Happy winter mid-point to spring! Whether you call it Groundhog Day, Candelmas, Imbolc, or St. Brighid’s Day, the point in the annual cycle of days and seasons where we are in this current year has been marked in the Northern Hemisphere for tens of hundreds of years.
I am a veritable fountain of information on February 2nd because 24 years ago, February 2nd, 1989, I stepped off a train in Tucson with only a couple of bags, to begin a life together with the man who is now my husband. We married close to the Summer Solstice of that year, but one of our favorite anniversaries is Groundhog’s Day. Yes, we have many anniversaries, and no, what occasions they mark are none of your beeswax. I’ve researched the day, okay?
Imbolc is the “pagan” observance of the day. I’ve never really been able to figure out what pagan is. When I was little I was taught by a very nice Sunday School teacher who was 3 zillion years old and spoke of things ancient from personal experience. She taught me that pagan meant any belief that wasn’t Christian. I later learned that wasn’t quite right, but I have come around once again and have realized that any belief system that is not Fundamentally Christian is viewed as a Pagan belief by Fundamentalist Christians who, apparently, are trying to take over the United States political and judicial system. Pagan equates with evil in these people’s thesauri. So I don’t like the word. Although I personally refer to it as all it really means is that is one of the four primary Gaelic seasonal festivals: Samhain (~1 November), Imbolc (~1 February), Beltane (~1 May) and Lughnasadh (~1 August). Wicca is too modern a religion to be as structured as it seems to be from my perspective. I am personally suspicious of all religious ritual. I guess I am a gnostic at heart. What I believe, I believe because of personal experience.
What the Wiccan/Pagan perspective does offer is the recognition of natural, earth-based cycles. Every woman understands cycles, lunar and otherwise. Even our non-agrarian, industrial society kept seasonal celebrations under the guise of various religious holidays.
Enough religious history. Now for etiology! Woot! Imbolc comes from the word oimelc which translates as the phrase “ewe’s milk” in the old Irish tongue. Now is the tiime for preparation for the birth of spring lambs.
St. Brighid Day is really nothing more than the transliteration of one of the forms of the Goddess associated with the Celtic observance of Oimelc into the pantheon of Saints within the Catholic Church that was made to assist with the incorporation of Celtic peoples into the Roman Empire by overlaying Christianity onto existing observances.
Our culture has a memory beyond that of any one slice of time in one place. Thousands of years of our history was spent with the majority of our population dedicated to agriculture and husbandry. Even when we don’t know why we do things, we continue to do them. Our American ritual of determining the likelihood of six more weeks of winter or an early end to winter predicted by the amount of sunshine on the morning of February 2nd comes from the same Northern European traditions of observing the midpoints between the solstice and equinox.
Somehow there may also be some sort of connection to ritual reincorporation of a woman into the community 40 days after giving birth as per the Christian observance coming out of the Jewish observance. February 2nd is 40 days after Christmas.
No matter what the exact travels of the observance of the midpoint between winter and spring from Europe to the U.S., when I was out with my dog Daisy this afternoon on a walk, it looked and smelled like spring. I think we are due for a long, wonderful spring.
Welcome Lucky 13! My Uncluttered Year.
I thought ’12 would be good, but it wasn’t. So as for predictions, I’m done making them. Luck is what you make of it. And we are entering a new Bak’tun as the Mayans called the ages in their long count calendar, so we can reinvent everything to our liking. Isn’t this what we do every year anyway with our resolutions?
I do hereby resolve to… (fill in the behaviors and traits to be reinvented here.)
Why do we do this every year? Lose 25 lbs. Exercise. Eat healthy. Our culture seems to condone the practice of futile resolution making. Pope Gregory reintroduced January 1 in 1582 as New Years Day after a Medieval hiatus when other dates of religious significance were observed rather than January 1. But the new year, whenever it may be observed, has more often seen resolutions centered on moral betterment rather than breaking the cycle of bad habits. I like this approach better than the more self-centered one. I leave the habit breaking for lent, which I observe as a time of cleansing and self-sacrifice, even though I have no association with the Catholic Church. In some respects, I just view New Year’s Day as the 8th day of Christmas.
So the only “resolution” I am making for this lucky year is to meditate on clutter and find ways to remove as much of it as I can from my life so that I may act in a more focused manner as well as to be able to tend to people more and things less. For those of you reading this who happen to know someone who has struggled with the symptoms of depression, like I have, you will also know that clutter easily accumulates in our lives and bogs us down.
So some ways I can de-clutter my life, and which you should feel free to join in and add to if your feel so motivated:
- De-clutter my house. Apply Feng Shui to rooms.
- Act from reason not superstition. This is a mental uncluttering.
- De-clutter my body with regular cleanses and fasting.
The real New Year psychologically for me the last several years has shifted to be the Chinese New Year. This year it falls on Sunday, February 10th. The Black Water Snake is the animal element for the year. You can find out more about the complete 64 year cycle of year types here if you are interested.
Simple concepts we can employ to frame our actions in ways that motivate us to act from a grounded, well thought approach could come from anywhere. I am trying to craft frames for myself that are simple and personally meaningful. The snake is an uncluttered animal to my mind so the consistency of symbols reinforces my belief that this will be a workable concept that will help me have a good year in which I can focus, streamline, and act in ways that benefit the most people.
So as you might have guessed, my New Year’s celebration is fairly low-key, and today is no exception. Hubby and I made Hoppin’ John per his Southern heritage, something we do every January 1. We also drink Mimosas. Life is good. This year is and will be good. Welcome lucky and uncluttered 2013!
The Veil Between The Worlds Lifts
A Personal Reflection on All Souls Day
Momma would have been 98 today. My best friend as a teenager / high school, Kim Marie, would have been 56 tomorrow had she not died at age 21. A once good friend who no longer speaks to me because I’m a progressive was 56 yesterday. These personal stories lead me into the darker celebrations of Samhein and Dia de los Muertos which arose out of celebrations of the end of harvest and recognition of the beginning of winter.
All Souls Day, November 1st, is celebrated in the Southwestern U.S. as it is in Mexico, as Dia de los Muertos. Many peoples with a European heritage carry on part of a cultural tradition in which the veil between the worlds was thinnest, the most permeable it is all year. Here in the part of the U.S. that was once Mexico, in La Primeria Alta or the Northern portion of the Sonoran Desert, the day is one where the graves of loved ones are decorated with intricately cut paper (papel picado), depictions of skulls and skeletons, marigolds, sugar skulls, candles, and pictures.
In Tucson, Dia de los Muertos, and the our unique observation of it on the weekend nearest to that day, has come to be a very special celebration for and by our community to mourn, to heal, and to celebrate lives and memories where they mix. A few years ago, in 1990, a personal remembrance performance began what has now become an All Souls Procession with over 30,000 participants. “Parade” is a term sometimes used to describe the event, but which is far too superficial a description of the procession. It touched the hearts and filled some of the emptiness of souls who are learning how to carry on in this world without the physical presence of loved ones.
Each year the procession grew. And this seems fitting. Tucson, the Old Pueblo, is a special place. People have lived here for thousands of years. In recent history thousand have died in the surrounding deserts as they attempted to migrate to find work. We are a fairly large city, but we were a town and still feel like one. We are a community that has always attracted artists and writers. Tucson is unique. Any person who is sensitive to such things can feel a sense of history and special energy in this beautiful town between several ranges of mountains. It is a place that honors life, history, and cultures.
I wish I could participate in the procession this year, but I cannot. I have several folks I would much like to acknowledge who left the earthly realm this past year. I will have to do something privately.