Welcome to this week’s edition of “Nudges,” weekly thoughts about connecting with self, place, and others. Today’s essay is a little piece of fiction I wrote for you this week. I hope you enjoy it!
Agnes bent to whisper hello to the flowering Prunella vulgaris, stroking her fingertips across the stalks of tuba-shaped purple flowers. She felt for the welcoming answer, a yes indicating which stalks were available for her to harvest for her medicines. Several reached back to her, sending a positive energy back up Anges’s fingertips, and she snipped each off with her thumbnail and placed them into her basket.
Her walks through the forest were a favorite part of her day. The easy pace, the greetings to her plant and animal neighbors. She could practically see the energy that wove between them, strengthening the spirit of the place, the spirit that they were all part of and contributing to.
Back at home she set the flowers up to dry. The previous day, one of her regular customers had bought the last of her self-heal salve and Agnes was preparing to make another year’s supply.
She heard a knock at the door and sighed. This was happening more frequently. Her regular customers, the folks who lived in this little valley, knew to visit her on Sundays and Wednesdays, leaving her to mix her magics in peace the rest of the week. But the world outside the valley was growing, and her folks had started sharing a map to her little yurt in the forest with their friends and family, and word was spreading. People had started showing up from out of the valley, impatient and demanding, treating her like they did the convenience store clerks they were familiar with back home. They had no sense of the timing of things, of magic, or patience. Agnes wondered if her magic would even work for them, with their untethered energies flailing loose from any Earthly connections. She could imagine these people in her mind’s eye, little balls of energy with dozens of tentacles waving in the air, questing but never entwining.
Agnes opened the door.
“Oh my gosh what took you so long I was starting to think you were closed!” The young woman standing before her took a breath and dropped her hand, which was poised to knock again. Agnes let her frustration fall away and scooped out an arm, ushering the woman into her home.
Despite her irritation at the rapidly changing world, and her desire to destroy the map that led these wrought people to her, Agnes felt a responsibility to help. She was in tune with Earth, she knew that these people who came to her, frantic and rude, were displaying a global pathology that she couldn’t ignore. She gestured towards a chair; the girl was too agitated to sit.
Agnes moved to the stove to start hot water for tea, then prepped a pot with a chamomile blend as the young woman paced in front of the offered chair. Agnes mused over her changing frame of reference around age. She remembered feeling old in her late twenties, and now how the same life stage seemed so young. She couldn’t settle on whether to call this female human a girl or a woman. “What’s your name,” she asked. Her visitor replied, “Monique.” “Agnes,” Agnes replied, gesturing to herself.
When the hot water was in the pot, Agnes set mugs and honey and spoons and the pot onto a tray and sat it on the small table between her two stuffed chairs. She sat and asked Monique, “What brings you to the edge of the forest today?” The woman started to weave a tale of woe about her life, about challenges that felt raw and unique. She waved her hands in emphasis as she continued to pace. Agnes shifted her focus, letting the girl’s words slip to the background, like rain on the roof. Agnes noted the girl’s pale complexion, her thin frame and tense facial features. She noticed how the girl’s gestures stayed close to her body, and how her shoulders bowed forward a bit, almost like she was cowering. Agnes shifted her attention back to Monique’s words. The young woman was describing her frustration with each person in her life, listing out their faults and failings.
Agnes poured tea into each mug. When the girl paused to catch her breath, Agnes held up a cup. The young woman took it and finally sat in the chair. Agnes lifted a lid off a plate of scones and offered one to the girl. She accepted and the room was blissfully silent as she chewed and sipped her tea.
“What are you hoping to find here today,” Agnes asked.
Monique’s eyes looked up to her left, then up to her right, then she swallowed. “I’m not sure,” she said. “Do you have any advice or …,” she looked around, as if someone might be eavesdropping, hoping to catch her doing something nefarious. She whispered, “any spells or magic potions that might help?”
“If I had something that could help you, what do you think it would do? What magic could it perform on your life?”
“Well, I heard you had potions that helped people relax,” Monique said.
“Okay. What else,” Agnes asked.
“Well, I’d love for something that would make people stop being so irritating. And something to help me focus. And I’m tired of feeling in a hurry all the time. Can you make my life less busy?”
Agnes nodded to show that she’d been listening. Then she set her mug down on the table and closed her eyes, resting her hands on her thighs. She took a long, slow breath; then another. Her feet were flat on the floor and she used that contact to establish a connection with the spirit of her place. When she could feel the tingling flow of energy in her feet, she moved her attention to the top of her head and imagined opening a channel with her spirit guide. In her mind it looked like sparkling flecks of light swirling from her head in a narrow column into the spirit world. When she felt the presence of Spirit and Place, she asked the question, “How do we help this girl?”
Neither Spirit nor Place speak in human language. Often the sensation that Agnes receives is simply a nudge, a gentle pressure towards a thought or a direction in physical space. Occasionally she’ll receive images, like today. A clear image of a hand sliding into soil came to mind. Agnes quested around the edges of the image, looking for any additional information to personalize her response. Finding none, she nodded a thanks to Spirit and Place and allowed the connections to slowly fade back to baseline. She opened her eyes.
Monique was leaning towards her slightly, eyes intent on Agnes. Agnes wondered how long she’d been “gone.” Sometimes what felt like seconds was minutes in “The Real,” and other times she felt like she was gone for hours and only a blink of time had passed here. Monique relaxed back into her chair as Agnes made eye contact and smiled.
“I have a suggestion for you,” Agnes said, “Something I’d like you to try every day for a month. Then come back to me and we’ll reassess how things are going. You will need to find someplace near your home where you can stick your hand into the soil. It can’t be a pot of dirt; it has to be the actual ground. You will need to completely submerge your hand into the soil for at least 60 seconds a day.” She saw a mixed look of repulsion and confusion on the girl’s face.
Agnes stood and walked over to her writing desk. She pulled out a sheet of thick, cream-colored paper that had a blank calendar grid printed on it. The days of the week were listed across the top but there were no numbers in the squares. Agnes wrote in the month’s numbers, starting with the current day and continuing on to the next month, until the grid was full. She handed it to Monique. “Every time after you place your hand in the soil, I want you to write a word describing how you felt before and a word describing how you felt after, in the appropriate box on this calendar. Bring this back with you when you return.”
“I don’t see how this is going to help me,” Monique said. “And I don’t like touching dirt!”
Agnes considered how to respond. Should she ask the girl to do this on faith, or explain it to her in scientific terms, or tell her the magic behind it? She decided on, “Tell me how you think this can help you.”
Monique sat quiet for several moments, her brain searching for a rationalization; making connections between her troubles and soil and recording how she felt. “Well, I suppose that maybe putting my hand in the Earth is a way to siphon off all the negativity in my life, and the reason that I’m supposed to record how I feel before and after is so I can see how much is left afterwards.”
“That’s right,” Agnes said. Whatever her clients believed was always true because that is what they were capable of manifesting at that time. “There are subtleties, of course,” Agnes said, “extra little magics that are stirred up when you reach into the Earth, but you’ll learn those as you go.”
Monique’s eyes started to sparkle with the idea of interacting with magic. She wasn’t quite convinced yet, but Agnes knew that if the girl completed this daily ritual that she would start seeing the power of it fairly quickly.
Agnes moved towards her front door. She said, “It’s helpful if you come on Sundays or Wednesdays, so I can focus on my other duties these other days.”
Monique stood and walked towards the door. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re always welcome,” Agnes replied.
Thank you for reading! If you’ve enjoyed this, consider sharing it with a friend. I’ll see you next week!