Welcoming Something New
Welcoming Something New
A quick hit on new things / A poem / Brigid in the kitchen
Imbolc / Groundhog Day / Lunar New Year / Chinese New Year / Candlemas
I’m not a new year’s eve person. Foul weather. The beginning of the doldrums of winter. Too much booze. A history of promises made to the self that the self has no intention of keeping. The last few NYEs at home have been among the best in my life, but still, they are where the doldrums begin, where the dragging on to the next thing begins. And now, the dragging is nearly done. The light is returning. We’re starting to be able to feel it. At five o’clock you can look out the window at the freezing cold, the piles of snow, and the LIGHT and know that the way is through and that there’s more of that through behind us than in front of us. It wakes something up in me, that light. It makes me want to start new things. So here I am doing that. I’m not sure what it is, yet, but I’m showing up to find out. Maybe you’ll join me.
Have you decided, after all, to heal?
Have you tried to let it go? Let it blow away? Wish for it an easy landing, soft soil, a home other than your own. Let it take its resilience with it on the wind. Let yourself be free of that idea.
Have you stared at the waning gibbous moon and known what it knows?That
neither of you is whole enough
to bounce, to return to what did this to you.
That only time and light
can move the terminator
edge in either of you.Have you laid on the ground until the grass imprints itself on your naked thighs?
Have you buried your nose in the clover?
the crown vetch?
the chamomile? Have you leaned into a tree
until it has reminded you
under the concrete
is a dream of a
forest still
trying to
be?Have you let that tree remind you that it does not feed the winter wasted limb but rather rushes all the green it can muster toward the sun in whatever parts its power lies?
Have you let that tree remind you that it does not reach for the ax’s hew?
Have you admitted to yourself that you know which tree I mean?
Brigid
If my kitchen has a goddess, it’s Demeter. I think about her a lot when I’m in there. The green, the grain, the Eleusinian mysteries, what it means that she kept that baby boy in the fire at night, her refusal to backdown. And then I think about grain some more, about how a wheat berry is a model of resilience in the way it pushes back against the teeth that bite it, about how a softening onion is also an onion sprouting green.
This time of year though, I find myself thinking of Brigid the goddess turned saint. Another harvest deity. Another grain goddess. Her saint day was laid upon her goddess day: Imbolc. Goddess of the grain, the green, the length of winter, and the first milk of the ewes. Saint of children who deserve better homes, remover of unwanted pregnancies, farmers and sailors, poets and brewers, blacksmiths and printing presses, and feeder of those who need fed. In honour of the return of the light, feed yourself today and, if you can, feed someone else.
