Dear Friend
🌹🎶 A Wild-Hearted Strawberry Love Song 🍓
A Strawberry Full Moon Ramble
As the roses reach full bloom, our songs for Glow & Glitter have been ripening under the June sun - a summer feast of song and dance awaits your ears and eyes!
I look forward to celebrating my Golden Anniversary on Earth with you.
Tonight’s Strawberry Moon rises in Capricorn, a reminder that both strawberries and goats can reach great heights whilst staying close to the ground.
Mountain climbing strawberries were considered sacred by Native Peoples of the Americas, who used all parts of the plant for food, ceremony and medicine.
Connor Sarazen, member of the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation explains that the Odeyimin, Heart Berry, was considered a reminder that we are “the seeds of Mother Earth…The strawberry plant is connected to the earth by its roots, crown, stem, leaves, runners and flowers much like our hearts are connected to our human bodies, beating like the drum of Mother Earth, and are at the center of each of us.”
Not content with the wonders of woodland strawberries, whose waters were used to treat Henry VIII’s ulcers, European colonisers claimed ‘discovery’ of the mountaineering version and harvested them using the labour of enslaved native peoples. Today’s English garden strawberries are the hybrid offspring of colonialist gardeners who cross-fertilised woodland, mountain and Chilean strawberries.
There’s a long root to every story.
The strawberry grows underneath the nettle
And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best100
Neighbour’d by fruit of baser quality:
- Henry V, Act 1 Scene I, Shakespeare
Despite being tinkered with by greedy humans, strawberries continue to conquer the
wild places of our hearts and the earth, evoking love, romance and femininity.
Heart and Earth contain the same letters, and the path to the heart is often simpler than we think. Just one bite of a delicious, juicy strawberry can reawaken our love of life, and just one moment of quiet listening can return us to the beat of our hearts and the songs humming at our core. It might be a gentle whisper or a giant thunderclap which awakens us to our presence within the vast natural symphony.
It might bring tears, sighs and laughter as we rewild ourselves and remember we are the seeds of the earth, bringing forth fruit and flowers, song and story.
Wishing you wild-hearted singing this July!
Look forward to seeing and singing with you soon
Full listing of events available here
Be well, breathe deep and keep singing loudly!
katie@therosewindow.org
www.therosewindow.org
@katierosewindow on the Socials
