Offerings

Nimue Brown

Jul 6

(David)

This morning, for the first time in weeks, I went outside to visit my back garden rather than just enjoying everything through the study window as I have been doing since the gastro hit me. Only to the ground level, not up the steps to my grove because I'm still physically weak while I recover, but I enjoyed the fresh air and all the flowers raising their heads to the sun.

I took my coffee pot with me and poured the used grounds into the soil below glamorous Gloria the Azalea, as an offering to the spirit of this valley.

This extends my inclusion of coffee in my practice. It's growing. The daily ritual for protection and happiness that I share with a dear friend as I prepare the makings, then my personal affirmations while I brew it in the silence of each early morning, and sometimes scrying as I inhale its aroma and stare into its darkness before I start drinking. And now giving its nutrients to certain plants and trees in our garden that I have researched to make sure it will be beneficial for them and not harmful. Caring for the plants is part of my half of the relationship with the beings and spirits in this place.

I can't take any credit for our gardens, in front and to one side of and out behind our house. The steepness of the land itself makes it physically beyond me.

We got hard landscapers in to protect our home from the landslips that used to happen naturally and were exacerbated by the man we bought the property from having dug out a significant chunk of land to extend this house into the hillside. The firm built a strong retaining structure behind the house to stop that happening again, and fronted it with a series of curved walls and flower beds to either side of the big flight of steps that go up to the top level and our little orchard and my grove, more retaining walls and beds down the side, and a terrace out front overlooking the valley.

Once the landscapers were finished, though, the design and planting and maintenance of our gardens was all my wife's work. What I do is spiritual and fellowship with everyone out there while she takes care of everything practical. It's a three-way partnership.

Offerings are part of my part in the partnership.

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