Kindreds: Nature Spirits (Dedicant Path Essay)

As should be obvious from my name, I have had a connection with birches, and with deciduous trees more generally, for as long as I can remember. When my brothers were out fighting imaginary battles, I could reliably be found halfway up my favorite tree, a quaking aspen, usually with a book in hand but sometimes just listening to the leaves whisper. My mother taught me the names of the trees from an early age, I learned to recognize them by leaf and bark and silhouette. In college I would spend hours wandering the paths on campus, looking at the stark branches of the oaks against the winter sky. While my classmates knew each other, I knew every tree on campus. Trees have been receiving my offerings for longer than I knew that I was making them.

My river.
Photo by Billy Hathorn

The most significant intentional connection I have made, though is with the river. There is only one river in my area which could be called the river, the Kennebec. The Celts seem to have worshipped their local river goddesses as Donu, or a similar name (Don, Dana, Danube, Donau). I live less than a mile from the Kennebec, and have started in the last year relating to her as Donu, and as Mother Kennebec. Kennebec comes from the Abenaki word kinipec meaning “large body of still water” which is accurate at a glance, but she has a fierce current and embodies both the nourishing and dangerous aspects of water. We can’t offer anything into the river due to laws regarding pollution and feeding the animals – the river was extremely polluted a few decades ago, and is now clean enough to swim in. I can’t pretend that going backward, even by my tiny offerings is wise. So I take water from the river to fill my offering well at home and offer into that. At the end of the ritual, the water is returned to the ground and the offering is either buried or poured out with the water.