This is going to be a very short post, as the batteries in my camera died before I’d gotten to take very many pictures.
Thorn Creek Nature Preserve is a short drive away from where I live (less than half an hour), just over the border in Forest Park, Illinois. Like many nature areas in Illinois, it is chronically underfunded and has no paid staff at all, just volunteers. It is one of my favorite places, with an oak/apple/hawthorn/white pine forest, lots of deer, a huge resident coyote population, several miles of trails, a fair-sized colony of owls near the furthest lake (which boasts a huge colony of bullfrogs), and plenty of other interesting things around every turn. Spring plants include trout lily, trillium, cutleaf toothwort, violets, hepatica, skunk cabbage, and at least one species of swamp buttercup. Lots of birds besides owls.
Over the last two months, I’ve sort of adopted Thorn Creek and go there to clean up trash and leave offerings there in the same way I do at my own park. My own park is a very sparse bit of city ground — baseball squares, seesaws and swings for the kids, and picnic tables. Thorn Creek is nothing but forest and hiking trails and boggy spots, much closer to actual nature (for all that I love my own park and my willow-tree temple!)
On this first visit, I decided to be a little more ornate with the offerings that I usually leave, instead of piling things up on the ground in heaps. I tried to actually be artistic and make a pattern with everything.
I had brought along a banana, green grapes, raisins, honey butter, wine, chopped walnuts, raisins, and rolled oats, and decided to try to draw out something based on threes and fours. I drew out a wide outer circle with the oats, then a smaller inner one of grapes. At the 12:00 position, I put a handful of chopped walnuts. At the center, the banana. At the six o’clock position, raisins. At the seven-thirty position (it turned into a peace sign), honey-butter. And at the four-thirty position, the wine.

I got a couple of pictures of the individual components (banana and honey-butter), but that’s when the batteries died (and I didn’t have my cell phone with, it’d been malfunctioning lately).
But apparently the spirits appreciated the offerings (and all the trash I picked up that day, three bags), because not far from where I left the offering, at the base of a dead tree — and that, about 500 feet off the path and down in a ravine — I found about half a deer skeleton, very well-gnawed. Ribs, vertebrae, leg bones. I’ve found that communicating with the spirits — especially those of the animals — is easier if I have a physical relic to use as a tangible focus, so this seemed almost like the spirits’ way of saying “thank you”. I collected the bones respectfully, with thanks to the deer that had died and the coyotes that had hunted it and benefited from its flesh, and then went on my way.
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