The Welsh have many words and sayings that seem to encapsulate a feeling, an idea, a longing even, in a way that no other language does. ‘Cwtch’ for example means so much more than a cuddle, and ‘hireath’ is much more than nostalgia.
I first saw the words ‘Dod yn ôl at fy nghoed’ on a beautiful print of an artwork by Lizzie Spikes, one of the founders of Driftwood Designs, based in Aberystwyth.
The image really spoke to me, although I didn’t know what the words meant at the time. But I bought the print anyway.
The phrase actually means something like ‘coming back to my trees’, or ‘finding balance among the trees’ and refers to the idea of finding a state of mental and emotional equillibrum. To me, it feels like a gentle reminder of the balancing effect of nature, of the way I am drawn to the natural world, and, in particular, trees and forests.
I am lucky in that my work is creative, as an editor, and that I live in a beautiful place, in a valley in West Wales, with the Teifi meandering (or sometimes crashing!) along the bottom of the garden. I haven’t always lived here, having been born in south London and then living variously in Basingstoke, Portsmouth, Fareham, and then back in Basingstoke before moving to Cenarth. But West Wales is home, where I feel I belong.
As a freelance editor and self-published author, I have a website which used to include posts about things I found interesting when researching, reading, listening to podcasts, or when out and about. As I became more interested in the beliefs and the traditions of Eclectic and Green Witches, Welsh folklore, and the link between these things and the natural world, I felt that the posts were detracting from the website, and that they deserved to be separate. So I have begun this blog.
Welcome – I hope you enjoy the stories, the histories, and the legends that I post here. And I hope you enjoy too what I share about my own journey to realising my calling as a witch.
Return to the Trees 