Prayer flags

 My feed over on Instagram delivered a wonderful profile with a continuing saga of the artist's adventures ... 

Hannah posted about a taking much needed camping trip, which turned into a sodden disaster - and wrote that they hung their 'cloutie flags' upon setting up camp in Cornwall. 

Clooties by a sacred well

I guessed she meant small cloth prayer flags or banners, and found this when I looked it up:

The Scots word ‘clootie’ means ‘cloth’ and this term can also be found in use in the famous Scottish dessert, the ‘clootie dumpling’. The ‘cloots’ of the clootie well are scraps of cloth hung from trees surrounding a sacred well or spring. These sources of clean water have been places of healing for millennia.

Traditionally, the well would be visited at special times of the year, such as Beltane, the May Day festival of Spring, or when someone needed a cure for an illness. The well would draw people from across the local area, a social pilgrimage, each taking their turn to dip their cloth offering in the water and say a prayer, before affixing it to a tree or bush. 

Closely linked with good health, pilgrims would hope for a good year ahead. Those afflicted with an illness or injury would wash an affected area with water from the well, then attach their cloth to the tree, the idea being that as it rotted and faded away so did their affliction.

  ...When i lived at Breitenbush Hot Springs in the 90s, we had lots of prayer flags around camp, including many on our Cabin porches, and often long strings of them on the footbridge.

Clooties on my porch

At one point, a friend took me on a path above our hillside meadow Springs, to a hidden ripple of hot mineral water, the cobalt springs. For many years, folks with cancer would visit this hidden spot for a foot soak, and the shrubs/ trees around it were alive with many of these small clootie cloth prayers! 

Some were little bundles done in the first nation style - a pinch of tobacco tied like a handkerchief doll in a black, white, yellow, red, blue or green square of cloth. 

My friend Elise and I visited the cobalt spring several times, and one fall, did a bit of clean up and rearranging of rocks. 

In Corvallis, my friend Leon had a basket of cloth strips, (torn from old sheets!) and would invite his massage clients to write a prayer on one or more with sharpie, and add it to the clootie strand hanging from his backyard fence. 

Fall or spring equinox is a lovely time to craft a clootie flags with intention, and string them to hang in a favorite spot. ❤ 🙏 🏳