October - Enneagram archetype 145 and Ash, keeper of stories.

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 and the Norse tree of life, and the job of Yggdrasil was to connect the  nine worlds of the universe. And Yggdrasil was an Ash tree. An ash tree supporting life, and very close to life and to death. This gives Ash a mighty status among trees as a keeper of big and important stories.

Yggdrasil, Norse tree of life

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.

Ash Keys

Going inwards, as well as outwards, to discover truth is also a quality of the 145 enneagram character, and energetically the qualities of this enneagram character 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 experience the whole at 5, all the time with an uprightness and symmetry in form of 1, expressed in its pinate leaves and branches as well as in its atmosphere.

Illustration of mature Ash

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 – 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 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.

Ash, Windmill Hill, Alton, Hampshire, England

Remembrance. For me this 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 I experience around a mature Ash – like it can hold all the stories for us in those keys, in those boughs. Like it can allow me space to remember beings  from the past who have gone, from my life, and souls now departed. Here is Garard Manley Hopkins:

‘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 ashboughs’.

Ash can hold complexity all the complexity of remembrance, and when needed offer room to open the heart safely to help you to grieve. Ash is naturally shock absorbing, and is often used to make tool handles.

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 really good listener simply holds space for everything that needs to arise. The 145 archetype is a deep humanitarian, with scope for high ideals, and capacity for imagination to take flight.

Ash boughs

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 the only way to see if his is true for you too is to make a practice of spending  some time with an Ash tree, 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.

Close up of cut Ash