The season of rebirth

There have been springs when I knew I wasn’t feeling it, so much of my life innately wintery that emotionally I couldn’t engage with the return of light and life. Emotional winters are a lot easier when the rest of nature reaffirms them, but once all the nest building and sap rising gets going, it can be hard not feeling like a part of that. This winter has been deep and dark for me. I’ve been really bodily ill, I’ve gone through yet another round of awful depression, I’ve had a real intellectual crisis around my work, and some kind of emotional meltdown to boot.

The sun is out today, the snowdrops are up, and Imbolc approaches. The time of seasonal rebirth is upon us. This year I’m not feeling a barrier between myself and the season. I can go with it. I’ve had some profound revelations about the changes I need to make in my work. Opportunities have opened up, and my body is healing. I have a long legacy of fear and distress to deal with and a pressing need to rediscover myself and figure out who I am. That’s all a part of the rebirthing process, some of it may hurt, but, so be it.

I’m aware of how much my upheavals and dramas impact on the people around me, how they can be interpreted and understood. I’ve been told that, having found the person I claim as my soul mate, I ought to be able to get on with living happily ever after. I think there are times when Tom feels he ought to be able to magically fix everything for me. Of course that’s rubbish, and the love of other people is never going to save anyone. Support, comfort, friendship, patience and encouragement are incredibly valuable, but you cannot forcibly love someone out of depression or personal crisis. You can just keep holding them and reminding them how to keep going. Rebirth is not the same as birth – no one else can do it for you, or to you.

That said love has always been an essential part of life for me. Love where what you give is returned, is a healing and inspiring experience. Love that seems one sided, that becomes an excuse to cause pain, love that is all about demand, and ownership, and control, is only love in name, and what it does, day after day is to make it harder to give and to care. I’m starting to recognise how shut down I’ve become, how unwilling to share my heart. It’s not just a fear of rejection, it’s a fear that I am somehow an affront to other people. That’s my history speaking. I’ve been told how destructive and hurtful my love can be, but I don’t have to believe that any more.

The sap is rising, and by slow degrees I can feel my heart opening up again. Tragic news stories make me want to cry. But that’s okay, and perhaps as it should be. Depression is a non-feeling state, a defensive retreat from painful excess. I don’t want to be there anymore. I do want to care, and feel, and open my heart and give more freely of myself. I know that birth is a messy, visceral, dangerous and painful sort of process. Without birth, you don’t get life. Time to come out of the darkness and learn how to love again. How to love life, and people and places. Also, how to love myself, which has always been beyond me. That needs to change.

I’ll end with some lovely words from a February song by Jehanne Meta

I’ll not expect this year to bring
A fortune then, or anything
But love, and just the chance to sing
All these new songs in my pocket.

I’m working on the new songs, too.

The landscape of light

So here we are at the turning of the year, the mistletoe has been cut in various places, Druids have been out and about at Stonehenge, and soon the days will start that slow process of getting longer again, at least round here.
I realise that the impact of the wheel of the year is bound to vary depending on how far you are from the equator. I struggle to imagine living closer to the arctic circles, with the long night of winter and the long day of summer. I rather suspect that would drive me nuts, but evidently plenty of people manage to live with it. I find it equally hard to imagine the stable nature of light and dark nearer the equator. I‘m too involved with the cycle I was born into.
The balance of light and dark across the year, and the shape of the seasons is closely tied to the land we live on – or at least where that land is in relation to the shape of the planet, its tides and climates. Here in the UK, the Gulf Stream keeps us warmer than neighbours to the east at the same latitudes. Where Tom came from a lot of weather tended to come down from the Arctic over the winter months, making for a very different kind of winter. I’m conscious of the warming effect of the River Severn too, not needing to get that far away to notice a temperature difference.

The shape of the hills affects the patterns of light and dark too. For me, down by the river, the coming of first light and the timing of the sunrise is affected by the Cotswolds. The sun has a great big hill line to get over before I’ll see any sign of it. It sets over the Forest of Dean for me, too, that’s another hefty hill range. For a person living in the shadow of even bigger hills, or mountains the patterns of light and dark will be even more influenced by this, and living on an open plain is a whole other experience.

It makes me realise just how local the experience of the shortest day is bound to be, because it’s going to be a lot shorter for those of us with hills, and all those other variables.

Today I am celebrating being where I am, wet and grey though it is. It’s not like anywhere else. Nowhere is.

When to celebrate?

This question came up on one of the Druid groups I’m on – when do you celebrate festivals? Does it have to be on the day? Is the nearest weekend good enough? Or something else?

As I see it, the calendar has been mangled a few times, so that dates, the 31^st October for example, may be more about the tradition of a number than an exact time of year. Solstices and equinoxes present their own challenges too. When, exactly, do they happen? When is that moment of balance at the equinox? And at a solstice, are you celebrating the night, or the day? The dawn? Midday? There’s plenty of choices and clearly no one right answer. If you can’t celebrate the exact moment, does it make sense to celebrate the gist of the changing times at the nearest convenient date? I think, if it works for you, then the answer to that one is ‘yes’ and if it feels wrong, the answer is ‘no’.

What are we celebrating, with the four non-solar festivals that turn up in so many calendars? Are we celebrating a specific date, or the state of the seasons? If it’s the latter… seasons are not fixed and often don’t tie in to dates. With Druids in the southern hemisphere these days as well, the dates and the seasons are in mirror image of each other, and that calls for some proper consideration.

I think there’s a lot to be said for figuring out what seasonal cues in your immediate environment you associate with traditional festivals. For a start, that takes you out of standard format and into thinking about your locality, and what is meaningful to you. The arrival and departure of migrant bids might be a consideration here. The appearance of seasonal flowers or leaves on trees might be another. The shedding of leaves, the first snow, or other things may present themselves.

If you’re living somewhere that doesn’t have four seasons, why not consider what you do have, and make up your own ritual calendar to reflect it? You may feel that nature as it exists around you is more resonant than sticking to dates that relate to another place entirely. And then again, the ancestral connection might be more important. There are no right answers, but, think about what works for you and why, don’t just take a ‘one size fits all’ ritual calendar and adapt your own feelings to fit it, that’s about the only wrong way there is!

There are still green leaves on the trees here, so for me, it is not yet Samhain.

The wheel of the year

When I started out as a pagan I didn’t do ritual in any group or formal sense. Getting onto the druid path, I discovered not only a local grove and their open rituals, but also the gatherings at Avebury and Stonehenge. An eclectic group started up in my area too, and for some festivals I was out ritualling a lot, for some years.

This last year I’ve not being doing ritual, but here I am, poised to jump back in, and wondering about the whole business.

I love the social aspect of gathering for ritual – not just in a gossipy sense, but the sharing of inspiration and energy. Having the 8 standard festivals to work with makes it easy to grab people for that. However, it ties ritual to a solar narrative in the wheel of the year, and makes it harder to do rituals that aren’t focused on that turning of the agricultural seasons. I do see the point of engaging people with the natural world, but I also think that ‘nature’ is more subtle and complex than this rather simplified story of the rise and fall of the sun allows for. Even the farming it’s supposed to relate to is more complicated.

I live very close to the practical realities of changing seasons – boat life makes nature and the sun (or its absence) very immediate. There is no ignoring what’s going on ‘out there’. I know from working with big groups that for urban folk whose living and employment situations alienate them from the natural world, the wheel of the year aids reconnection. This is undoubtedly a good thing, but it feels like a place to begin, for me, not an end point.

When I’ve been involved in running open ritual, providing that point of connection with nature through the year seemed like an important part of the job. Simply holding ritual was about service to community. But I’m looking at a very different sort of group now, with people in it who are far more connected, who maybe need the shared inspiration angle of ritual, but not the ‘getting outside’ bit.

I’m sure our ancient ancestors would have celebrated the end of harvest, the coming of spring, and done something in the dark days to cheer themselves up. But when you are living day to day with the subtle shifts in season and sun, those big focal points seem less important, I find. I don’t need reminding where we are, I know it in my bones.

I’m thinking about ritual to take me further, to help me connect with the things that aren’t immediately present in my daily life. Which means identifying what those are for a start, and seeing how they correspond, if at all, with what anyone else wants. I’m in the curious, liminal headspace of knowing I’m looking for something and not yet knowing what it is.

As a consequence I’m going back to the absolute fundamentals in some ways, asking, what is ritual for? Who does it serve? What do I want to get out of it? What does ritual mean? How do I want to do it. (More of this pondering to follow, no doubt!)

I feel like I’m going through a big upheaval phase, questioning everything, paring everything back, looking for the essence, the significance. All the things I have ever taken as normal or fixed seem open to negotiation, and that’s an exciting place to be. I always did like the inbetween places.

Reflecting on the seasons

Coming out of the depths of last winter, spring seemed sudden, too fast and impossible to engage with. By April it was unseasonably hot here and I wandered around in a daze, because on the inside I was still in winter. That I was suffering from depression no doubt didn’t help. The tides of my own life had fallen entirely out of synch with the seasons, and no amount of wanting to fit was going to change that.

We had a peculiar summer in the UK – much of it grey and damp. It was frequently cold, and didn’t feel like a ‘proper’ summer at all. So my ideas of the season and the actuality of it didn’t match up either. Now autumn is here. Truly here. Misty mornings, leaves changing colour, and although it’s been hotter than usual, it does, definitely, feel like autumn. I also feel like I’m here, for the first time this year. It is autumn for me on the inside as well. I am feeling the sweet sadness of letting go, that strange appreciation for melancholy inherent in the ephemeral beauty of things. Apparently the Japanese have a word for this, but we don’t.

There are still chicks. The moorhens in particular had late broods, so plenty of the younger birds are still fuzzy, barely adult. They don’t look even slightly autumnal, and being smaller will no doubt have a harder time of it when we enter the lean wintery weeks. Living so very close to nature this year has made me realise that a lot of the time, ‘nature’ does not conform to our simple wheel of the year story either. Living things do what they can, when they can. Sometimes that works, and other times it doesn’t.

My early encounters with Druidry involved a lot of instruction about how I was ‘supposed’ to engage with the cycle of the seasons and how I ‘should’ be feeling and behaving at different times of the year. I’m becoming ever more confident about rejecting that model. It belongs to an urban paganism that mostly stays indoors and imagines what nature is doing ‘out there’ and attunes to that imaginary perception. Before I lived on the boat, I had no idea of all the things I did not know about the cycles of the seasons, and the fine details of living. In fairness to me, I knew a lot, but it was nothing compared with what there is to know. Nature has taught me a lot this year, not least that it is not a single, coherent thing, but the total of many lives, energies and intentions all rubbing along together. No one told the moorhens that spring was the time for new things and autumn the time for dying away.

The complexity of the natural world – of which we are very much a part – is beautiful. It is full of wonder, surprise and mystery. If we let ourselves believe that we understand it, know how it works and are in tune with it, we can miss so much. I thought I knew. I thought, being outdoors every day and paying attention to the trees and birds, I had a fair understanding, but I had barely scraped the surface. Thinking I was some kind of expert and finding myself to be a total novice has been a really good learning experience. It’s re-opened my eyes for me, made me look closer, and stop for longer to listen. I’ve re-learned how not to assume that I know. Embracing my ignorance, I go out with new openness and see things I might otherwise have missed.

I Tai Chi, when you have learned the series of movements, what you do is go back to the beginning, to the simplest, most basic of moves, and learn them again. You learn them more deeply, with more attention to detail, bringing the knowledge gleaned from the first cycle of learning back to the very beginning. There is no end to this, no point of achieving sufficient insight that you can quit learning and call yourself an expert. I think Druidry is the same.