Happy Groundhog’s Day, Bright Ones! For today, I offer a collage of writings from past Imbolc days:
What do you bring up into the light today?
What has been developing within you during your Winter Sleep?
What does the dawning light tell you about your shadows?
How does the coming sun define the shape of you?
Groundhog’s Day is a modern version of the ancient celebration of the Goddess Brigid, who became syncretized with the Catholic Saint Brigid, whose feast day is February 1 or 2, depending on whom you ask. Brigid asks: What path will you commit yourself to in the coming season?
SONG FOR POETS: A POEM FOR BRIGHID’S DAY
by Beth Weaver-Kreider, Feb 2013
(Today we look for that jolly rodent, and also we commemorate Brighid, triple goddess and patroness of Ireland, Saint of Kildare. Smithcraft, poetry, and healing arts are her realms.)
Sacred wells, undying flame.
We forge our words on your anvil,
listening for the sweet ping
of hammer on metal,
watching the sparks fly outward,
shaping and crafting.
We seek them like wild herbs
found only on the side of a mountain
for a short season each year.
We search under bracken,
through briar and thorn,
stepping through bogs,
listening for the birdsong
that tells us we have arrived
at the proper place.
We give ourselves to words,
not waiting for inspiration,
but chasing it like skuthers of fog
over the misty hills.
Seeking the solace and healing
that words offer,
and turning our minds
to do that healing work.
Crafting our words
into tools and enticements.
A year and a day
the old ones would pledge
to your service.
So may it be.
One year of poetry,
making it, reading it.
Oh Lady, give us poetry.
Questions to Contemplate in the Season of Brigid:
This is the season of sunlight and shadow:
What is the shape of my shadow?
How does it hamper me?
How does it hold me?
How does it tell me the shape of my soul?
Brigid is the Smith, she who works the forges:
What within me is being tempered this season?
What is being shaped and shifted?
What sacred patterns are being traced along my edges?
What useful tool am I being forged to become?
Brigid is the Healer.
The waters of her well bring wholeness.
What spaces within me need the touch of her waters?
What dis-ease drains my vitality?
How can I offer the waters of healing to others?
Brigid is Patroness of Poets.
How do words shape my reality, like iron is shaped in the forge?
How do my words bring healing, like water from the well?
How can I speak poetry into the cold and the shadows
of the season which is upon us?
Can I offer my daily words with the care and the artfulness of the poet?
Gratitudes:
1. My neighbor and his snow blower. We got some good exercise shoveling about a third of the driveway, for about an hour. Then Ron brought his snow blower over and finished up the rest in five minutes.
2. We might be covered in a foot of snow, but the birds are singing spring songs.
3. Breathing out. Starting afresh. My new semester is feeling like a field of unbroken snow, waiting for us to cover it with our little birdy tracks.
4. Two snow days right when I need them.
5. Professional development. I learned a new thing–sort of by accident–about how to design Google Slides this morning. And I’ve listened to Sonya Renee Taylor talking about Accountability vs. Cancel Culture. Take a deep, deep breath. Yes, Call people out, when the situation warrants. Call people in when you can. But, she says, let’s call on each other. Don’t be “bound to the binary” of calling out or calling in. “Your amygdala is your business.”
Walk in Beauty, Beloveds!
“Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution.” —Albert Einstein
“Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” —Cornel West
“It is the scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox.
“T. S. Eliot said that in poetry there is ‘a perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations.’ It is perpetual; it cannot be kept out of the poem; it can only be directed and controlled.
“The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize terms, to freeze them into strict denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive. The terms are continually modifying each other, and thus violating their dictionary meanings.” —Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox”
“Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song.” —Borges
“Stories you read when you’re the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you’ll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.” —Neil Gaiman
Mockingbird Chronicles 