The Willow

The Willow is the fifth tree of the year, standing in the weeks when the northern spring finally softens the ground. If you were born in these four weeks you were planted under the tree of water, the Moon and medicine. You are the one people come to when something in them hurts.

The tree itself

The willow grows beside water, its long flexible branches trailing toward the surface. In a storm it bends to the ground and comes back up. Its roots run deep into wet soil and spread wide, holding riverbanks together that would otherwise wash away. Cut a willow wand and push it into damp ground and it will usually root, which is as close to a tree being unkillable as you will find.

Willow bark contains salicin, the substance aspirin was later developed from, and healers were using the bark for pain and fever two thousand years before a chemist put a name to it. Willow wands were used for dowsing and for healing, and willow was woven into the baskets that carried whatever needed carrying. A tree that holds, bends, carries and eases pain. That is the one you were planted under.

Who you are

Other people's feelings reach you directly. You feel what they feel, often before they have found a word for it themselves. You arrived with it, long before anyone could have taught you, and you have probably spent some years learning to live with it.

Your knowing arrives through feeling, through dreams, through the slow turning over of experience in the back of your mind. The old lore puts the willow under the Moon, and you work in the Moon's way, by cycles and tides.

You are flexible. Like the branch that bends in the storm, you adapt to conditions that would have broken a more rigid nature, and you should never let anyone tell you that bending is weakness. The willow is still standing after the storm. The rigid trees are firewood.

Strengths

Your first strength is that you heal by being there. People's wounds ease in your company because something in you calms something in them, with no technique involved. Nervous systems settle near you. In my experience this is the rarest gift in the whole tree calendar and the one its owners most often undervalue, because it feels like doing nothing.

Your second is intuitive knowing. What you sense about people and situations is usually right, and your counsel, when someone asks for it, helps.

Add your emotional memory. You remember the feeling texture of other people's lives, and you ask the questions that touch what actually matters.

Challenges

The shadow of the healer is losing yourself in other people. Without boundaries a Willow takes in everyone's weather and ends up depleted and unsure which feelings are actually your own. There are people who will take from you and give nothing back, and your nature does not notice the imbalance until you are empty. Learning limits is what lets the gift last.

The second shadow is moodiness that takes the household hostage. Emotional sensitivity with no channel becomes weather that sweeps through your home or workplace, and the people in it learn to check your face before they speak. Containing your own cycles, so that the household does not have to live inside them, is ongoing work, and the daily practice of it is what separates a mature Willow from a draining one.

Both of these are the gift turned inside out. Hold them kindly and do the work.

In love and work

In love you are deeply caring. Your partner, family and friends receive an emotional presence that more buffered natures simply cannot give. You notice. You remember. You ask. The watch point is absorption. Learn to tell your feelings from the ones you have picked up in the room, and have a way of putting the picked up ones down before you go to bed. A walk by water works for a Willow more often than not.

In work you belong in healing, formal or informal. Therapy, nursing, bodywork, spiritual direction, teaching, and any art that goes into difficult emotional territory. Work with children, with the grieving and with the vulnerable carries your particular soothing quality. If you are in a job where nobody ever needs you to care, you will wither in it, and you should trust that.

The Ogham letter

Saille is the fourth letter of the Ogham, four notches on the edge of the stone, and the letter of the willow. It carries intuition, healing and the mysteries of the Moon: the knowledge that comes in tides and dreams. In the old lore Saille is tied to the Moon's pull on water and on the human heart. That is your letter. Serve the healing of others through your own particular medicine, which is presence.

Across the traditions

The Willow month sits mostly inside Taurus in Western astrology, with its first few days at the end of Aries, so most Willows are Taurus Sun signs. The Signs pages in the Western Astrology section take you to Taurus, the sign ruled by Venus, and the two pictures sit well together: the steady earth of the bull and the deep roots of the willow holding the bank. Your Chinese animal lives in the Chinese Astrology section and your Mayan day sign in the Mayan Astrology section, and Find Your Numbers and Signs will give you your tree alongside the rest when it opens.

Whose weather are you carrying today that was never yours to carry?

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