been going back and forth writing this blog, toeing the line of intense vulnerability in a public space, but if there's one thing that Hawthorn has taught me, its the courage to share from the heart. So here it goes.

Earlier this year, I took myself to the Emergency Department with intense physical heart pain. A series of x-rays, blood tests and scans later, I came back totally healthy, the pain unexplainable. I was sent home to resolve it on my own accord.

Knowing western medicine couldn't help me, and after ruling out major causes, I opened myself up to spirit, and asked to be shown the path to resolution.

The next week a story about Hawthorn was shared on a podcast I was listening too, when I got to my friends place, she made a passing comment that it was the season to harvest Hawthorn. Twice in the space of an hour, I began listening.

On my drive home, I noticed the roads adorned with thousands of bright red berries. I pulled over, and sure enough it was the Hawthorn. I harvested some in an old coffee plunger and took them home.

It didn't take long into my research to realise that I had been found by one of the natural worlds most powerful heart medicines. I started tincturing and dosing it multiple times a day. My heart pain resolved, and hasn't since returned.

This is a story about physical pain, but also a tender matter of the heart.

At the time, I was going through a relationship breakdown that lead to a total Aimee breakdown. Having to move out of my ex-partners place, and 3000km away from home, I again put the call out to spirit for a safe place to land.

 My call for help must've been intercepted by the Hawthorn fairies, as I was moved onto a farm 3 hours north, to a town I had never been too, with a forest of a hundred Hawthorn trees.

I spent most of those winter days kneeling at the base of her tree, opening my heart to her guidance, moving through deep grief. She was gentle, all encompassing and lovingly fierce. I felt her thorns strengthen my spine and fortify the barriers of my heart.

She showed me how to use my protection so that my sensitive heart could beat safely.

She taught me to be brave in loving myself. "yes" she would say, "that part too, especially that part" when I was confronted with the parts of myself I hated.

I would cry with her and be strong by her.

I was taught how to be courageous in self love.

Eventually she started entering my dreamscape to communicate with me.

I was in an underground cave network filled with Hawthorns. Sunlight cracked through the earth and glowed red the berries of a single Hawthorn atop a hill.

She summoned me over, and when I touched her branches she gave me visions of how to spread her medicine to the dark, barren, cold places of the cave. Where the light did not yet reach. Where heart medicine was needed the most.

The instructions were clear and I began sharing her freely.

a painting vision gifted by the Hawthorn

There's a lot more to say here, but this has been incredibly vulnerable already.

 I have been gifting her tincture to friends who are grieving. I have been holding hands, crying with strangers and hearing their deepest heart aches. I have been offering the medicine and watching hearts crack open in my very hands, and the Hawthorn speaks.

She moves with me, and I with her.

 It is an honour to have her as an ally, and it is honestly still hard for me to fathom that plant communication is possible in this way. But here I am, and the world continues to reveal itself in truly wacky and unexpected ways.

These moments of contact with animate natural forces are so so precious, and so real. Which is why I feel I need to be brave in sharing. The medicine we often need is found already around us, all we have to do is listen and catch the signs. It speaks to everyone.

I have the last few bottles of Hawthorn remaining for this season. Paired with the Rose-hip, they grow amongst each other on the land and wanted to support each other in the bottle.

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