Fennel and Listening
Fennel is a plant of between, of translation. To translate is to listen and makeshift, substitute, rearrange, improvise. To translate is to listen with the next listener in mind. Fennel is beloved by gods who go between, who have been to otherworlds and return to tell the tale.
Fennel befriends god-thieves who steal cattle, steal fire, steal into nooks and crannies of the world. Fennel loves torchbearers in the dark. Fennel allies with the gods who fetch powers, gifts, and other god-people from unreachable places.
Prometheus, Hermes, Dionysus. Gods of substitutes, gods who transmute, translate, take-across. Prometheus who descended from Olympus to Earth with sacred fire. Dionysus who descended from Earth into Hades and fetched Ariadne and Semele.
And always, ever Hermes.
I’m writing this on Mercury’s day. That whisking weird planet is leaving the heart of the Sun in Scorpio. Scorpio is an astral environment of fixed water. Held water, still water. But a gateway like the swamps of Lerna, through which Dionysus entered the Underworld.
As I think about Mercury in Scorpio as Mercury in Lerna, I am thinking of fennel. This particularly psychopompic plant tells stories of listening and telling that trespasses, transmutes, retrieves, and otherwise otherworld-travels. Speech that goes in and comes out as a kind of fetching.
Questions I’m asking: in how many languages, verbal and nonverbal, do I listen? What trans-species translations are possible? What connections could I retrieve — to the beings around me and in otherworlds — if I improvised ways to listen I haven't tried before?
Could I steal across the boundary of my own body and into the ecosystem of which I am a part, and make my body an ear? Sipping fennel, I wonder how I can be a lake-gate, a reflection and door for more translations to slip through. How is my very breath a translation, every inhale listening to the stories of the flora who exhaled, every exhale another story I am telling them?
Listening to the myths that plants tell and what they can teach us about the astral is what I offer in my Plant & Planet Devotion work. If you’d like a guide to help you build relationships with the planet-gods and the plants who love them, let’s talk. That offering shares the heart of my practice with you. It’s too much to cover in one hour so it takes place over two sessions. Payment plans are always an option and common. Email me to talk payment plans or click here if you’re ready now.