Flags for Intentions
Several years ago, my feed over on Instagram delivered a wonderful post featuring a continuing saga of the artist's adventures ...
In her post, Hannah wrote about a taking much anticipated camping trip, which turned into a sodden disaster! She wrote that they hung their 'cloutie flags' upon setting up their campsite in Cornwall.
I guessed she meant small cloth prayer flags or banners, and found this article when I looked it up:
The Scots word ‘clootie’ means ‘cloth’ - the term can also be found in use in the Scottish dessert, the ‘clootie dumpling’. (A Scotts pudding, with dried fruit - currents, raisins and the like) which is boiled in a cloth (the clootie).
Clootie flags are scraps of cloth, hung from trees surrounding a sacred well or spring. These sources of fresh water have been considered places of healing for millennia, and the flags hold prayers for healing.
Traditionally, the wells were visited at special times of the year, such as Beltane, the May Day festival of Spring, or when someone sought a cure for illness. Often a group of local residents would make a social pilgrimage to the spring or well. Each in turn would dip their cloth offering in the water and say a prayer, before affixing it to a tree or bush nearby.
Pilgrims hoped for a good health, blessings, and a favorable year ahead. Those afflicted with an illness or injury might 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 prayer flags around camp, including many on our Cabin porches, and long strings of them on the footbridge. The bridge flags were refreshed after our Summer Solstice Healing Retreat, with guests invited to daw/ write on squares of cloth.
5 element Prayer flags - brown paper In my second year living at the springs, Elise took me on a path above the soaking pools in our hillside meadow, to a hidden ripple of hot mineral water, the cobalt springs. For many years, folks with cancer would visit this spring for a foot soak, and the shrubs/ trees around it were alive with many of these small clootie cloth prayers!
Some were little prayer bundles done in First Nation style - a pinch of tobacco tied like a handkerchief doll in small black, white, yellow, red, blue or green squares of cloth.
My friend Elise and I revisited the cobalt spring several times, and one fall, did a bit of clean up and re-set the rocks.
In Corvallis, my friend Leon kept a basket of cloth strips, torn from old sheets! He would invite massage and Reiki clients to write a prayer on one or more with a sharpie, then add it to the clootie strand hanging from his backyard fence. Here's a simple way to hang cloth strips, using a slit at one end.
Last summer, I crocheted granny triangles from cotton yarn, and made colourful buntings to hang on the fence and above my French doors, holding my intentions for well being, health and harmony. Here's a tutorial for a fun SPIRAL pattern! I want to do it in red and gold (and maybe an ombre)!! Here's a nice overview for building crochet skills from my virtual friend Jazzy.
Have you crafted prayer/ clootie flags, and strung them to hang in a favorite spot? ❤ 🙏 🏳
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