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