Croi - pronounced kree - is the Irish for heart. At Brigid's Day I picked that word from a basket and tied it as a clootie to a hazel tree.  It was a well wishing tree.  A plea for renewal at Imbolc.

It has seemed over this past year that so many people have had had their hearts broken.  People are ill. The earth is sick. Women are systematically violated in perversely imaginative ways. Men are imprisoned by the mythic expectations of strength. 

People are tired. (Although I first had a Freudian typo of 'tied.' Yes, many people feel 'fit to be tied' as they used to say in my mother's day.)  Hearts are hurting.  It's not even empathy burn out.  It is a world weariness, a heart sickness. A yearning not just for healing, but a cure.

Meanwhile, I can report that I saw the first primrose today.  I have walked glens and felt the fairies out in their multiverse waking up. I saw a magpie fly past today with a long twig in its mouth for nest building.  One for joy...

There is a lesser known chakra, just below the heart chakra. Sometimes it is called the boon tree chakra. In my reiki practice I work with this chakra extensively. The boon tree is the seat of one's heart's true desire. 

What is the tree that will bear the fruit of your heart's true desire?

In Ireland, the first week of March is Tree Week.  I am reminded of an Alice Walker poem "Torture". As it lists the loved ones who can be and are tortured there is the refrain "plant a tree." The poem's finale is when the trees are tortured and the forests cut down; we, the reader is enjoined,  "start another."

Over the past few weeks I have been listening to a radio documentary created by John Haughton of the Enviro program on NearFM.ie.  John is a tree lover and is involved in Peace Forest Ireland, an initiative to plant a million trees along the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic.  This is not only about the releafing of Ireland; it acknowledges the hurt over centuries and actively planting a tree instead of cursing the pain and darkness that has been much of Ireland's story.The documentary is called "New Perspectives on Irish History" and looks at how the ancestral Irish lived with the natural environment, how the Celts had a kind of eco-cosmology that is both lost and found in Irish history.

If Spring and renewal cannot come fast enough to you this year, take heart. Take a walk in a woodland. Make an offering in a fey glen.

Look to the fruit of your heart's true desire.

Ask for a miracle. Look up. It's happening now. It's all around you.

If all has been cut down to the ground, start planting a new forest.