GRANDMOTHER MOON by Iona Jenkins

This year, the full moon on 30^th August, which was a Super Moon, is also called Blue Moon – the name given to a second full moon occurring in the same month. I stayed up meditating and reflecting, because the rising of this moon flooded both my front room and my awareness with a light of great beauty. Beginning gold, she changed into a robe of silver, and eventually pearl white, with a crown of pastel shades, in her vault of luminous blue flecked with white feathered clouds. The full moon is always an inspiration, a Goddess who lights up the psyche, revealing hidden shadows to be faced, firing intuition, or illuminating the soul with her timeless wisdom. She has become my good friend over the years, and in my life as an elder human being, she offers me inspiration, visions of creative wisdom and possibility on those gold and silver paths stretching between the shores of Wales and The County of Somerset in England.

On this full moon, I found myself reflecting on how the elder feminine, is regularly depicted as a wicked witch, an unattractive, marginalized, often despised hag in western mythology, rather than a glorious being whose wisdom has grown from her talents, her responsibilities in life and interactions with the people in it. I no longer display the anger of my youth now I have learned to laugh from a deeper sense of inner security. Learning from past difficulties has taught me to trust myself.

This bright Supermoon brought a memory of my grandmother. It was a strange sensation, as though she were in the room washing over me in a wave of affection. The memories of her smile, whenever I shared my dreams and secrets, brought with them a warm glow, enhancing that feeling of security since she always cared for me as a child. She was my rock in the often-stormy sea of my parents’ problems.

I have a delicate presentation watch that once belonged to her. It was given by her employer and is engraved on the back with the words ‘To Nellie for Long Service.’ I wore it at my wedding, and it has always been one of my treasures. A coal miner’s wife, in the days before a notable national miners’ strike that brought better conditions and wages, my grandmother worked in a factory and lived in a basic red brick terraced house close to a path leading across fields to the coal mine. The house had an old black range with a coal oven in which she would bake perfect teacakes on Saturday, big and round like the moon, delicious with butter cut with a wire from a huge slab at the Co-op store.

The only toilet was in a separate brick building at the end of the back yard and the downstairs rooms had gas lighting until I was five years old. In those days, we went to bed by candlelight, climbing the stairs with ‘Wee Willie Winky’ candlesticks before the installation of electricity. There was, however one luxury in the form of a cast iron bath with claw and ball feet, located in the second bedroom I had shared with my parents for a year prior to being given our own National Coal Board house.

My grandmother’s name was Ellen though everyone knew her as Nellie, and she was not descended from an Irish Celtic line like my grandfather, but her name appears to have ancestral origins in a part of England called East Anglia with its two coastal counties of Norfolk and Suffolk.

Images of green countryside and the village of Walsingham in north Norfolk, about seven miles from the popular holiday resort of Wells-next-the-sea, were evoked in my intuitive mind, flowing like a stream through points of connectivity. I once explored Walsingham, which is a national shrine and place of pilgrimage with a holy well. The site is linked to a reported vision of the Virgin Mary and the well is reputed to have healing properties. Tudor monarch King Henry VIII made a personal pilgrimage to Walsingham to ask for a son who would ensure the succession according to patriarchal law. After leaving the Catholic Church, divorcing his first wife Catherine of Aragon, and beheading his second wife Anne Boleyn, he did get a temporary granting of his wish with his third wife Jane Seymour. But alas, the boy Edward VI died in adolescence, giving way to Catherine’s daughter Mary, the first independent British Queen who then imprisoned her half-sister Elizabeth in the Tower of London, before putting her under house arrest in Oxfordshire. However, Mary died after a reign of only 5 years.

The Walsingham Lady, it seems might have had plans to eventually install a formidable queen, in the form of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), Henry’s second daughter by Anne Boleyn. Ironic, but a move towards restoring the balance of the realm with a healthy, powerful woman who lived to be 70 years old in an era of lower life expectancy. Her reign was said to be a golden age in British history, given, of course the consciousness of the times in which she lived. Invoking the Goddess, which is what Henry did, should never be underestimated, for the outcome may not always be what we have in mind if our thinking is flawed. The Virgin Queen as she was known, never married since she likely had no intention of giving up any of her power to a husband. Leaving a period of history that has always interested me, I re-traced my steps to my grandmother, which is where I began, though sadly, unlike Elizabeth she didn’t make 70, having been diagnosed with cancer in her fifties.

Moonlight had begun to illuminate the memory of loneliness and devastation felt by a 10-year-old child, even more so because she had spent her last 3 weeks in bed in the front room of our house. During those final precious days, I attempted to lift her spirits by writing short stories at lunchtime and rushing home from school to read them to her, as she lay on her back, smiling at me through the pain and touching my arm with one wasted hand. I entertained her in the only way I knew how.

“One day, when you are all grown up, I think you might be a writer,” she whispered, as I came to the end of my last tale in the short space before she went away to the hospital where she died.

“Well, it took me so much longer than you could possibly have imagined, to fulfil your prophecy grandma, but look, here I am at last,” I tell her, thinking how proud she would be of my long-awaited creative efforts.

Warmed by my ancestral connection to Ellen, an ordinary woman who had never experienced the benefit of good state schools and free university education that the working-class youth of my generation enjoyed, I remember a heroine, still willing to support my creative soul, even in the face of her terminal illness. I was proud to call her grandma. Once more, I felt that kindly smile, wrapping me in a soft shawl, the strong threads of a grandmother’s love that had given me so much more than any amount of money, status, connections, or material possessions could ever have offered.

BIO: Iona Jenkins is a former teacher, counsellor, psychotherapist, and hypnotherapist turned author, creative writer, and mystical poet in her elder years.

She has been published several times in Touchstone, the monthly magazine of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, as well as Mystic Living Today, Kindred Spirit Magazine and Pagan Ireland Magazine.

She has also self-published two books of poetry and reflections and a fantasy trilogy for young people. In December 2022, O-Books published To Sing with Bards and Angels – A Journey into the Creative Heart available in paperback and E-Book from Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and Collective Ink (formerly John Hunt) of which O-Books is an imprint. Her website is http://www.ionajenkins.com