The Lettuce Liberation League
Much of the deep soul work of the Wood Sisters happens steadily and quietly, week on week, in the Wood Sisters Circle. We rarely write of this aspect of the Wood Sisters in this journal, in part because much of what unfolds is deeply personal and confidential for the women involved. But periodically, Sue and I say to each other… we must give a taste of the wonderful work happening in the Circle… and then we get swept away by planning events and everything else in our full lives…
Perhaps one of the special qualities of the Wood Sisters Circle is that it holds a sanctuary of stillness and a contemplative way of being for a morning every week within all the rest of the busyness in all our lives. In a Wood Sisters Day Gathering, meditation, quiet and deep listening form a part of a full day, while in the Circle these are the basis of the morning and in a group that’s half the size and who meet weekly, there’s a much greater potential for a deeper intimacy and sharing. The Circle is a warm and welcoming space that holds a wide range of wisdoms, including grief and tears, rage and passion, warmth and laughter and deep, deep, soul nourishing silence and simply being without any words at all.
Another feature of the Circle is our yearly theme, which for this sacred cycle has been plant lore. The Circle is the Hedge School of the Wood Sisters and the time when we develop our relationship with the natural world. In the opening wisdom pot we share our reflections on the outer seasons week by week and on the inner seasons of our lives and we spend two weeks at a time communing with our chosen plant. Our method takes inspiration from Druidry and from Goethean Science, so we spend time encountering each plant through our senses, our imagination, our intellect and through meditation. We dive into as many approaches to each plant as possible, drawing upon how it features in myth, story and poetry as well as botanical details and healing and medicinal properties.
Following our Wood Sisters Spring Equinox celebration, with our focus on the story of Isis and Osiris, and leading up to Beltane, our last fortnight in the Circle has explored the much under rated lettuce, which actually forms part of this Ancient Egygtian story. As Wood Sisters we first met the mythic lettuce at Midwinter in the sensual love story of Inanna and Dumuzi as Inanna sang:
“He has sprouted; he has burgeoned;
He is lettuce planted by the water.
He is the one my womb loves best.”
Our modern expressions such as ‘limp as a lettuce’ hardly seem to match the early reputation of lettuce as a plant representing sexuality, fertility, passion and vigour. This was similarly true in Ancient Egypt where wild lettuce was sacred to the God Min, a God of fertility and sexual potency and usually shown with an erect penis. The milky sap of lettuce was linked with semen, as in the myth of Isis and Osiris when Isis feeds Set lettuce sandwiches disguising the semen of her son Horus, as part of his struggle for kingship. The ‘priapic’ qualities of lettuce continue to feature in Ancient Greek and Roman times, Priapus being a Greek God of gardens, fertility and also featuring a giant erect penis! The Romans referred to lettuce as Lactuca, from the word, lac, meaning milk and this became the basis for our name, lettuce. The Latin name for lettuce, Lactuca Sativa, the latter word meaning sown or cultivated, seems to sum up something of the changing fortunes of the wild and sexy lettuce.
In our Circle, for our first week a rather feminine lettuce graced the centre of our group with a wide rosette of soft and rosy, lacy leaves, while by the second week our lettuce was a crisp and priapic bright green cos, which drew a mixed response! This week we moved from myth to a more botanical appreciation of the lettuce and were united in celebrating the full life cycle of the lettuce. As lettuce eaters and gardeners, what most of us tend to forget or be unaware of, is that the soft, sweet rosette of leaves that we so appreciate is actually just the first stage in the full life of a lettuce. The wild lettuce (and liberated garden variety too) goes on to grow a magnificent, tall stem with many multi petalled flowers. Each petal is in fact an entire self fertile flower each producing one seed, which ripens and is carried by the breeze to new ground by a parachute of small hairs, which reveal lettuce’s part in the Daisy plant family along with dandelions and sunflowers.
In meditation we journeyed in imagination through this full cycle of life and liberated our inner lettuce! In the sharing after our quiet time, several of us commented on the parallel we feel between the cultivation of the lettuce and the taming of our own inner wildness as women. (I know that many men, in these still patriarchal times, are similarly seeking their own healthy re-wilding and inner fire and fertility – so this journal entry is for you too, our Wood Brothers). The sweet, little, low lying lettuce becomes a towering, flowering, bitter tasting giant, roundly condemned in vegetable gardens around the land as having ‘bolted’ and ‘gone to seed’. There comes a time in the life of a lettuce and of a woman to stand up in all her wild wisdom and power and express the fullness of her life, especially in later years when the sweet juicy times of Bride & Mother come to fruition in the time of the crone. Let’s celebrate the cleansing bitter taste of the wisdom, rich with experience, that we bring through in our later years… join us, sisters, in the lettuce liberation league!