WILD HONEY CIRCLE
I Love You Like Salt

Fairy tales and the alchemy of salt

Online
Tuesday Sept 22, 11-12.30pm (Sydney time)
USA Monday Sept 21, 6 -7.30pm (Pacific time)

There’s a fairy tale - The Goose Girl at the Well - about a king, who one day decides to test the love of his three daughters. He asks each of them a fatal question; how much do you love me?

The first two princesses pour forth glittering words of a love like jewels, the sun, the moon. The third princess, the bright and wise one, contemplates her beloved father and says, ‘I love you like salt’.

The king is horrified that her love is not more precious. Unable to hear the meaning under her words, the earth singing through them, he banishes her, and a tale of initiation and alchemy begins.

This month in our Wild Honey Circle we explore the nature of salt.

Salt of the earth, of oceans and tears. Salt that forms and sustains all life. Salt that seasons, purifies, protects. Salt as catalyst. Salt so common we forget how essential it is.

Without the salt in water, there would be no life.

I love you like earth, like body, the princess offered. You are shape and structure and bedrock in my world.

I love you like salt. Like wind. Like new shoots in spring, like tears, like sea spray.
I love you like a river flows.
I love you like the wind.
My love is not rare or singular, neither pearl nor diamond.
My love is nourishment, not possession.
My love is common and so plentiful. The ocean itself cannot contain my love.

When all waters evaporate, only salt remains, bone memory cupped by the land, ancient and enduring.

I love you like salt.
Her love is common as breath, as abundant as tidewater. Unhoardable. A love beyond limit.

Love that is true and sustaining is often made small or invisible, because we want love that dazzles like fireworks, that glitters like jewels. The king wanted pearls, and diamonds and rubies, a bejewelled house of love. Sugar not salt. Treasure not truth.

I place salt on my tongue from the coastal marshes of Brittany, land of Melisande the serpent woman of Breton legend. Another woman linked with sacred waters, wells and the moon.

What a heartbreak for the princess to be so dismissed. To speak a language that others can’t hear. He wanted diamonds. She offered an ocean.

This month we’ll explore the alchemy of salt together, in tales, body and psyche. Salt tightens and tones and protects. It preserves and holds. It is the transmuter, and protector.

What in you needs salt? What might need shaping, or cleansing, preserving or remembering?

We’ll explore what goes unseen when language gets misread. What gets exiled when it doesn’t fit a particular script. Sometimes we hear only words, blinkered and filtered, and not the meaning.

Together we’ll write, draw and journey into the mythic realms to find the wild third daughter’s exiled truth, and what she might reveal of your salt essence and salt love. What languages do you speak that others often don’t hear? What has salt preserved within you?

The Wild Honey Circle is a creative gathering, weaving together wild and wondrous tales, conversation, guided meditation, reflective writing and some gorgeous imaginative wanderings and wonderings.

Tuesday September 22

11am - 12.30 pm Sydney (AEST)

USA: Monday September 21, 6 -7.30 pm Pacific Time

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or join us through Humanitix for $25.

A Replay is available for all participants.

YOUR FACILITATOR

Jacqui Bushell has been dancing with the mythic imagination for much of her life, through her love of the archetypal wisdom held in fairy tales and her work as a spiritual herbalist, listening for the voices and stories in plans, rocks and landscape. She is passionate about encouraging others to explore their own mythology at the borderlands of psyche, body, culture and land. She has been facilitating women’s circles, ceremonies, retreats, workshops and courses in Australia and internationally for 30 years.

Jacqui guides people in awakening their creative soul through connecting with the mysteries of the earth and their own sacred nature. She weaves together plant spirit alchemy, energetic healing, embodiment practices, storytelling, journey work and earth connection to inspire transformational shifts in the way people see themselves and their world. Her work is always empowering and experiential, inviting you to come home to a deep sense of belonging and kinship with nature.

FB Jacqui Bushell or substack The Nectar Tree

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