A Guided Visualisation for Lammastide: The Wise Woman’s Cottage - By Lucya Starza
Lammas is a harvest festival when grain crops are brought in. It can traditionally be celebrated by baking bread. Whether you have the skills, ingredients, or inclination for cooking or not, the post offers a guided visualisation you can do, from the book Pagan Portals – Guided Visualisations.
Guided visualisations are journeys made in the mind using a script or recording created to help us experience a story we’re part of. They are sometimes called guided meditations. As well as helping us know ourselves better, guided visualisations can help us find potential solutions to problems, get ideas for projects, see possible ways forward in life, attune to the cycles of nature, and gain wisdom. This one is called The Wise Woman’s Cottage.
Before starting, make sure you’re in a safe place, where you won’t be disturbed. Ideally, guided visualisations are done with the eyes closed. If you are on your own, that means recording each visualisation before you do it for real. Play it back to yourself, pausing when necessary to engage with each part. If that isn’t possible, read each section slowly to yourself, then close your eyes and visualise it as you go.
Find somewhere safe, where you will not be disturbed. Sit comfortably and close your eyes. Take three deep breaths in and out and relax, then visualise the following:
Visualise that you are in a baker’s shop, in a small village in the countryside. It is Lammas, when the fields are ripe, and the crops are brought in. You have been asked to deliver a basket of freshly baked bread to an old woman who lives on her own in a cottage on edge of the village, beyond the first field.
Taking the basket, you walk out of the door of the baker’s shop and into the village street. It is a hot, dry, sunny day. Your journey takes you first along a street of old cottages, with gardens full of flowers.
At the end of the street there is a fence with a stile and beyond that a field golden with ripe grain. You cross the stile and enter the field. A path leads around the edge of the field. You see poppies and other wild flower and herbs growing in the borders. Beyond that you see a grain crop being harvested under the hot sun.
You watch the ripe grain being cut down in neat rows as you walk along the path. Crows circle in the sky above, and perhaps you catch a glimpse of other birds or animals. In the distance the farmer steadily harvests the crops, absorbed in his work. Observe what is happening as you walk along the path.
At the far end of the field is an old hedge. After a while you reach it. In the hedge is a gate, which leads into the old woman’s garden behind her cottage. Open the gate and walk into the garden, carefully closing the gate again behind you.
The garden at first seems overgrown. With trees at the sides, shrubs and bushes and tall plants, it offers cool, dappled shade from the sun. You make your way further into the garden and see flowers growing everywhere. It is full of bright colours. Bees are going from flower to flower, birds are singing and there are sign of other wildlife too.
You then see the old woman. She is harvesting berries and putting them into a basket. You go up to her and greet her. She smiles and greets you in reply, then invites you into her cottage. She opens the door and you follow her inside.
The old woman invites you to sit at her table and put down the basket of bread, then she offers you tea. She prepares the tea using leaves in an earthenware teapot, and brings out a jar of fresh jam she has made from her garden berries, and butter and milk she tells you is from a neighbour’s farm.
You join her for tea. The fresh bread, butter and jam are delicious. You talk with her as you enjoy your tea together. What do you talk about?
When you have finished your tea, she asks if you would like her to divine your future or answer a question, by reading the patterns in the leaves at the bottom of your cup. If you do, let her see the cup.
She turns it three times clockwise and then holds it to the sunlight that streams through the cottage window. Then she answers your question and gives you an idea of what the future might possibly hold for you. If you want, she can show you the patterns in the leaves and how she has interpreted them.
Then it is time for you to leave. You say goodbye and stand up, picking up the empty breadbasket. As you are about to go, the old woman presses a final gift into your hands. You look at it and thank her, then put the gift into the basket and wave goodbye as you go out of the cottage door.
You walk back through her garden, through the gate in the hedge, along the path at the edge of the field and over the stile into the village. You walk back along the street and return the basket to the bakery shop, where you began your journey. You may keep the gift the old woman gave you, and remember the things she told you.
When you are ready, take a deep breath, shake your fingers and toes and open your eyes to the real world.
After this visualisation, you could have a harvest feast – or just some fresh bread and jam and a cup of tea.
You can view more guided visualisations in my book Pagan Portals - Guided Visualisations, published by Moon Books. My earlier books include Pagan Portals – Candle Magic and Pagan Portals – Poppets and Magical Dolls.
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