Threshold Magicians
Dancing between two worlds – horses, women and the Elder tree
Horse Moments
Four horses nudge and sniff me with their soft noses, curious, trying to figure me out. I scratch their foreheads and under their cheeks, and touch their soft noses when I feel like the scratches have earned their trust.
A couple hours beforehand I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Esteben lives in the village. I meet him on my walk a day before and we talk briefly. He had his hands in the soil, harvesting potatoes, loyal to the place he has always lived in.
With my incomplete Spanish, I only understand his Catalan invitation to come with for a walk. We drive up the hills on meandering roads surrounded by downy oak trees and terraced land punctuated with old stone walls.
As we travel further up it gets cooler, crisper, and aromatic with the smell of pine. The oak trees give way to pine forest, a mixture of living trees and dramatic bleeched-white tree skeletons in undulating forms. This kind of landscape reminds me of the Rocky Mountains near where I grew up. I feel relief knowing there’s another part of Europe that has been left to its own devices, alive and trembling, not yet too squeezed into form by human hands.
Esteben stops the car a couple times, scanning the landscape. It isn’t until we run into a small group of semi-wild horses that we park. Scrambling down the mountainside I finally understand the mission: we have to find the rest of the herd and bring them to higher valleys. After ten minutes, me slow and clumsy and trailing behind (and every once and awhile distracted by a dried out mushroom) we find the rest of the horses.
Esteben puts a lead on the oldest mare and starts walking her up the mountain. Twelve others slowly follow, a couple of them still foals, all of them different shades of caramel. They avoid me or try to trot past quickly, sometimes waiting until I move far enough away so they can catch up to the group.
The horse smell is familiar and comforting. Mixed with the forest its a special kind of grounding scent. I ask myself, “How many different smells have I experienced in this lifetime?” How lucky to have been able to smell so many different smells!
Once we reach the road I’m given the unexpected task of leading the horses to the path where we can bring them up into the higher valley, while Esteben keeps an eye on them from behind in the slowly moving car. Aware of horses’ energetic sensitivity, I am a little anxious, but try and move that feeling out of my body with deep breaths, moving my focus to my chest, and I start singing to myself and the matriarchal mare I’m leading. My hope is that she will hear my truth through the singing, and know that I’m a good one. Or maybe I’m just self-regulating to keep my body calm next to so many huge, wild, powerful beings. In any case, I feel like my vulnerability is welcome in this moment.
Twenty minutes later we are all caught up together near the spot where we go up into the higher valley. The horses are nuzzling me with curiosity. They have accepted me, at least for this moment, and its a surprisingly moving feeling. I try to share aloud how this moment is touching me, but notice I’ll start crying if I finish the sentence. Esteben lets my words trail off without question, either because he can sense it already, or because his focus is with the environment.
Fast forward nine months later. I’m in the countryside of Brandenburg in a trailer in the middle of a horses’ paddock. Horse magic surrounds me once again. I’m helping a client through a process of moving through her inner landscape, inviting change, new energy and different perspectives into her being. We’ve decided to hold the session in her paddock trailer instead of in inner city Berlin.
She is already deeply in tune with this outer landscape, and in moments throughout the 4-hour session, beings lend their energy to the journey: rabbits hopping across the trail, a whinny of one of her horses, the call of a crane, a plant in the field that is more abundant this year than the last ones. There is an added stability and inspiration surrounding us through this participation of her horses and the landscape.
I hope that one day in the future I will be able to create a beautiful and natural space for the 1:1 work that I do. Planting that seed here right now. If you want to find out more about my work around threshold moments and journeying through your own inner landscapes, you can book a free call with me here to find out more. Or visit my website and take a first look around.
Elder Tree Messages
I felt a connection with you for a handful of years, but it was only this month that everything clicked more consciously into place. Our first real meeting was around six years ago. I picked your berries along the canal in Berlin-Neukölln and baked them into a beautiful pie with peaches. Your dark purple juice bled out into the peach slices, creating a peach to magenta to purple ombre effect. I read about the folklore surrounding you – your position in front of houses or around cemetaries, guarding thresholds both physical and invisible (You can watch a 2021 youtube time capsule video of that pie and time here).
During that time in Neukölln I needed a break from my normal neighbourhood in Friedrichshain, and a quieter place to process themes around death, grief and heartbreak that were coming up through lived experience. You stepped in as a plant neighbour on my daily walks along the canal in the quiet of the pandemic-tinted autumn.
This week I sat on a bench under your branches, the perfume of your flowers wafting around me. Reading some passages from Buffalo Woman Comes Singing around ancestors, I called on my Grandpa to sit with me. Immediately he was there, invisible to me but energetically clear as day in humour, encouragement and his goofy relaxed way of being. It made my eyes water with emotion, and his messages landed with more conscious clarity than they ever had in the past.
It wasn’t until after teaching my Elderflower-themed Plant Yoga class, which ended up being a lot about the shoulders and what we carry from our ancestors, that the puzzle pieces slotted together into one coherent bundle of image and experience. Did sitting below you enable this more direct connection with my Grandpa? Working with you and the themes of ancestry over that week helped more insight land.
The Threshold Magic of Elder and Horses
There is overlap for me in the energy of horses and Elder. A wild aspect of femininity. A connection to European lands and folklore. Something deep, earthy, grounding – holding you, healing you with a large and quiet presence. And intuitively reacting to unseen shifts in energy.
And at the same time remaining sovereign in that wildness and service. It reminds me of that connection between young girls and horses, that draw to horses when you’re in that pocket of time between childhood and puberty. Another threshold moment. A push-pull between a desire to be free, and taking on the slowly encroaching societal expectations. It reminds me of my Grandma’s stories of how she would jump on the neighbour’s horse when she was a little girl, intuitively knowing how to move with it. Riding horses sometimes secretly, unbeknownst to her family.
Horses and Elder are beings that guard thresholds and the movement between physical locations or states of mind. The horses, carrying humans between worlds, enabling a different kind of travel once upon a time – over rivers, over distances, between cultures. Like the "Magic Black Steed" in the Russian fairytale Sivko-Burko, a horse with the ability to fly: “Russian scholar Vladimir Propp argued that the magical horse of the Russian tale Sivko-Burko represented a messenger connected to the Otherworld […]”
And Elder, planted near the boundaries of homes, gates, cemetaries – protecting either the living or the dead. Possibly translating between the two, both seen and unseen? Or simply translating between Mother Earth and humans. An ally to Freya from Northern mythology, or Frau Holle, a German fairytale character associated with Mother Earth. Old magic, wise women, embodied intuition.
Thank you for reading. What are your thoughts? Let me know what you think in the comments.
I love working with threshold in-between spaces, going deeper into our inner worlds. And a good astrologer friend recently looked at my astrological chart and said “Yep, that all makes sense – your chart is perfect for it". Born on a new moon, in the hours between day and night, on the edge of the world in the land of “Dreamtime”, child of two opposite worlds, I feel right at home in threshold spaces.
My threshold work comes alive in 1:1 quantum healing hypnosis sessions, in Berlin or online: three-to-four-hour guided journeys that can help you connect to your imagination and intuition, answers around the questions you have in life at the moment, self-healing capabilities and knowledge about your life path. These sessions can also function as a deep nervous system reset, integrating new lessons and energies into the body – or for processing emotions we’ve been unconsciously holding onto.
They are gentle yet empowering, and helpful at threshold moments between two chapters of your life. If you’re curious, I invite you to check out my website whiterabbitjourneys.com here. Full sessions include a free 30-minute call beforehand to prepare you, and a 1-hour integration session about a month afterwards to help ground insight.
The next Mushroom Meditations evening, a guided journey to connect with the Earth, your own inner guidance, the fungi kingdom and a medicinal mushroom of the evening, will be on Wednesday, July 29th at Teeraum Sanvian in Prenzlauer Berg: https://luma.com/0pacei96. This time we will be inspired by cordyceps, a parasitic bright orange fungi that takes over the bodies of caterpillars! This medicinal mushroom is known for its help with vitality and assisting the libido, and has been used in Asia for hundreds of years. After three fungi evenings around decomposers (fungi that transform wood and matter back into soil or the stages before it), it will be fun to see what kinds of themes come up with parasitic cordyceps.
Local Berlin Recommendations
Herby at Heart, my favorite local herbalism podcast, is hosting a first event: “Earthly Apothecary by Herby At Heart” on July 27th at Nourished. In their words: “Join us for an interactive plant journey centred around blind testing, sensory exploration, plant constellation and meditation. Together, we will explore a chosen herb without knowing what it is, allowing curiosity, intuition, and connection to lead the way.” This sounds like a lot of fun and I hope to take part myself.
Thank you for joining me and have a lovely couple of July weeks!