out of darkness and into light

The sun has set on the last day of this calendar year, barely piercing the grey gloom and drizzle that had settled over the city. For so many reasons it is entirely appropriate that even when I’m looking for it, I can barely find the low, pale sun. Sunsets in this complex and marvelous city can be magical… blazing off the towers of steel and glass as those bright new spirits seem to dance furiously and proclaim their might; setting the sky ablaze in seductive hues that make old stones blush; or illuminating a sight you don’t normally see in your day to day goings-on with a brief and secret spotlight. There are as many sunsets as there are those who perceive them, each one different because they reflect off a different spirit and resonate in a different chamber of the heart.

So for my battered soul, that the last sunset of this year should be indistinct and muted could not be more welcome.  A peaceful graduation through gentle shades of grey.  There have been so many trials this year and it is only as I begin to find closure that I can see that so much of it has been spent in shock, almost numb to the howling pain that threatened to devour me. Hasty walls of protection that would crumble or be breached and then need repair, an overabundance of the toxic fight or flight hormones coursing through my system for far too long. Of thinking that nothing else which I loved could be taken away from me and of finding out that I was wrong.

As I began to release into the dark of the year I hoped for healing, I felt optimistic in a way. But healing is not always comfortable or gentle and the very act of consciously facing all of that pain is not something to be taken lightly. My gods and guides have gone with me, by times sternly making me look at my own place in my wounding; pushing me to accept which of the things I thought I wanted are actually the things I really need; or allowing me to rest and dream of my future and forget for a while the work that is to come in building it.  The dark is not just a place of dreaming and forgetting, to only use it in this way would be to refuse its true power.  For within the dark there are no distractions, only the stillness needed to truly confront my past and my future.

“Proserpina” was the last song Kate McGarrigle ever wrote and ever performed.  A beautiful re-telling of that descent into the darkness of the Underworld, it is heavy with a feeling of loss and contains all of the sorrow of a parent losing her child, but really it is about a mother who knows she will lose her children because it is she who is about to die.  On the 9^th of December 2009 I heard that unique performance and it made me weep, just as it does to this day.  I was in the audience for “A Not So Silent Night” at the Royal Albert Hall… an untypical Christmas concert thrown by the sprawling folk dynasty of the McGarrigles and Wainwrights.  At the heart of the clan are Kate and Anna McGarrigle and Kate’s children Rufus and Martha Wainwright.  Only those close to her knew at the time how seriously ill she was. Kate McGarrigle would finally lose her battle with cancer in early 2010.

But the song was not a sole melancholy note in a night of frivolity.  It was a powerful proclamation of one woman, her art and her love for her family.  It was a song from a woman who was able to face her own death and create a lasting piece of shining beauty that told the world who she was and what she stood for.  A reminder that the darkness can never be permanent.

From a deep point in this descent into the dark I have found an unexpected new awareness: the returning of the light manifesting in my own life, not just in the natural world around me. Throughout this Yuletide season pagans will find themselves talking about the rebirth of the light, the coming of the Mabon or divine child, the astronomical process of the days lightening. Within my fortress of intellect I know all of these things, for years I have stood in ritual in the dark and lit a symbolic flame, or in bright frosty day turned to face the Sun to eagerly strain for the feeling of warmth on my face. Yet this year it is within the pool of my soul that I feel this light returning through the people who carry it into my life. 

They have brought in the light in as many different ways as they are themselves individual.  The gentle lantern which sheds new light on what was already there, the stalwart lighthouse who helps me plot a new onward course, the bright new beacon who insistently draws my gaze away from the dark. With each connection I can feel my own light begin to glow ever brighter and I am so grateful for the inspiration and optimism that they each bring into my life. So at the closing of the year, I reach for the water of life and toast these wonderful bright spirits, these people I am so lucky to call my friends.

Sláinte.

like some bold seer in a trance

On the first day that I do not need to speak, my voice has left me. I have sat in my high tower, drinking in the honeyed autumn light and warm infusions of marshmallow and sage, with a feeling of calm and peace that I had not realised I had been missing. I have had the ethereal strains of Tennyson's "Lady of Shallot" as sung by Loreena McKennitt running through my head and realise I have spent the day weaving a pattern from the skeins and threads not of strangers lives glimpsed from afar but of my own.

The Lady of Shallot (Steampunk Version)

Maybe because I spend so much of my life using my voice, to lose it makes me feel vulnerable. I have spent the last few days feeling the familiar choking swell in my throat and the rough burn of swallowing, knowing and fearing the inevitable. Or perhaps because there has been so much to talk about, so many changes, such an overabundance of feelings, that I have talked myself out of words and just need to stop. A day without being able to talk is an uncomfortable trial, but a day without the need to talk about all that has happened is the true blessing here.

As the gates of Samhuinn begin to creak open and I prepare for the dark half of the year, I am surprised that I do not feel bleaker and darker given the remorseless tides of loss and change this year has brought me. As the Wheel of the Year turns, or so our modern imaginings tell us, Samhuinn is a time of endings. This year I have seen so many endings.

I have never connected with the notion of Samhuinn as a Celtic New Year, maybe Hogmanay is simply too firmly imprined in that role and possesses such a strong tradition that I cannot supplant it. A single day of change is so much easier than learning to feel the ending of the agricultural year, the drawing in of the nights, the subtle descent into the dark. So Hogmanay marks the change of the calendar, an arbitrary point when a year is a cycle that is forever ending and beginning, whereas Samhuinn marks the elusive and liminal tipping point between light and dark.

An old dream returned to me last night. I find myself in a dream-altered version one of the many rented accomodations I have had during my adult life, or looking for a new place to live. So far, so relevant to the trials of my waking life. Yet in the dream I will always find an extra space through an awkward hatch or an oddly shaped door in an unusual place. Sometimes a simple extra room, sometimes a vast and dusty museum filled with books and display cases. The body is the mansion of the spirit, I was once told by a very wise woman indeed. I am not gifted with a subtle subconscious, although for some reason it took me years to associate this dream with periods of change and growth in my life.

Once more I stand before the Dark, the domain of my veiled Lady. The sternest and strictest of my teachers, so familiar but this year entirely different. Foolishly I supposed I was to learn about loss, but I look at the pattern of the web before me and see that I am supposed to be learning about the threads that connect endings and beginnings.

I'm chanting as we speak

The Sea, The Sea

I’ve never had what could be described as any kind of fear of hospitals, or even a particular dislike. For most of my life there has been a matter-of-factness about hospitals that was neither alluring nor off-putting. As if the institutions and buildings themselves had their own clinical detachment from me. As the years inevitably pass, my relationship has changed. Now it is to do with the lingering pain of those I love and not the acute stitch, suture, redact or set of youthful misadventure. “Ow, that must hurt”. “You’ve made a bit of a mess, haven’t you?” “Oh, it’s worse than it looks”. Inconvenience then, not tragedy and life-changing diagnoses.


I hear that for many people the smell is the dominant factor in their dislike, triggering all those unhappy associations. That completely unique smell that invades the lungs and clings to the clothes. Despite the fact that smell is very important to me, that isn’t the problem. My problem with hospitals is the heat: there seems to be an institutional belief in the necessity of a uniform temperature similar to that inside a clay kiln.

So after an hour on the ward I am drowsy, dehydrated and irritable, my throat and nasal passages just as dried out as my hands are from all the applications of alcohol gel. Dried-out and emotional. The cold February air carries a light taste of approaching rain, inviting me to breathe deeply. Once, twice, a third time and I realise I am breathing rhythmically in an attempt to calm, reach out and connect. This is the place where I grew up, surely I should be able to make some connection? This place of suburban sprawl, municipally spartan verges and brutally pruned shrubs. I trudge past the low gardens replaced by gravel and monoblock, drab wintery lawns and skeletal standard roses. Death without the promise of rebirth. Where are the snowdrops, the crocuses, the first insistent shoots of narcissus and daffodil?

What I am longing for is the towering cathedral of land and sky; to reach into the fecund mud and disappear into the green. But that didn’t come until later: near black mud and a holly grove; damp leaf mould and a ring of beech trees; a singularly special hornbeam tree beside a river. These places where my druidry came alive are miles and years from this grey place, yet these are the places my wild soul reaches for when I need comfort.

So where is my connection to this place? It pulses low within my sensory memory. The shore. The shore. It was my childhood refuge and many a troubled adolescent evening was spent trudging the sand and staring out at the waves. I can feel the pull, the green-grey swell huge and wintery, filling my vision. The tides pull at the waters of my own spirit. The deep healing waters of the soul, the collective unconscious. Such a simple and primal massiveness, so powerful that it would envelop me and sweep me away.

I only know I had my eyes closed because now I opened them and dragged in a deep breath to steady my swimming head. I couldn’t face all of that like this. Too big. Too much. There is a rising fear within me. Don’t go anywhere near it. Turn away. Grab all these swirling feelings and stuff them into a box inside. Seal it up, walk away. My jaw is clenched and my eyes are stinging.

Shit.

A quarter of an hour later I am facing the sea. No surging swell, no crashing breakers. The Cattle of Tethys are conspicuous by their absence. The sea is calm and almost still, waves lapping low against the shore. No drama. Just a pale, grey stillness. Even the horizon was an indistinct smudge barely separating the sea and the sky. Nothing was certain, nothing was clear.

The sky is neither blue nor dark slate grey but an uneven paleness. Sea and sky blurred and became indistinct, the weather itself featureless, almost wind and almost rain. Nothing, not even the sound of the wind and the waves, is solid or definitive. Even in this muted space I can feel the pull of the sea. It could pull my sorrow away, replacing it with the gentle lapping. Dissolve away the pain, the uncertainty, the confusion and leave only a formless grey. Take everything, even memory itself. A cruel irony, nature imitating life. I don’t know if I will feel better after this, but I realise I’m not really doing it for me.

I step towards the water’s edge and I begin to pray.

Imbolc

By no other agency than my own incompetence, I missed my Grove’s Imbolc ceremony today as I had written into my diary that it was tomorrow. I felt more than a little disappointed as I always enjoy our meetings and last year the ritual was beautiful, a small nemeton created in one of the city's remaining pockets of ancient woodland and a gentle yet powerful ceremony which crossed dusk leaving us praying in only the light of a ring of candles we had placed around our altar of natural and found objects. My soul needed the nourishment that my friends in the Grove provide and I have been too long out of their company this year.


I had a good long walk across the heath to the Observatory this morning, feeling and smelling the first fecund hints of spring and, mindful that I had felt strangely disjointed last year when I hadn’t made time for my seasonal observances, looking forward to feeling that connection. In the early years of my pagan path, Imbolc was a festival I didn’t really ‘get’: it seemed strange and dare I say it, only there to make up the numbers. As the years have passed and I have shared a deeper connection with certain aspects of the dark half of the year, Imbolc marks an important midway point in this season. It is full of contradictions, as is the Goddess with whom I now associate this time. It is the first glimmerings of light and growth and warmth, yet within that comfort is the sure knowledge of the brightest days of brittle cold and the darkest days of bleak lethargy that are still to come before Proserpina fully re-ascends.

In thinking of how I would mark the day instead, I turned to the pages of my journal and found my account of my solitary experiences of Imbolc two years ago:

With muffled drum I beat and dance a sacred path, a line consecrated in fire and smoke. Carried by the tempo of the drum around the circle, making nemeton, a temple in the dark, calling to rock and tree, frost and storm – the spirits that surround me and have showed their control of the land today.

I did not expect the city to be thrown into upheaval and disorder. The bright, white snow had started the day before and gathered momentum in the night, gaining strength and depth with every hour. I had woken before dawn, my head full of the day’s important tasks and the schedule I was to keep. So organised, so precise and, ultimately, so fragile. It became clear that I was going nowhere and resorted to leaving a series of messages for people who would probably be as stuck as I and fielding calls from those who most definitely were. Schools were closed, buses and trains cancelled, even airports grounded their traffic. It seems few are in any actual danger; most will wake today and know they aren’t going anywhere and shouldn’t even try. With any luck, for them at least, the day will pass huddled under a blanket with a mug of hot chocolate after sledging or snowballing.


In my sanctuary, I speak the name of my gods. Witness me, guide me, strengthen me. The last name thrums on my lips, over and over I sound it with the beating of the drum. Softer, louder, softer, louder until I know that I stand in Her presence. Today has been Her day – she has ridden the Siberian storms and swept deep white drifts over us all, snow and ice and wind, smothering our land and making mockery of the hubris of man. Hers is the deep cut of winter’s icy knife, She is the one who will use her staff to blast away the first shoots of spring.


Bringer of the White.

Bringer of death.

Veiled Lady.


I stand before her and she before me, swathed in white and wreathed in snow I know Her. But She knows me better.


“That which is weak must die.

You must be the man you know you can be.”


Her harsh words scythe through me. Again I think of Her blasting away fragile green shoots. Those were the shoots that were not strong enough, then better that the winter takes them. There will be other, stronger shoots to follow, for Springtime has never not come. Something falls away as I beat my drum again, dying back so I can leap forward. Whatever is now gone was not strong enough to survive. I remember that in the midst of the white this morning I saw a space had been cleared and a strong green shoot was growing through the snow.


Looking back, that year Imbolc was surely what it should have been: a day of snow and chaos; rules upturned and giddy excitement – a festival! I had a journey through the harsh and unforgiving white but I came out stronger the other side. For alongside the heady joys of that unexpected snow-day, there had been disappointments and, for me, the light and bitter taste of a betrayal revealed.