October - Keepers of big human stories.Tree-type series. Enneagram 145
Exploring correspondences and openings for an inner journey with this tree's archetypal pattern.
Moon: Hunters moon, Song moon
Tree:Ash
Enneagram Archetype: 145 - the storykeeper (also 154,451,415,514,541)
Virtues: Serentity, equanimity, non-attachment
Holy ideas: Holy perfection, holy origin, holy omniscience
"I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers."
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Yggdrasil was the name of the Norse tree of life, and the job of Yggdrasil was to connect the nine worlds of the universe. Yggdrasil was an ash tree. An ash tree supporting life, and so very close to life and to death. This gives Ash a mighty status among trees as a keeper of big and important stories.
Gradually turning inward, towards a gentler more reflective time of the year, is a characteristic of this month of October, and it is timely to celebrate the beauty of the Ash. The ash keys – the characteristic bunches of seed heads – have now ripened and turned brown and are ready to be harvested, or to begin to fall to the ground. Seeing these bunches of keys hanging in the tree is a little bit magical. I always have a sense that the ash tree KNOWS things.
Going inwards, as well as outwards, to discover truth is also a quality of the 145 enneagram character, and energetically the qualities of this archetyoe correspond powerfully with this tree. As always with these correlations, I wish to signpost towards the tree as an opening to explore the pattern in a deeper way, rather than to suggest that the correlations I draw exclude others you might find. This kind of intuitive meaning finding is inclusive and spacious. Kathryn Fauvre calls enneagram 145 the researcher. and in the gifts of this type there is a need for the stepped back qualities of the four and five points on the enneagram, combined with the moral compass and straightness of the one point. For me in tree form Ash is the storykeeper, and when I read the role that it has had as a medium between heaven and earth, this makes sense. Ash understands both the intimacy of the human experience at 4, has capacity to step back and witness the whole with non-attachment at 5, all the time with an uprightness and symmetry in its form of 1, expressed in its pinate leaves and branches as well as in its atmosphere.
Death and life are not separate in the scope of Yggdrasil and the capacity of an Ash tree to receive human stories is immense. Sit under an Ash tree if you need to reflect on what an experience has to teach you. It is a place where the wisdoms of the heart and the mind can work together. If you have spent time with a human that has settled here, and done their healing work in 145 space, you may find that they are the kind of person whom it is very safe to share your stories with, since they are unafraid of depth and darkness, as well as having capacity for seeing transformation and transmutation of experience, including the ways that witnessing and being with human suffering teaches compassion for ourself and for others. This archetype is a place for holding stories and allowing them to reveal deeper layers of truth about being human. These qualities may have been hard won, for to gain the virtues of 145, the human will have certainly have had to have faced the other end of the polarity, and have travelled to serenity via anger, to equanimity via envy, and to non-attachment via avarice.
Remembrance. This too is a quality of ash. A capacity to hold space and acceptence for all that has gone before. There is a sense of its self-containment that can be experienced around a mature Ash tree– like it can hold all the stories for us in those keys, in those boughs. Like it can allow me space to remember those from the past who have gone from my life, and souls now departed. Here is Garard Manley Hopkins on Ash:
‘Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world,
Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep
Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky.
Say it is ash boughs’.
Ash is naturally shock absorbing, and is often used to make tool handles. Ash can receive and absorb our experiences too, and hold all the complexity of remembrance, and when needed, offer room to open the heart safely to help you to grieve.
Spending time with a big old ash tree is like being with a really good deep listener. As an enneagram six, I can often get caught up in trying to understand myself and others. a friend of mine who shares this archetype, once said o me “Don’t try to understand me, just love me”. A really good listener has capaciy to hold space for everything that needs to arise. The 145 archetypal pattern, is a combination of a deep humanitarian, with scope for high ideals, and capacity for imagination to take flight.
If the virtues of serenity, equanimity and non-attachment, of the healed 145 personality are mirrored in a tree, I hold that a tree that offers space to reflect powerfully on that is a mature Ash in its prime. And of course a way to see if this is true for you too would be to spend some time with an Ash tree, this month, with an open-heart, and see what the experience brings you.
Lastly I want to talk about Ash Die Back in the UK. The Ash tree is in a painful chapter in its own story, as a species. Ash is experiencing attack from a fungus that causes its growth to be stunted and lesions to form on the bark. This is meaning that we are losing many mature ash trees in a prolonged episode of decline in tree health and numbers over the past thirty years or so. To know this is I hope an opportunity to notice it, to care about it, even do something about it. In the UK The Woodland Trust predicts that 80% Ash trees will be affected. If you come to love this tree, recognising its beauty and life-giving ways, and the part it can play in upholding your human story, along with creating diverse habitat for many other creatires, you might like to learn more. As the tree of life sourcing our mythic roots, I want to believe that the Ash story need not be headed towards its ending.
This is the second in a monthly series exploring enneagram tri-ypes as tree types. The first was about 268 and the benevolence of apple trees - you can read it here