On Imbolc

Lighting the sacred fires

It is Imbolc. It is raining and it is the village wassail. I organised it, but instead of being in the orchard spilling cider and waking trees, I lie feverish on the couch with a pile of snotty tissues and a half-drunk mug of lemon and ginger tea. This January has made me sick.

I am sick of the horrors on the news. Of princes and presidents victimising those who lie beneath them. Terrorising the ones who came chasing the visions dangled before them of a better life. But isn’t that how they got here, our conquerors? Invading others’ lands, chasing visions of the better life they promised? We have all come from somewhere. But where on earth do we all go from here?

This is the same question the other creatures ask as the rising flood waters wash away their homes.

It is a full moon. It is fully madness.

On the 2^nd of June 2020 I was moved to post online, to plead with white British friends to recognise that the violent harm inflicted on the body of George Floyd was not a distant, isolated act. That this harm was already happening to us all, and would soon, visibly and explicitly, come for them too if we all continued to remain silent, complicit and compliant. This January it came for the bodies of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

The rain grieves harder. The wind sobs against the windows. Across the ocean the rising tide laps at our shores.

I blow my nose and scroll through reports of released files. The ones with wealth and power who exploit and profit from our vulnerability in the open also do so in secret. As always, everything, and everyone, is connected. Online, the image of the body of a young woman lies on the floor, a black square obscuring her face. I remember the summer of black squares online, obscuring real action. We lie prone, our overlords crouched grinning above us.

It is Imbolc, the very beginning of spring, when the world begins to wake. Cider is spilled to wake the trees, will the blood spilled in the streets finally wake us? It is Imbolc, ‘in the belly’: a day to visit the holy well, to light the sacred fire. The rain falls even more heavily, the sky an emptying holy well.

A full moon Imbolc wassail happens in the rain in the old orchard and a community of humans gathers in love to stamp the ground beneath the trees, feed the spirits with bread, water tree roots with the cider they once made. Voices are raised in songs of joyful connection, and home we come again, to light the sacred fires of rage in our bellies, to fully, finally, burn away this sick madness.