John Moriarty, said: "To learn to speak is to learn to say 'our river has its source in an Otherworld well,' and anything we say about the hills and anything we say about the stars is a way of saying 'A Hazel grows over the otherworld well our river has its source in.'" Within this framework, there is no distinction between physical and metaphysical geography...
Though I mark time more by the rhythm of changes on the land that the seasons bring than I do by the calendar of the dominant culture, I still love the opportunity that New Year's Day brings for reflection and transformation. Any holiday or festival being celebrated by the people around you is an opportunity to partake in mutual blessing while the community is focusing on gratitude, hope, and joy, whether or not you share others' conception of "the reason for the season." No matter what calendar you follow, the turning of the year is a liminal time, a time of putting the past behind you and stepping into new ways of being.
We live now in a time of rising waters, when the sun is obscured by the smoke of burning forests. We stand vigil, uncertain if the sun will return. We place lights on evergreen trees to bring brightness and the memory of life, marking a festival that carries echoes of the tales of a Winter-Born King, a bright light born of the darkest night, harbinger of hope. The night is not over, and there is time yet to dream anew, to dream each other Winter-Born Sovereigns, who come in the darkest hour to restore the wasteland with our wild love.
In winters of snow and ice, winters of the heart, and winters of our collective experience, Damiana awakens the memory of the invincible summer within us. Bitter, warming, and aromatic, Damiana grounds us into our bodies, stirs our heart to quicken the rhythm of the movement of our blood, and relaxes the tension we hold to allow the blood to flow freely to all of our parts -- and where blood flows, awareness goes.
This Samhain season, the darkness around us seems especially heavy, almost impenetrable at times. Our individual worries and struggles flow together with the collective pain of a culture and a planet in peril. The temptation to surrender to that darkness, to allow it to swallow us whole, can be immense. There can absolutely be value in going to that place of surrender – but only if we do not stay there.
The nights grow longer, the wheel of the year turns toward the West. The time of the Bone Mother is here. Bone Mother. Cailleach Béara. Nicnevin. In Gaelige traditions, she is the dark bride the land becomes at Samhain. Here, the North wind is her breath. If Brighid is the flowing water and the bright dancing flame, the Cailleach Béara is the cold solidity of the Earth which holds our ancestors’ bones, the darkness of the womb and the grave.
Autumn roots are perfect medicines for the journey within that the dark half of the year calls us to. Soil, roots, and mycelia are the fascia of the Earth. Roots and myeclia carry chemical and electromagnetic information between trees and fungi and understory plants beneath the forest floor. The soil is the medium through which they run. Our own bodies are like the forest floor, just beneath the surface of our skin, the fascia relays messages.
Journalist Steve Sliberman wrote "Whatever autism is, it is not a product of modern civilization. It is a strange gift from our deep past, passed down through millions of years of evolution." Human survival depends on embracing the strange gifts that come from beyond the walled garden of culture’s accepted modes of thought and perception.
Healing is the bringing of the life moving through us into the fullness of its expression. We cannot come into the full expression of who we are without allowing our consciousness to fully enter and fill our bodies. Embodied, we experience ourselves as the animals we are whose senses are attuned to the pheromones of other creatures, the scent of rain on soil, the Milky Way and the Aurora Borealis. We recognize them as signs of the proximity of kin.
At Midsummer, St. John's Wort bloomed bright as the sun. Now there are cobwebs on its last dying flowers, and Goldenrod blossoms with summer's dying glory. In the calendar of my ancestors, Lúnasa marked the first harvest -- the harvest of grains -- and the turning of the wheel of the year toward the time of darkness. Bonfires on the hilltop brought to the night what the burning sun brought to noon -- the bright, dry, hot blaze that precedes the ashen embers of autumn.
