Wheel of the Year | Contemplative Inquiry

Celebrating a moment as sunlight floods the room. I am happy to point my phone camera more or less at the sun. It is not the done thing and the result may be odd. But it does reflect my experience of the moment itself.

My wife Elaine has just come home from a week in hospital. It was a necessary week, and she is the better for it. Nonetheless we both have a slight sadness that it coincided with the best and brightest weather of 2025 so far, while our attention was otherwise engaged.

This moment is one of celebration of her return to an apartment wearing its warmest and brightest face. It is a contemplative moment, extending in time until it morphs into gentle action. We go outside. Elaine basks in the sun, recuperating and healing.

I am energised and curious. I move closer to the blossoms I saw through the window and take a picture. I am grateful to be reunited with Elaine and freed from my own worst fears. I am grateful for a spring that is now offering both brightness and warmth. I am glad of this day.

Leave a comment

February 26, 2025

WINTER’S END

4.30 pm, 25 February 2025. Sunrays are caught in willow branches. The sun is a little stronger today than it was in full winter. The willows have begun a tentative greening. But there is much shadow in this picture. The day has begun its decline.

The world retains a winter feel for me. I aware of the change in my local park, but I do not altogether trust this spring. In the moment of taking this picture, I see a world in shadow, softly darkened. This is partly because of where I have chosen to stand. It is the image I seem to want.

In the brighter picture below, I show daffodils growing among dead leaves. Daffodils are iconic harbingers of spring, yet not my sole focus. Both pictures were taken intuitively and without any mentally registered intent. It seems as if something in me wanted to make a statement.

I know and accept that I am in the winter of my life. In the wheel of my own life, I can’t quite see how my winter will move into spring, certainly in any personal sense. Dissolving into interbeing is easier to imagine.

My customised Druid liturgy names winter as the season of dying and regeneration. It has associations with law and faith. I understand law in a karmic or ‘natural law’ sense. But it can also be an acknowledgement of the nature we see around us. Faith, in part, concerns the willingness to accept dying and regeneration without knowing what they are like. In my last post, I discussed (1) ‘being nobody’. My current reflections take this suggestion a step further. Evidently, I still have much to learn.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2025/02/21/being-nobody

Leave a comment

February 12, 2025

SHADES OF GREY

I am standing in a favourite spot, enjoying the expanse of water in front of me. I am missing the sun. I have been missing it for awhile, as the bright days of early February disappear into memory. I am living among shades of grey.

Standing in this space, I feel both sadness and reassurance. The late winter has turned gloomy and I am somewhat depleted. Not much energy or bounce. At the same time I continue to feel held, powerfully, within this landscape and my life.

Looking now at my apparently monochromatic picture, I see subtle variations within the grey. I am drawn to the ripples and reflections in the water. I am aware of the shapes of buildings and trees against a background leaden sky in which a seagull is flying. There are life and movement here, and their promise that the wheel of the year will continue to turn.

Leave a comment

February 2, 2025

SOLAR GAIN

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.

2 Comments

January 29, 2025

BRIGHID AT IMBOLC: A SONG BY DAMH THE BARD

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.

(1) Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids

OBOD | Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids | Druidry

2 Comments

January 18, 2025

LATE WINTER: REGENERATION

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.

(1) https://contemplativeinquiry.blog/2021/02/01/birch-new-beginning/

6 Comments

January 12, 2025

SIGNS OF LIFE IN A WINTER KINGDOM

I am in a place and time of cold beauty. Beside the Gloucester-Sharpness canal, the water margin looks like a scene of suspended animation.

It isn’t true. There are fish in the water, underneath the ice. Trees are preparing for spring, protected by their bark. In the picture below evidence of the sun is seen on a tree trunk and on the thawing waters of the canal.

In woodlands beside the canal, I find an iced up inlet where the surrounding ivy lives up to its evergreen name. This small enclosed spot feels strongly alive, the frozen waters an adornment rather than a contrast.

Returning to the Docks, I notice that the seagulls aren’t acting as the confident, aggressively resourceful selves that I expect. The are neither at work, busily scavenging, or at play, gleefully flying or enjoying the water. They seem a bit bewildered by the thin ice that they are standing on.

On this walk I’m connecting rather than communing. I’m outwardly rather than inwardly focused, oriented to narrative and incident. There are different ways of observing and today I want to connect with the world and feel that I am part of it. I am endlessly fascinated with this small territory and the way it changes as the Wheel turns, and seasons come and go.

Leave a comment

January 9, 2025

BLUE SKY, RETURNING SUN

When I walked out this morning, my fingers felt cold inside their gloves. Visually I enjoyed the interplay of strong light and strong shade. The sky overhead was blue. Without seeing it directly I felt the presence of the sun. When I did find it and stepped into its path I found it dazzling and warm. I hadn’t expected the warmth. When I checked the temperature I noticed that it was rising, though not by much.

This, for me, was the sign that the sun was back after the long Midwinter moment that marks the turn of the year where I live. It helped that we were free of fog, rain and snow. Whatever comes next, Ì can tell myself that I have lived to greet another rising year together with my wife Elaine. A moment to cherish and celebrate.

Leave a comment

December 6, 2024

LIGHTS IN DARKNESS

Stars in a night sky. Candles in a dark room. Cleverly crafted decorations for Yule. These, for me, are ideal images of light in winter. When I came into Druidry, I was moved by the liturgical use of the phrase ‘the illumination of lights’. In a reality of many lights, which can also be a reality of one light and many lamps, the light is not overwhelming.

Darkness makes light bearable when containing a plurality of lights. There is space for freedom here, and likewise space for relationship and connection. This winter, I am not energetically hibernating, as I sometimes do. I find myself going deeply into Innerworld landscapes and connections in a way I have become unused to in recent years. Yet I do not feel alone or self-absorbed. I feel like a little light in a field of lights, each contributing its own individual illumination to the field, whist nested in a nurturing dark. It feels like the right focus for the time of year, and the end of 2024.

Leave a comment

November 11, 2024

RE-ENCHANTMENT WHEN GROWING OLD

“Contrary to the current genetic determinism that sees increased longevity as a wasted aberrance created by civilisation, The Force of Character presents an explosive new thesis: the changes of old age, even the debilitating ones, have purposes and values ordained by the psyche. The older we become, the more our true natures emerge. Thus the final years have a very important purpose: the fulfilment and confirmation of character.” (1)

I have known and walked with James Hillman’s book for a number of years, but only recently have I felt it coming into its own in my life. Hillman, originally a pupil of Carl Jung, went on to found his own school of Archetypal Psychology – a psychology which remembers that ‘psyche’ first meant ‘soul’. He describes his own journey as about challenging what he sees as limiting beliefs that “clamp the mind and heart” (1) into positivistic science, bottom-line capitalism and religious fundamentalism.

I am growing old and experiencing frailties together with a beloved partner in the same position. What is happening in the depths of my psyche? I notice that I do not perceive a single entity here, but multiple aspects, including a dialogue between youth and age. Both have always been present. But their roles have changed. I now find myself seeking them out, engaging with them and listening to them.

How do I recognise re-enchantment in my everyday life? Simply being open and alert to experiences as they come. On the morning of 10 November there was blue sky for a limited period. We walked around our Greyfriars Estate (once the site of a Franciscan Priory). There was a good-natured Remembrance Parade close-by: a custom beginning in 1919 after Word War I, when people hoped they had been through the war to end all wars. I am not very military minded but I’m glad we have this occasion all the same. I’ve made it to 75. A lot of the people we think about at this time didn’t make to 20 and they shouldn’t be forgotten. Honour was being paid to the dead, and an intentional act like that always changes the space.

Elaine and I however were at some distance from the event so that she could practice her walking. Whilst I was looking at some young birch trees with vigour still in their end-of-autumn leaves, Elaine carried on walking on her own. She didn’t need me hovering around her. It was the first time she’d walked outside on her own since her accident in Gran Canaria six months ago. I had witnessed a wonderful emancipation and, more than that, a fulfilment and confirmation of character.

(1) James Hillman The Force of Character and the Lasting Life Milsons Point, NSW: Random House Australia, 1999. First quote from back of cover blurb, second from main text.

Leave a comment

Contemplative Inquiry

Tag: Wheel of the Year

March 9, 2025

BLOSSOMING

February 26, 2025

WINTER’S END

February 12, 2025

SHADES OF GREY

February 2, 2025

SOLAR GAIN

January 29, 2025

BRIGHID AT IMBOLC: A SONG BY DAMH THE BARD

January 18, 2025

LATE WINTER: REGENERATION

January 12, 2025

SIGNS OF LIFE IN A WINTER KINGDOM

January 9, 2025

BLUE SKY, RETURNING SUN

December 6, 2024

LIGHTS IN DARKNESS

November 11, 2024

RE-ENCHANTMENT WHEN GROWING OLD