Imbolc - 1st February

Imbolc; the word has so much love in it for me. Partly because of the beautiful family ceremony that we do on this day (I wrote about this last year, you can read it here) and partly because however much I like reading and painting and things-you-can-do-indoors with any spare moments that I happen to be blessed with, best of all I love being outside and with Imbolc tends to come the first whisperings of that outside time of year.

This year it's particularly outsidey as spring appears to have sprung. Most of the yellow flowers that you would associate with April are already here, as (rather confusingly) are some blackberry flowers! It's tempting to get all doom-sayerish and talk about how our disregard for it is sending our environment haywire, but I don't actually think that helps.

This is Daisy Dog's paw amongst the daisies.

Thoughts have power, words have power. If we put our attention on the doom and gloom then doom and gloom is what our experience of being alive will be. I am full of anger and grief for what I see as atrocities being meeted out on a daily basis to everything and everyone - but I don't want to live in a constant state of anger and grief. I don't advocate putting your head in the sand, that's not going to help; I believe that we need to do what we can to change the world on every level. So attend anti-fracking rallies where you can. Sign petitions, all that stuff (as I did in Exeter on Sunday. There were pitifully few of us.)

I believe it's incredibly important to acknowledge our grief about the state of our world and our fears for the future, grief and fear are both part of becoming motivated to act for change - but if you stay in grief and fear then ultimately I believe that they are immobilising, so we have to feel them AND - believe in Love. Be love. Know that everything is made up of the same stuff; we are part of the wholeness of creation, part of The Goddess and she is part of us. So, if we 'will' that it be so, if we WILL with every bit of our Breath, our Will and our Imagination that the world is a place that will support the life and health of all things, then it will be so (as long as there are enough of us wanting that). And that little bit in the brackets.... that's the crux of it! There have to be enough of us. So it seems to me that the most useful, the most political, the most revolutionary act is the dissemination of information about our world and what's being done to it. If  Sunday's anti-fracking rally showed me anything at all, it's that far too many people out there simply have no idea what's going on. Some of them genuinely can't see any further than the end of their noses and don't care to, but far more just haven't noticed.

The lambs are still being born, right on cue - some say that Imbolc means 'Ewe's milk'.

This year my Imbolc ceremony will focus itself not on what I want for me but on what I want for my land; the place of my roots, that without which I am nothing, have nowhere to live and nothing to love.

Christina Rosetti wrote

At Last 
Many have sung of love a root of bane:

       While to my mind a root of balm it is,

For love at length breeds love; sufficient bliss

For life and death and rising up again.

Surely when light of Heaven makes all things plain,

    Love will grow plain with all its mysteries;

    Nor shall we need to fetch from over seas

Wisdom or wealth or pleasure safe from pain.

Love in our borders, love within our heart,

    Love all in all, we then shall bide at rest,

    Ended for ever life’s unending quest,

         Ended for ever effort, change and fear:

Love all in all; —no more that better part

         Purchased, but at the cost of all things here