When I created this Green World Oracle it was intended for personal, individual readings. Relationships with the larger environment were often included but the focus remained on the individual.  I mention this because today something changed.

Every year between winter solstice and my January 7th birthday, it is my habit to consult three different oracles (Green World, Druid Animal Oracle, Crystal Ally Cards), seeking guidance from flora, fauna, and minerals for the coming year.  But 2010 was such a dismal, impoverished year for so many of us that I chose to skip solstice and Christmas.  Instead, I decided to start the oracular sequence today, New Year's Day 2011.  When I awoke today, however, I felt a strong impulse to expand the focus beyond myself to the world.  I'd never thought of doing that before.   I would have considered it arrogant.  I have no objection when psychics do world-readings for a new year but I'm not psychic.

In fact, back in the 1960's, NYC's Grand Central Station had an astrology machine that kept fascinating me.  One night after work I finally dropped in my money and entered my birth data.  A printout arrived moments later.  What made the deepest impression on me was this statement: "You would make a very fine priest or philosopher but a very unreliable prophet."  I've never forgotten that warning and have often shared it with my students and friends lest they be tempted to take any of my utterances too seriously <smile>.

However, today I couldn't stop wondering what the oracular world might see ahead for the living, shifting, struggling physical world in 2011.  I decided it was time to explore this new dimension and see what might happen.  So shortly before 1pm, I lit seven tea-candles in various imported stone and ceramic votives scattered on shelves and pedestals around my living room.  I also lit a rich sandalwood-scented candle on a large handwoven woolen Zapotec prayer rug in my room's southeastern corner.

Then I began slowly spinning to the right, holding a small Moroccan Miryam-drum, drumming a six beat rhythm (numerologically, 1/1/2011 is a "6" -- I put the accent on the 4th beat for the 4 directions).  I spun for a long time, getting centered; then I spun to the left for a long time, staying centered, going deeper.  I began to feel as if I were spinning through the leafy greenness surrounding the misty earth in Sandra's painting above.   I felt I had left myself behind and was somehow, however briefly, connecting with the collective unconscious.

When the time felt right, I stopped.  I didn't choose any particular place to stop -- I just stopped spinning, which happens to have been facing my prayer rug.  Glancing at the drum in my left hand, I was surprised to see a glowing circle of light in the very center of its drumskin -- a small circle about the same size as the earth in Sandra's painting!  How can this be, I wondered.  I moved the drum -- when the light went off-center, then I realized the source came from the burning, sandalwood candle on the prayer rug.  The drumskin is only 5" across -- a few steps one way or the other and I would never have seen that phenomenon -- that earth-light perfectly centered on what was fleetingly akin to Shiva's "cosmic drum."  I took it as an affirmation of the process.

I knelt on my prayer rug and emptied out a wooden box of 33 sea-stones that I had collected along the Pacific coast many years ago, handlettering each one according to qualities in the stones that seemed to resonate at the time with specific trees or plants in the tree oracle.  Today, I tumbled the stones as I've done so often, then closed my eyes and circled the cluster of stones with my non-dominant left hand.  Always before I've let my little finger guide the process, descending to touch the appropriate oracular stone at what feels like the appropriate time and position.  But today, somehow, I felt that my ring finger was supposed to guide the process, this "wedding-ring" merger of connectedness between microcosm and macrocosm.  Thus, when the energies felt right, it was my ring finger that touched the cool, smooth surface of a stone.

I opened my eyes, retrieved the stone from beneath my ring finger, and found I was holding a pale, 1.5" triangular-shaped stone. I held it above the sandalwood candle so I could read the name I had painted on it years ago.  It was Elm.  I felt a sense of immediate sadness, for I know the oracular meaning of that much-abused tree. I would personally have preferred another one.  But Elm is what the Oracle gave.  As Carl Jung wrote in his famous essay on the I Ching, one must never second-guess an oracle or think that another might have been better, for that would be the height of immaturity and rudeness.  When an oracle is given, that's that.  Deal with it.

When you read my text below, you'll understand why I felt such sadness -- but there's also an old-fashioned "elven" hope that seems to want to be re-activated in our current age.  Hopefully, some will find this 2011 reading meaningful and will resonate with it; probably many will not. But then that's true of all oracles and is as it should be......

New Year's Day 2011:
A Reading for the Earth

Elm, horse (fine trappings woven from elm bast) ,
and an Amazon's respectful tenderness with both
Copyright © Sandra Stanton

ELM.

The elm is a tree to avoid as far as its auric atmosphere is concerned, for quite apart from its nasty habit of dropping a dead branch without any warning, it does seem to be in some way inimical to human beings.¹

We are not told which of the three [gods] endowed [the elm] with the devastating habit of crashing flat to the ground when full-grown without a word of warning....

[In the Celtic world] elves...had a lien on elm-trees, as the old name for these trees was 'elven,' from their connection with elves.²

THE MYTHS

In the old Celtic world, as the last of the above passages indicates, there was a close bond between elves and elms -- the trees were even called elven.  A harsher mythos existed elsewhere.  In the great Germanic collection of poems called the Eddas, the first female, Embla, emanated from an elm; her male consort, Askr, from an ash.  In the myth of their creation, three male gods, Odin (battle-storm-seer god), Hoenir (Rune Master, destined to survive the Twilight of the Gods) and Lodur, were walking along the shore when they saw two great tree trunks washed up by the sea.  The three gods carved the elm into a woman, the ash into a man.  Then Odin gave them souls, Hoenir, thought, and Lodur, blood.³  The two types of wood, hard ash and soft elm, reflect ancient fire-making rituals in which spinning the ash against the soft elm generated enough heat to "birth" the fire lying latent within the softer wood.  Among many Indo-European peoples, such fire-making techniques became an obvious metaphor for the union of male and female.    The ash continued to figure prominently as Yggdrasil, the World Tree, in patriarchal Teutonic myth.  The elm did not.  It became a drudge, valued only for its physical properties.

A group of ancient Amazon women, however, gave the elm the reverence due her as a sacred embodiment of woman's spirit.  According to medieval legends, they founded the southern German city of Ulm, "elm tree," a city on the Danube where they worshipped their goddess in elm groves (ulmae).⁴  Amazons were warrior-women, fierce in battle, loyal to their sisters, intolerant of men except for "fire-making" a child.  It is said they cut off one breast for greater effectiveness in handling their bows (elm and bow once shared the same Old Norse root, *olm).  Modern female archers say this would give no clear advantage, yet the legends persist.  Regardless of whether the women literally removed a breast, the myths point to the existence of some catastrophe so terrible that they took extreme measures to prevent its recurrence.  These were women pushed to the edge: they sacrificed whatever impeded their survival and then spun around, faced their foe, and fought for their lives.  They won, but it was too late to return to their old lives.  They forged a new way of being, of coping.  Too often they devalued the playfulness, trust and innocence they once possessed -- gentle qualities which may indeed have led to the original catastrophe.  Those lighter qualities now need to be restored, not recklessly, but with tenderness and respect for an elfin nature that has been wedded to a bow for far too long.

Footnotes:
1. Butler, W.E., How to Read the Aura:30-31.   2. Dorothy Jacob, Witch's Guide to Gardening:38;95.   3. Larousse:364;386;398; Dorothy Jacob, Witch's Guide to Gardening:38.   4. Walker, WD:463; WEMS:26.

THE TREES

The elm (Latin ulmus) has similar physical characteristics to the linden: both have a strong, fibrous bast which allows strips to be easily woven into clothing, footwear, baskets, mats, ropes.  In ancient times, linden lent itself generously, gracefully, lithely, to such mundane use; its very name is cognate with "lithe." Linden was also ritually important in horse-breeding areas where highly honored, sacrificial horses were outfitted in trappings woven of linden bast.

The elm, unsanctified by any ritual importance to humans, perhaps became more hostile to human use.  Where linden was allowed to be lithe and graceful, elmwood was forcibly shaped and stretched into a killing-tool.  Language reflects this too, for Old Norse, *olm, as well as cognates in other Western Indo-European languages, means both the elm as well as the elmwood bows used by those who could not afford the more highly valued and stronger ashwood bows.  Left to itself, the elm is as graceful and stately as the linden and the two have often been confused (a single Middle Welsh word, llwyfen, was used for both trees, for example).  Yet the elm, far more than the linden, was subject to widespread exploitation.¹

Between 7000-3500 B.C.E. climax forests of elm, mixed with smaller numbers of linden, covered large areas of Europe and Russia.  Then from about 3500-800 B.C.E., the elm declined dramatically in central and western Europe, supplanted by oaks and other hardwoods.  Archaeological evidence from Neolithic and Bronze Age sites shows that during these periods elm was the preferred fodder tree among Indo-European tribes practicing animal husbandry.  When branches, leaves and young shoots are grazed, the tree's pollen production is drastically curtailed.  The vulnerable shoots are especially at risk because it takes them another seven or eight years before they can flower again.  Few shoots were given that respite.  In addition, fibrous bast could only be obtained by stripping bark off the elm -- if done recklessly, the tree could be seriously damaged or killed outright.²

For centuries, when it was no longer used as much for fodder, the elm was considered a reliable and cheap building material -- since it is water resistant, it was used for ship keels and its hollowed out trunks were used as early drain pipes.  Troughs, sluices, bridge pilings, and coffins were also made from its wood.  Further, countless elms have been chopped into "sullen and slow firewood." ³

The elm has never been a "people" tree.  After centuries of misuse, it is perhaps not surprising that she will no longer fight to survive.  Severely stressed urban elms have been all but decimated by Dutch elm disease, a fungal disease probably originating in Central Asia and associated with the Dutch only because they worked so diligently -- and unsuccessfully -- to develop an elm capable of resisting the disease.  The fungus, which clogs the tree's water-conducting system (ironic, considering its unique water-resistance), is spread by bark beetles.  The insect begins with the most stressed trees but, as they die out, the beetle seeks new prey and moves on to stronger varieties, soon infecting them with fungal spores as well.  There are exceptions -- elms growing in coastal areas seem to be protected by seawinds; also, Chinese and Siberian elms remain highly resistant.  Aside from these, however, most older species of elm are increasingly succumbing to infestation.⁴

Fortunately for those who love elms, new hybrids have been developed by American horticulturists.  To keep them healthy and prevent their becoming overly stressed, they must be fertilized annually in the spring.  Perhaps this may be seen as a contemporary way of belatedly honoring the special beauty of this tree.⁵

Footnotes:
1. Friedrich:80-81;83.   2. Friedrich:85.   3. Grigson:260.   4. Alan Mitchell:48-52; Better Homes and Gardens, April 1993, v.71, n.4, p.20.   5. Better Homes and Gardens, April 1993, v.71, n.4, p.20.
 

THE READING

Even upright, this is a hyper-vigilant tree.  In Germanic myths, although the first female was an elm, other elms were hacked, burned, stripped, axed, and uprooted.  Now she is merciless in her swift anger over continued abuse.  She is a Kali, a Greek Fury, a bare-breasted Amazon, a shouting, raging Valkyrie.  She does not wish to be touched physically, but she is a strong and patient listener to others, whether female or male, who have also suffered abuse.

If you draw the elm, you are being told that you are capable of taking extreme measures in order to survive.  You can cut off your past without hesitation if it interferes with your chosen path, your destiny.  You can single-mindedly sacrifice all tenderness and mercy in pursuit of a higher good.

Sometimes this may be necessary.  Many times, however, too much single-mindedness will dehumanize you.  It indicates compulsiveness, a need to control, and an unwillingness to explore other options.  Consider whether it is time to become human again, to reactivate your empathy and intuition, even to play with the elves.  Until you can release the prodigious energy required to sustain your vigilance, you will not have the resources necessary for transformation.

REVERSED:  This tree, once used in ancient fire-making rituals, now warns of impending burn-out.  If time is not taken to relax and unwind, you risk a complete collapse, sudden, seemingly without warning.  You have been forced to be hyper-vigilant for too long.  You may be feeling misanthropic, exhausted, misused.  There is an urgent need to re-balance but you do not believe you have time.  You do -- use it wisely.  Remember the elm's elfin nature: bright, shimmering, magical.  She becomes an Amazon only through dire circumstance.  Left to herself, her innocent, hidden sweetness makes her the chosen abode and playmate of the elves.

My negativized elm silhouette: elf-like, graceful, "other-worldly."
Source unknown

Additional comments from 1 January 2011, 8pm: Note -- both upright and reversed readings apply here.

Part of this oracle seems to relate to how mother-earth feels -- abused, butchered, her precious resources sold too brutally, denigrated, pimped and exploited as a money-making whore, exhausted.

Part of the oracle also seems to relate to us -- for many of us, both female and male, are now the equivalent of ancient Amazons, hypervigilent, aware, singleminded, informed, loyal, protective of our earth and her flora and fauna.

But perhaps we've lost an essential, elf-like playfulness.  Re-balancing seems urgent but it's also risky, dangerous.  The oracle offers no guidance in re-balancing because it will be different for each of us. Perhaps some of us need to sing to our trees more (the ancient term was wassailing -- and this is the time of year for it); dance more like birds and animals; collect more pollen like bees; glow more like lightning bugs; laugh more; sleep more; have a little more wine sometimes; enjoy Dr. Who more; take more time just to be or to collect moments of gladness in the midst of these endlessly depressing days. It will be different for each of us.

For me, this sentence is the one that stands out most:

Those lighter qualities now need to be restored, not recklessly, but with tenderness and respect for an elfin nature that has been wedded to a bow for far too long.

Next is this one:

Until you can release the prodigious energy required to sustain your vigilance, you will not have the resources necessary for transformation.

Other sentences will no doubt stand out more for you.......<smile>

Regardless, may 2011 be kinder to earth and to earth's many teeming species than 2010  was.

Warmly,

Kathleen

Text Copyright © Kathleen Jenks, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
Art Copyright © Sandra Stanton
All rights reserved.

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