This morning, 2 February, sunlight streamed into our flat. Soon we realised that warmth was coming in along with the light. There was no need for artifical heating.
This may not yet be spring, by most people’s reckoning. But the day has had a spring- like quality. Elaine and I both felt lifted. For me, it was as if a weight had come off my shoulders: a weight to which I had become acclimatised. I had stopped even noticing it until it was so gloriously removed.
We made two trips out during the day. In the later morning we stayed near home. Elaine walked using her rollater and spent welcome time sitting in the sun. The same sun also shone on our adopted birches. Though it’s not shown in the picture below, the catkins are greener now.
In the afternoon, using the wheelchair, we visited Gloucester docks and sat there until not long before 4 pm. The heat was beginning to drain away by the time we left, and shadows were lengthening. Yet the two pictures below show, respectively, the dazzle of sunlight on water, and a canal barge lifting its solar panels to the sun.
A great day for a festival of lights, and a welcome opportunity for exuberance.
Imbolc/Candlemas is celebrated on either 1 or 2 February as part of the Celtic wheel of the year. It signals the loosening of winter’s grip. Brighid, Goddess of poets, smith-work and healing is its patron. Damh the Bard is a prominent member of OBOD (1), best known for his music. A singer song writer revisioning ancient Bardic tradition for modern times, he has been an inspirational and much loved force in modern Druidry and Paganism. His lyrics for this song are below as presented on YouTube.
There’s a tree by the well in the wood,
That’s covered in garlands,
Clooties and ribbons that drift,
In the cool morning air.
That’s where I met an old woman,
Who came from a far land.
Holding a flame o’er the well,
And chanting a prayer.
(Chorus) Goddess of fire, Goddess of healing,
Goddess of Spring, welcome again.
The told me she’d been a prisoner,
Trapped in a mountain,
Taken by the Queen of Winter,
At Summer’s end,
But in her prison, she heard the spell,
The people were chanting,
Three days of Summer,
And snowdrops are flowering again.
She spoke of the Cell of the Oak,
Where a fire is still burning,
Nineteen priestesses tend the Eternal Flame
Oh but of you, my Lady,
We are still learning,
Brighid, Brigantia,
The Goddess of many names.
Then I saw her reflection in the mirrored well,
And I looked deep in her face,
The old woman gone, a maiden now knelt in her place,
And from my pocket I pulled a ribbon,
And in honour of her maidenhood,
I tied it there to the tree by the well in the wood.
We have had a lot of wind and rain in recent days. Saturday was an exception. The sky was clear, vividly blue. The air seemed cleansed and fresh. I stood at the back of St. Mary de Crypt, above, and understood the sensibility that reaches up, aspirationally, to heaven. I could empathise with the yearning that goes with that, looking for something clear and bright and pure. It’s as if such a sky might hold a promise of peace, a peace that was alive and able to nurture beauty.
I am also glad that, by the standards of medieval churches (including others within walking distance) this St. Mary’s is modest and balanced in its upwards aspiration. It aspires, but does not run away from the earth. The picture below shows it as solidly grounded, and not altogether dwarfing the buildings that have been its neighbours for many years. The church is still consecrated and holds services from time to time. But now it functions largely as a busy community centre with a strong continuing role in Gloucester’s life. A solid presence in the heart of the city.
Looking in on the city park, I welcomed the same clear blue sky. But my eye was mostly drawn to the trees that it framed. Although this is still a winter scene, the colour of the willow suggests a strong presence of male catkins and the cycle of growth and change that is under way.
Leaving the park I made my way to the still living garden of the ruined Llanthony Secunda Priory, once the monks’ physic garden. It still feels like a place of healing and the present version is well maintained.
I was both surprised and delighted to see a rose in bloom. Roses have for a long time been a heart symbol for me, but I have generally associated them with summer and especially midsummer. I became aware of winter roses quite late last year and they were shop bought. I loved them but had some misgivings about their production. So I felt blessed to see one growing in the physic garden last Saturday. There’s no traditional link between Imbolc and roses that I know of. But seeing this rose in the ground, sunlight glinting on both petals and thorns, I had an Imbolc kind of feeling, as we approach the first festival of the rising year.
In the picture above, birch catkins are gaining strength. It is a bleak and cold early afternoon. The tree trunks sit in quiet latency. But new life is stirring all the same.
In the wheel of the year, winter is the season both of dying and regeneration. Late winter my be the coldest time of year, but the turn has been made and the days are already lengthening. Imbolc, which once marked the first lambing season of the year for our ancestors, is on its way.
Four years ago (1) I wrote a post in which I described the place of Birch (Beith) in the Irish Ogham alphabet, and its link with new beginnings and the need for careful preparation in any new endeavour. In Northern runic tradition Birch (Beorc, Berkana) is identified with the young Goddess, sexuality and birth, as well as beauty and creativity in general. At the time of writing I was working with a mandala of 16 trees in which Birch was my tree from 1-22 February. It continues to be an important tree in my life.
Now, my emphasis is different. I started by reflecting on a group of birch trees planted just outside our building. I can see them now out of a balcony widow. There are five in this space, somewhat sheltered between two buildings. They are the nearest thing to a grove in this urban setting. They are still young and have only recently reached the second floor level where we live. They seem vulnerable, shallow-rooted. When we have high winds, I expect them to blow down. They bend a long way. But they haven’t broken or fallen yet.
They are our neighbours. Elaine and I walk among them often. They are a good place for her when she re-learns walking after her accident and its complications. She first noticed the catkins and pointed them out to me weeks ago, when they were tiny. The picture above, which I took today, shows how much they have managed to grow in these apparently unpromising winter weeks.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in Brighid, Celtic spirituality and the evolving culture of modern Paganism. In The Torch of Brighid, Erin Aurelia eloquently describes her flame tending path as a devotee of the Goddess Brighid. For her, this is a path of celebration, contemplation, creativity and deep personal change. Her book shares the fruits of a remarkable journey.
The author makes clear that she is not reconstructing a past Pagan practice. No such practice is known. She references a Christian history dating from 480 CE, where nuns maintained a sacred flame at Kildare in Ireland. This was documented as still in place in the later 12th century CE by Gerald of Wales in his History and Topography of Ireland. It was repressed by the English King Henry VIII – who also ruled Ireland – as part of his violent religious revolution of the 1530s and 40s. On 1 February 1993, flame tending was revived both by Catholic Brigantine sisters in Kildare by the neo-Pagan Daughters of the Flame in Vancouver, BC. Both groups were influenced by Gerald of Wales’ description.
Erin Aurelia has been a flame tender for 20 years. She began in the Daughters of the Flame and then founded her own Order, the Nigheanan Brigde Flametending Order, going on to lead it for eight years. The original model involved moving through cycles of twenty days, in which nineteen flame tenders take a day each to tend the flame, leaving the Goddess to take care of the twentieth. Erin found that she wanted an intensified practice and a closer fellowship with other Brighid devotees. During those years, she writes: “Brighid inspired me to develop guided meditations to use during vigils, seasonal feasts, and lunar phases”. Later came “the template for a whole new way to practice flame tending: the way that the flame tending cycle matches with the twenty letters of the traditional Irish tree ogham alphabet, in which each alphabet letter is denoted by a tree and infused with esoteric meaning”. She describes herself as “enthralled and excited” by this discovery, which lead on to daily communing with Brighid and a fuller development of her work.
She found the process transformative, and learned that “growth is not only made through obtaining wisdom, but by implementing it. And Brighid showed me that I can effectively implement it by embodying her own skills as Shaper, Healer, Seer, and Transformer. Through embodying her skills, I became empowered”. In the narrative of her own journey, Erin shows her willingness to innovate, take initiatives, lead when called to do so, and also step back from leadership. Her relationship with ancient culture is to be inspired by it without being bound by it. I see her as modelling the best of modern Pagan practice in these respects.
Erin provides extensive information on her flame tending vigils, and how to set them up. She shares prayers, meditations and path workings. She includes her unique approach to ogham work, and also her own way of working energetically with the traditional ‘three cauldrons’ (of warming, vocation and knowledge). She shares her ways of working through the four Irish fire festivals from Imbolc (1 Feb.) to Bealtaine (1 May} to Lughnasadh (1 Aug.) to Samhain (1 Nov.). She has an Imbolc advent practice centred around the four Sundays prior to Imbolc – because it starts the year in this tradition and is specifically dedicated to Brighid. Her book is a powerful addition to the growing literature about Brighid as a much loved Goddess.
I shall not be put in a cell, I shall not be wounded …
No fire, no sun, no moon shall burn me,
No lake, no water, no sea shall drown me.” (1)
Brigid has a long history, stretching back in Gaelic traditions to at least the pagan Celtic iron age. The words above come from the Western Highlands of Scotland, in this form probably dating to the traumatising early modern period. Caitlin Matthews suggests that, even though the the words are addressed to ‘St. Bride’ rather than the Goddess of poets, they still have the talismanic power to preserve life.
More recently, Brigid has been successfully revived as a Pagan Goddess, where, according to an affirming Imbolc self-dedication story by Morgan Daimler (2) she has lost none of her capacity to protect her devotees.
“When I decided that it was essential for me a self-dedication to the pagan path, just like all my books talked about, I chose Imbolc to do it on. At that point the holiday to me was on the 2nd, the same day as America celebrated Groundhog Day, and was about cleansing and blessing of the self, so it seemed ideal for a self-dedication. I got everything together and when the night of the ritual arrived I was excited to take such a life changing step. At 13, coming from a non-religious background, doing something like this was momentous and I felt like I was ready to commit myself to the spirituality I had been studying.
“I went out alone into the bitter cold, without a winter coat on, and tried to do the ritual the way I had learned how to, but it was hard to focus. February in Connecticut is frigid and the darkness on that particular night was total, without any moon to light my way. It was Brigid’s holiday, so I automatically started calling on her, asking for her help, for the strength to do what I planned to do. At the same time it was almost a reflex to call on a Goddess I associated with warmth a light under those circumstances. It was important to me to make a declaration of my religious path, the books I’d read at that point had emphasized the need to be outdoors, and I was too stubborn to let the cold weather stop me. So I prayed to Brigid.
“It’s funny the way, as children, we simply take experiences in our stride, without considering them at all out of the ordinary. I don’t remember ever feeling Brigid’s presence or having a sense of the numinous, but I prayed and then I was warm. The cold simply ceased to be something I noticed, as if everything around me had become an indoor room temperature. I took the usual half hour or so kneeling on the cold ground to do my ritual, dedicating myself to the Irish Gods and to pagan spirituality. And then I got up, collected my supplies and went back inside, feeling euphoric.
“At the time it never even registered that what I did was dangerous or that I was risking frostbite and hypothermia. And I never stopped and thought that it should seem at all remarkable to pray to Brigid for warmth and then be warm. It all seemed entirely natural and normal.
“We speak, and the Gods really do listen. Sometimes they even answer.” (2)
(1) Alexander Carmichael Carmina Gadelica Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1972 (Cited in Caitlin Matthews The Element of the Celtic Tradition Shaftesbury: Element Books, 1989)
(2) Morgan Daimler Pagan Portals – Brigid: Meeting the Celtic Goddess of Poetry, Forge, and Healing Well Winchester UK & Washington USA: Moon Books, 2016. Daimler identifies as a reconstructionist polytheist pagan working in the Irish tradition.
The appearance of a daffodil in our garden is a delight. Daffodils in early February feel quite different from the iconic Imbolc snowdrops, whose beauty still feels wintry. The solar yellow of the daffodil disrupts my winter habits of mind. The flower is a clearer harbinger of spring in the world’s life and mine. In a number of different ways, I am recovering my belief in movement and change. The daffodil tells me that it is time for a vitalising re-orientation.
A Covid-19 vaccination tomorrow is another event in a new pattern of life and experience. My wife Elaine’s recovery following her recent hospitalisation is another and greater one. Her convalescence is a gradual process and we are still living very carefully. But we are thinking creatively about the new life before us and how best to inhabit it, even whilst living a day at a time.
I notice that I feel more spiritually sensitive and open. I do not know yet where this is going to take me. On the one hand I feel strongly moved by a single flower. On the other, the world of appearances feels dreamlike and provisional. Then there is the vividness of daily life and relationship. A change is happening and I’m not looking for an explanatory language to pigeonhole it, or to make it abstract and safe. For now, I am simply acknowledging a change in mind.
Within my mandala of the year (1) Birch – Beith in the Irish ogham alphabet (2) – is the first tree for the spring quarter beginning at Imbolc. The overall theme of this quarter, in my world, is one of early growth. Birch presides from 1-22 February and will become one of the first trees to flower in spring, from March onwards. It is also one of the first trees to colonise new ground.
In ogham lore Birch is understood to support new beginnings and to encourage careful preparation, a skilful laying of the ground on which we will build. “In making your spiritual journey with this tree as your guide, remember to concentrate your mind on the uplifting slender whiteness of the tree, a whiteness that stands out clearly from the tangled undergrowth and confusion of shrubs and thorny bushes that cover the floor and, hence, may inhibit an easy journey” (3). The Green Man’s wisdom (1) is that a good beginning leads to a good conclusion.
In runic tradition (4), where Birch (Beorc, Berkana) is also linked to new beginnings, there is specific reference to the young Goddess, sexuality and birth, as well as beauty and creativity more generally. Birch may signal a laying aside of old patterns, whether merely redundant or positively toxic, and a willingness to welcome new, more energising and nourishing ways of being.
For me, this is a welcome shift from the necessary defensiveness and protectiveness of alder. This year, it comes just at the moment where such a shift is possible – as my wife Elaine continues her recovery from major illness and we begin to dream and think our way forward, into a new cycle of life. The wheel turns, and there is a promise of positive change in the air.
(1) The image is from: John Matthews & Will Worthington The Green Man Oracle London: Connections, 2003.
(2) This mandala is based on my personal experience of trees in the neighbourhood as well as traditional lore. Moving around the spring quarter from 1 February, the positions and dates of the four trees are: Birch, north-east, 1-22 February; Ash & Ivy, east-north-east, 23 February – 16 March; Willow, east, 17 March – 7 April; Blackthorn, east-south-east, 8 – 30 April. The summer quarter then starts with Hawthorn at Beltane. For a complete list of the sixteen trees, see https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2020/autumn-equinox-2020-hazel-salmon-awen/
(3) Liz and Colin Murray The Celtic Tree Oracle: A System of Divination London: Eddison-Sadd, 1988 (Illustrated by Vanessa Card)
(4) Sweyn Plowright The Rune Primer: a Down to Earth Guide to the Runes Rune-Net, 2006
The world is changing, again. New growth insists on its place in the world, however icy the conditions. Life asserts its rights, as we move towards the festival of Imbolc. But this post is personal rather than generic. I am welcoming the return of my wife Elaine from seven days in the Royal Gloucester hospital, where she was treated for a life-threatening, non-Covid condition.
This was the background to my previously reported Covid test, (1) since we thought that Covid might be a factor for Elaine, whose symptoms were severer than mine. I have not said anything about this context up until now, because Elaine did not want to be mentioned in this blog at the time of the crisis. Now she is fine about it. In her first two or three days of Elaine’s hospitalisation, I was very worried about her. In the last couple of days I have been more relaxed and confidently looking forward to her return and a period of convalescence at home. Elaine speaks very highly of the hospital, its staff and the treatment she has received. I was able to communicate with her (and others) by text, email and sometimes (on her initiative) phone. So I did not feel cut off from her even though the hospital is operating a complete ban on visitors due to the Covid crisis.
The week has reminded me of the fragility of both life and love, and of their immense value. The outcome feels like a victory for life at a time when nature, in my neighbourhood, is pointing in this direction. Meanwhile the festival of Imbolc celebrates the return of the light. I will cherish this time as we move forward from here.
It is the dawning of 18 January 2021. The stark, bare beauty of the trees is set against a promising sky. Is the world beginning to open up? I can see a leaning in to Imbolc in this dawn, and a loosening in the hold of winter as the year moves on.
I cannot run out into this dawn, as I would like. I am in formal isolation, with a home testing kit for Covid-19 winging its way from NHS/Amazon. My symptoms are ambiguous. Covid-19 may not be the cause, but there is a real chance that it might. Meanwhile people in my 70’s age group are about to get vaccinated. Interesting times, for sure.
For me, the best way of addressing this is day at a time, whilst also assessing possible challenges sufficiently to be prepared for them. From a Druid perspective, I am finding the nemeton of my practice circle a tremendous resource. From the beginning of this year I have had both a morning and an evening circle. The former is built around energising myself and affirming both being and world. The second is contemplative, and built around both walking and sitting meditation. Each lasts for about half an hour.
I notice that I draw on Druid (largely OBOD) liturgy (1) , with modifications, quite a lot – for example, the approach to sacred space and use of the Druid prayer. This locates me within a training and community which add strength even at a distance. There are also aspects of practice drawn from other traditions and others which I have developed myself. The package overall retains a basic simplicity. It is a distillation of my contemplative inquiry – in a sense re-telling its unique story twice a day. I am finding this enormously helpful. I am reminded that the journey is what I had hoped it would be. This recognition holds me up, and is a dawning in itself.
Contemplative Inquiry 