Slow embrace

"That is what the intuition is for: it is the direct messenger of the soul."
Clarissa Pinkola Estes


A relatively relaxed day ahead, my stay in Llandrindod complete it's time to return home - quite looking forward to the journey down the Wye valley.  But there's one stop I plan to make along the way, at St Gwendoline's church in Llyswen, the resting place of my great-grandparents and two of their daughters who died young - 19 and 24.  It was quite a shock to find out about them when I visited with Dad in my early family history research.  He remembered where the grave was, he'd been there for his grandfathers funeral in 1941 - just before being called up to serve in the RAF - but knew nothing about the girls.  I subsequently found newspaper reports of their sudden deaths and the coroners inquests - quite heartbreaking to read as one of the deaths was in childbirth. 

I missed the turning as I drove through Llyswen on autopilot; it's been a few years since I've been to the church and it's down a narrow lane.  I could have continued on homewards but instead decided to turn around at the roundabout and return to honour my planned visit - this was a visit to the ancestors after all, and I haven't visited for a while.  I found a parking spot nearby and clambered up the stone steps, over the wall into the churchyard, not the most dignified of entries but it was closer than the lych gate at the far end.  Camera at the ready I was looking around for an interesting photo for the day when I happened to look down, picking my path to avoid the nearby graves, and my eye settled on a slow-worm in the grass, basking in the morning sunshine I thought.  What surprised me was that it hadn't slipped away quickly at my approach.  When I moved closer I realised it was a pair of slow-worms, and the reason they'd not slithered away was that they were busy mating.  A bit indelicate of me to stare but I've never seen this before and I was fascinated.  They stayed there for a few minutes, seemingly not bothered by my presence, or that I was photographing them!  Their business concluded, they slipped away quietly into the grass.

I still had my visit to the church to make, and as I did so I reflected on the imagery of the slow-worms, reminding me as it did of the intertwined serpents around the staff of Hermes [or Mercury in the Roman pantheon], messenger of the gods and guide of the dead amongst other attributes.  The significance wasn't lost on me given the background to my visit, and the nature of the weekend in LLandrindod just finished.  In shamanism death and birth are closely related, a part of the never-ending cycle.  One of the roles of the shaman is as "midwife" to the  dying, to help usher the soul into the unity of the afterlife, Annwn.