Parting the Mists

Running a tad behind today, but we were enjoying a lazy morning with Mother Earth News and coffee. Then, I had a little helper join me at the computer. I’m sure some of you know just how “helpful” little Mojo was. But he sure is cute.

For those familiar Celtic lore, we know this card includes two features of wisdom: the Hazel tree and its fruits and the salmon below. When wisdom cards appear, it’s time to stop thinking you know everything and tap into something deeper and mysterious – intuitive and ancestral wisdom.

Blessings!

Hazel – Seek Wisdom in the Depths

Meaning: Wisdom is much harder to find than knowledge. It comes to us in a moments of grace, when we stop striving for fixed or prior knowledge, then we assess the need of the moment and ask for helpful solutions. Wisdom is already inside us, but when there is so much information on every side, we need some help to distinguish between true and false. So that is when we turn to the Ancestors, the guardians of wisdom that dwell in the Otherworld, where every thought is stored, every experience laid down, every atom of memory and truth recorded. By attuning to this storehouse of collective memory, we find that we can tap into a wisdom as old as time and as fresh as tomorrow. Those in need may think they do have sufficient knowledge to overcome a problem, but the depths of ancestral wisdom refines what we have into something far more powerful and appropriate to what we require. The message conveyed by Hazel is to dip deeper into your store of wisdom, and to seek out the primal information that can illuminate your every action.

Hazel Lore: For the Celts, the hazel is deeply connected with wisdom, and the fruit of the tree (known as “the food of the gods”) has an important place in the iconography of learning. Irish tradition speaks of the sacred salmon who swim in a pool surrounded by nine hazel trees. When these trees dropped their nuts in the water below, the salmon ate them and then carried them to the sea and back in their annual spawning run. This endless cycle was seen as a metaphor for the passing of wisdom from age to age and from person to person. Salmon were already regarded as sacred in their own right, and their ingesting the fruit of wisdom made them doubly precious. Celtic literature contains many descriptions of heroes who, the they ate of the flesh of the salmon, thereby imbibed wisdom, and so set them apart from the rest of humanity.

The Spirit of Nature Oracle by author John Matthews and artist Will Worthington