A Ha'penny Will Do: A Pagan Perspective on Christmas

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The noise of the internet is in my head today as I sit down to my computer. Already afternoon — where did the morning go? All fog and rain here in the hilly Steel City, and no snow yet this year except for that brief slushy mix drifting from the sky on Black Friday, as if in response to some pre-planned Xmas Shopping marketing ploy. December already, and the full moon, a full Fire Friend moon last night. Fire Friend, high cloud-webbed shining rock in the sky on the drive home, echoing the tasteful evergreen wreaths wrapped with strings of tiny star-like lights and topped with red bows on the windows of the house next door. I joked with Jeff about putting one of those cheap plastic candelabras in the downstairs window of his apartment. In a Jewish neighborhood that decks itself out in huge wooden lawn menorahs and fills the grocery store aisles with blue and silver Hanukkah decorations every year, would anybody even second guess which holy day we were celebrating?

Christmas is coming. Amidst the noise in my brain this afternoon, that song wends its way through. "Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...." It's strange, but Christmas is one of those holidays that make me feel the most Pagan. Maybe it's all the greenery brought in from outside, the whole-hearted unabashed singing and celebrating and decorating, especially with the simple old-fashioned trimmings of ribbon and candles and holly and bits of shining tinsel. During the Christmas season, my parents' house itself becomes a kind of walk-in shrine to Yuletide Cheer, and I've inherited my fair share of holiday decorations that find themselves strewn about my apartment each year, a simple nativity scene still taking a privileged place atop the armoire in the living room. The green and red and ribbon and fire and shiny things, all this raging against the dying of the light, is all very Christmas-y to me, though. Alban Arthan, the solstice, remains distinctly quiet, reflective and dark, the new-born sun like a small, cold seed of potential light still to be planted, hidden away, unripe and unready. Yet it seems more obvious than ever that both of these are necessary, both moods relevant and revelatory each in their own ways.

This year, my decorations will be migrating over to Jeff's place where, for the first time, I will be sharing Christmas with children as a kind of parent-figure in my own right. Children who still don't know Santa Claus isn't real (despite the oldest being eleven and having only just found out the Tooth Fairy has been mommy all along). The "story" we're sticking to, in case this is the year they ask, is that Santa is real, because he is the spirit of generosity and gift-giving that we invite into our lives and into our hearts, to help guide us in choosing the perfect gift for our loved ones. It's the same story my parents explained to me the year I playfully, but knowingly, asked my father for Santa's phone number because I needed to call him and update my wish list, and my father in turn dutifully dictated our own home phone number as I dialed, a mischievous look on his face. And if this weren't also a bit of a lie — if we weren't more carefully guided by marketing and game-theory parenting — it would be a very nice story, a lot nicer than just acknowledging that we lie to our children every year. But I find that I can't be all too concerned with whether or not the kids believe in Santa Claus (though I worry sometimes that the longer their disillusionment takes, the more fundamentally disturbing it will be for them in the end). Instead, I have found myself ruminating on Christianity and the story of Christ, and how to share this with the children in a meaningful way as a Pagan "parent."

Honestly, I find that I'm having a bit of an identity crisis over the Christmas holiday this year. Not so much the kind that leaves me wondering who I am — I know who I am — but the kind where I find myself asking, "Who the f' are all of you, anyway?" Christmas is still the one time a year when I attend church with my family, though I no longer participate in the sacrament of Communion out of respect for the Catholic Church's own sense of community-identity boundaries and sacred mysteries. Every year, midnight on Christmas Eve (or, I guess technically, Christmas morning) finds me sitting meditatively in one of the long, polished-wooden pews of my old church, smiling familiarly at the faces I recognize, noting the muted creams, greens and golds of the church's Christmas decorations, neither gaudy nor solstice-seasonal, that always seemed so oddly out of touch with everything except the building's own particular sense of style.

Midnight Mass is presided over every year by a priest now well into his eighties, who is one of the wiser and kinder spiritual leaders I've known in my life, and who speaks gently and deliberately each prayer and blessing. Whereas once I thought his long pauses and slow pacing were signs of senility finally setting in, work with regular meditation in my private life has in recent years opened up these moments of quiet, in the darkest hour of the longest night, to reveal the spaciousness of absence and Mystery. From the warm lights and bustling family noises of a cheery home edged with expectation and excitement, each year we venture out into the windy darkness of winter midnight, starlight scattered across shorn-down fields rolling out to the horizon in all directions, to sit for a time in dimly-lit tranquility, singing old, familiar songs in keys nobody can comfortably reach. And when the wizened priest stands at the altar and recites the Proclamation of Christmas — "Today, the twenty-fifth day of the month of December, countless ages after the creation of the world..." — to the building crescendo of the organ piling chord upon chord, culminating in the announcement that Jesus is born, today, this day, in the present tense, while the organ shakes the building to its rafters, every year I feel that strange and knowing thrill. The thrill of mystery, where garish light-filled celebration collides with darkness and fragility and the silence of the rumbling, trembling pipes of music suddenly cutting out.

And I find myself wondering, this year especially, what does all this have to do with Christianity?

Now, I think many Christians would themselves say that this is it, this is really the heart of Christianity when all's said and done. This moment of creation and beauty and light within the gently howling darkness. Yet so many things get tacked on, added and amended, huge socio-political institutions growing up around simple, powerful truths, institutions that expect assent to certain formulae and doctrines, that draw conclusions about heaven, hell, salvation and revelation. I no longer believe the story of Jesus as exclusive spiritual truth, let alone as literal historical fact. Yet I believe in the story in a way that anchors it deeply in my bones, regardless of what religious community I belong to; I believe in the truths this story tells. I have not left those truths behind; they were in many ways the very thing that led me to Druidry, that left me dissatisfied with Christianity as an organized religion. These truths have never disappeared from my life, and yet I am as sure of them today — as sure of their mystery and power and gentleness and goodness — as I am sure that in every way that counts, I'm no longer a Christian. Not really.

But that leaves me with a question. Because the solstice season is a season of noisy celebration and fire-lighting and gift-giving, as much as it is a time of death and darkness and the suffering struggle of rebirth in the biting, barren cold. And the story of Christ being born is, all theology and doctrine aside, the story of the birth of the world, weak and squirming and covered in glop, the on-going singing of the World Song, ever-new and always renewing, today, this very day, in the present tense. So the question I'm left with is: how do I share this aspect of the solstice, Alban Arthan, with children never raised with a theology of god-become-man, not even familiar with the story, with the bizarre notion that Utter Godness is within each of us? And how do I tell them the story without getting bogged down with the language of doctrine and interfaith politics? Never mind that Santa Claus isn't real, how do I teach them the things that are?

Because one thing you can certainly say for Christians is, they've got focus. The birth of a sun-child on the winter solstice is all the more powerful when that babe of light is the unique Revelation of Spirit, the whole Divine shebang condensed down into this singular, fragile form. This is, in some ways, poetry heightened to the nth degree: not only the use of particulars to speak of universals, but the exclusive worshipful focus on a single Particular as the whole of the Universe. The Hindu bhakti yogic discipline of love and devotion to one particular deity has nothing on this. And the mild Pagan focus on Mabon, or Sol Invictus, or whatever other solar deity... well, feels a bit lacking in comparison, just another god among a whole slew of gods and goddesses to choose from, if you please. Besides which, the gods of Pagan polytheism sometimes feel so heroic and larger-than-life that the utter mystery of vulnerability and weakness gets left in the mythic-metaphorical dust.

Whereas, take Mary, whose only superpower was having not had sex yet. As the story goes, this young woman, living in poverty, sustained in her livelihood largely by family and community ties and betrothed to a man she loved deeply, is confronted by God — friggin' God, you guys — and given the choice to bear a holy son destined, after only a few short years on the planet, for degradation, suffering and death. Aside from the destiny of the child, to be an unmarried woman and pregnant at this time risked personal shame and community rejection, jeopardizing the future of her marriage and permanent ostracism from the social ties on which she depended. And the Universe itself basically asked her permission, this nobody, this fragile little human thing, and in full knowledge, knowing what risk she faced and the suffering it would bring, confronting the overwhelming injustice of it, and her own smallness and impotence in stopping it... she said yes. No goddess with nothing really to lose. Just an ordinary woman, who gave birth to a god as wrinkled and spongy and smelly as any infant.

There is something important in this, something that I wonder sometimes might be missing from today's Paganism still deepening and finding its sea-legs. There is, in the Christmas story, something about confronting the reality of darkness and suffering, not with shouting and singing and leaping bonfires in defiance, nor with acquiescence, silent obedience or willful denial... but with quiet, unflinching affirmation, the affirmation of empowerment, courage and strength, the life-giving, meaning-making affirmation of creation. A recent comment from a reader of this blog spoke of the "gentle respect" for suffering and difficulty that lurks sometimes in my writings here. For me, sorrow, loneliness and grief go hand-in-hand with joy, connection and love in this life we live together, in this song we all are singing. In a very real way, I could not devalue or deny these things without sacrificing the fullness and complexity of beauty and life, without substituting a shallower, simpler version of mere contentedness and safety in their place. This is a truth of my Druidry, my Paganism — the balance, the intricate interweaving of darkness and suffering with illumination and ecstasy. The liminal space between, within which nothing is precisely delineated and separate.

And so, this is the space I find myself in again as Christmas approaches. Wondering, wandering in a liminal space that is not precisely Pagan, nor exactly Christian. Asking myself how to teach children that realizing their own inner Santa Claus is infinitely more challenging than believing in some unlikely literal jolly-old-elf, and infinitely more rewarding. Asking myself where I belong, where we all belong, and how we belong to each other. Asking myself how I can tell the stories of my ancestors, pagan and Christian alike, to the children of my partner, who do not really share those ancestors with me, at least not by blood. What can I say that will be meaningful and relevant for them, that will share with them the "spirit of the season" that I have come to know and love and value? What will I say when they come singing, a penny for my thoughts?

Well, like the song says, if you haven't got a penny, maybe a ha'penny will do. And if you haven't got a ha'penny... may the gods bless you.

These Holy Days

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Yesterday morning, I woke up to Christmas. Four in the morning, I was warm and buzzing nestled between soft pillows and a billowy comforter, the holiday songs from my dreams still echoing in my sleepy memory. What had I been dreaming? A tiled sauna and a room full of hot cascading showers, a shuffling choir, long curtains of fabric draped in folds and shifting gently in a warm breeze... My bedroom was cool and dark, utterly quiet, as sun, steam and bright colors wound ribbons of anticipation and giddy joy through my mind. Some days just feel like Christmas.

Another hour of light dozing and my alarm was going off. As I dressed and ate breakfast, I caught myself humming "Santa Baby" ...I really do believe in you, let's see if you believe in me... I walked to work through blue twilit dawn, the scent of the late February air--tense with chill, sparkling just slightly under each streetlamp in diffuse wisps of crystalline snow--seeming entwined with hints of peppermint and cinnamon; even the smell of cigarette smoke wafting down early morning city streets reminded me instead of smoldering hearth fires and sap reaching up lazily through the limbs of pines. All morning felt like a holiday. When I wasn't paying attention, I slipped backwards through the calendar, pulsing with gratitude and energy.

My first customer of the morning was a disheveled-looking woman with suitcases and overflowing canvas tote bags piled up around her in the tiny booth where she sat sipping her coffee and fingering an unlit cigarette back and forth across her knuckles. The waitress from the midnight shift shrugged and shook her head. "It's not like she's out of her right mind or anything..." I glanced at the woman grinning dreamily across the dining room. "When she came in, she threw up her arms in the air in a bear-hug," my manager chimed in, "I thought she was going to attack you!" I walked a fresh pot of coffee over and topped off her mug. The woman winked. "It's cold enough out there to shiver my timbers!" I smiled. "That's what we're here for," I said, gesturing gently with the steaming pot.

All morning, the woman sat in her booth, hunched over a newspaper, stepping out sometimes for a smoke. From behind the counter, I could see her bundled, hunched form shifting from foot to foot outside the hazy window, reaching sometimes to tap ash into the street's gutter. Another thin layer of dust covering the dusting of snow and gray hunks of sidewalk salt. Other customers came and went, the usual barrage of coffee, eggs, hot tea and homefries, oatmeal and bagels and french toast and fruit. Some were regulars, catching up on news, asking after my family and sharing stories from the weekend. Others were new faces, or only vaguely familiar, meeting strangers to talk morning business, or sitting alone with their palms cupping the smooth porcelain side of a grande carmel latte. Warmth radiated. My manager kept to the basement, going over the usual Monday morning inventory, and upstairs it was just the one sleepy cook and myself drifting through the oldie tunes playing over the muzak system. Sometimes I sang along softly to myself, feeling the roots of my hair prickle as though radiating heat in a halo of lazy melody.

Midmorning, a soldier came in, dressed in gray sweat fatigues, and sat at a table by himself in the far corner of the dining room. Soldiers make me a little uncomfortable, I admit. "Service" means something so different to me. Courage and loyalty, discipline.... I've known boys who went off after high school to become soldiers, often just for the financial aid or health benefits. Two of them have died because of it--one in war, one from sudden heart failure while training to pass his physicals. Another called me a "childish c*nt" and stopped speaking to me when I joked about anarchy and a community shaped by Gandhi's satyagraha, love-force, instead of a Big Brother military enforcing our interests overseas. These men--mostly men--sit in their uniforms and follow strict protocols of civility, refusing to eat until a commanding officer has begun on his own meal, calling us waitresses "ma'am" as though we were all mothers or teachers. But they have also been trained how to kill, to level a gun or swiftly drop a missile with the same precision and detachment. I am a pacifist, perhaps by nature; I cannot choose war, I cannot choose military even in its most abstracted and ideal form. And so soldiers--unlike police officers, or EMTs, or the local crossing guards--make me feel how deeply I am a civilian, how soft and far I am from a fighter.

I always wonder what they're thinking. As I dropped off this soldier's breakfast--a young man hardly older than myself from the looks of it, and sullen in the frozen morning sunlight cutting down through the long restaurant windows--I smiled and felt my own uncertainty lurking beneath my usual kind and eager inquiries about refills and condiments. I always want them to know that I respect them as human beings, rather than as soldiers. I always want them to feel the aching wish in my heart that they would one day just... give it up, that every one of them would give it up and come home and leave the weaponry to rust. National security be damned. Politics and power-plays be damned. In this small, cozy diner where every scent, every scrape of silverware or drip of the coffee machine, is familiar and resonant... I always want them, for a while, to cease to be fighters and become men again.

With barely a dozen words exchanged between us, eventually the young soldier picked his check up off the table and came to the register to pay. He stood, seemingly distracted and uneasy, as I punched in the amount and he rummaged for change in his wallet. Then from behind him, the disheveled woman was approaching, tapping him softly on the shoulder, muttering something too low for me to hear. "No, ma'am," he replied, looking down at his gray sweats, "Just standard issue." A moment longer the woman stood before him, her old body a good head shorter and a good deal wider and softer than his own muscled and rough beneath the worn gray fabric. Then, she threw her arms up in the air, and drew him into an embrace that seemed to grow long and quiet from the center of her being. For a moment, everything in the dining room stopped. I lowered my eyes.

Then, she shuffled back over to her seat and took up her coffee mug again. I watched the young man out of the corner of my eye as I counted quarters and nickels back to him; once or twice, he glanced over at where the woman sat, as if bewildered or shaken. I wished him a nice day, and he thanked me distractedly. He stepped away from the register, hesitated, then turned slowly towards her booth. "Thank you," was all he said. The woman looked up and grinned her awkward, tooth-rotted grin, split open with caring.

"Pass it on," she said, "Pass on love. We all have to try to become better people."

The young soldier nodded his head, or bowed it, as he walked back out into the cold.



Later, another coworker arrived, picking up my slack as business increased despite the ever-denser snowfall outside. Shafts of sunlight that had cast sharp, long shadows across the carpet earlier in the morning were replaced by monotone grays and whites in slow, low-lying clouds wending their way between buildings and alleys across the street. The old woman was back outside sucking delicately at a cigarette when my coworker glanced at her fort of battered, pudgy suitcases and asked disdainfully, "Who's at booth thirty-three?" thinking it was a bag-lady.

Perhaps she was. "Just a woman getting coffee," I said. I shrugged and shook my head, feeling tears stinging the corners of my wide, humming eyes. "It's not like she's out of her right mind or anything..."

Poems by Wendell Berry

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The Cold

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping

--to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.






Earth and Fire

In this woman the earth speaks.
Her words open in me, cells of light
flashing in my body, and make a song
that I follow toward her out of my need.
The pain I have given her I wear
like another skin, tender, the air
around me flashing with thorns.
And yet such joy as I have given her
sings in me and is part of her song.
The winds of her knees shake me
like a flame. I have risen up from her,
time and again, a new man.






February 2, 1968

In the dark of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter,
war spreading, families dying, the world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.






To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

A Brief Note of Renewal

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There will be one or possibly even two more "Re-Membering Theology" posts before the series is finished (I actually quite like how the series is evolving and sprawling all over the place, incorporating much more than I had first anticipated). But before moving on, I just wanted to mention something that has also been on my mind a great deal recently: the atrocities in Gaza.

What is happening in the Gaza strip--what has been happening, not just for the past two weeks but for the past several decades--is wrong. It is not just wrong, it is monstrous. I cannot even feel my old familiar political angst over the issue. It's too clear-cut for angst. To suggest that the tragedy of the Holocaust and the genocide of Jewish Europeans can somehow excuse and justify a theocratic government (which is what a government is when it forces its democracy to confirm to an ethno-religious identity, as Israel's "Jewish democracy" does by driving out or exterminating the non-Jewish native population)--to suggest that this tragedy can justify such a government terrorizing an entire population... well. That sentence is so packed with anger and pain that I can't even finish it.

We must not confuse anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism (bigotry directed against Palestinians/Arabs, who are also Semitic in descent and religion, is also anti-Semitism, by the way). We must not confuse a denouncement of the Israel government with a rejection of the Jewish people. And we must not stand by and continue to allow the U.S. government to send billions of dollars in military aid to a government involved in its own little genocide. It is clear that the Israeli government does not care about the Palestinian people; it has illegally occupied land, uprooted families and destroyed livelihoods, allowed children to starve and imprisoned adults, and now it is bombarding the population ruthlessly in a pre-planned attack that needed no provocation. (In light of this abusive treatment, is it any wonder that groups like Hamas can find support? If you doubt for a moment that the average American wouldn't turn to such groups under similar circumstances, ask yourself how you justified the overthrow of not one but two foreign governments (Afghanistan and Iraq) in the aftermath of one American building destroyed on a sunny morning by people who weren't even from those countries.)

But as angry and disgusted as I am, I am also filled with hope as this new year dawns. The city of Pittsburgh is suddenly full of protest and debate. Students have gathered--indoors and sometimes in the streets--for the last several days to protest the massacre and show solidarity for Gaza and the Palestinian people. People here are talking, finally. Four or five months ago, I would never have believed that I could not only freely express my disapproval of America's blind support of Israel, but that others around me would be nodding and saying, "Yes, enough's enough." But all around me, people are watching the bodies of emaciated children and dismembered mothers carted out of the Gaza Strip, and they're wondering how long it takes for a child to waste away like that. Surely not twelve days. Certainly a forty percent civilian casualty rate is too high (when the Palestinian death toll is almost a hundred times that of Israelis). People have compared Gaza to an "open-air concentration camp"--and for once, they are not being bullied into silence by politically-correct cries of "Holocaust-denier!" and "never again!" For too long, we've allowed "never again" to mean "well, again, but not to us, to someone else this time." This is not acceptable, and people are finally waking up to that fact.

I feel a similar renewal in the Pagan community, in the wake of deo's podcast ending. Certainly not on the scale (either of tragedy or resulting discussion) as the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, but energizing and hope-filled nonetheless.

Out of hardship and doubt come rebirth and renewal, out of struggle comes community and perspective, and hopefully a fresh new beginning. I'm waiting for spring, in some ways vibrating with anticipation as the sleet slices through the wind outside and the streets and the trees glisten under a slick coating of ice. I am waiting for spring, waiting for the sun to climb, waiting for the warmth, waiting to feel new again. There is a struggle ahead of us. There always is. But there are also moments of gratitude and momentum, of elevation and even awe. Attending a gallery opening last night to raise money to send aid into Gaza, I overheard its organizers speaking, close to tears, about how they were running out of seating and unable to fit everyone in the modestly chosen lounge area. Sometimes it's enough to show up, to be present, to allow our presence and our engagement to manifest our care and our desire to change the world for the better. Afterwards, I walked home through the woods--each shadow highlighted and stark against the layering snow, a full moon glowing faintly among low clouds... It is winter. It is still very much winter.

But I trudge through the snow and the dark. And I didn't cry. I felt, for once, too lucky and too hopeful and too committed to cry.

Memories of Winter.

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It's snowing outside again.

Earlier this autumn someone, I think my father, told me they were predicting a snowy winter this year. Because I don't drive, I never developed the automatic dislike of snow that many people seem to have. To me, snow still means a Lancaster county winter from my childhood: two-hour school delays, matching scarves and knit hats, plastic trash can lids transformed into make-shift sleds, the creek down the block from my parents' house freezing over, the crunch of boots on packed-down ice crystals, the thin shovel-scraped paths struggling over uneven sidewalks. It means vast landscapes of farm lands and scraggly wooded hills frosted over as if by a fine dust, as if finally left alone to settle into a good old silence.

Winter in college seems hardly memorable, except for the long, cold walks to the grocery store, rain trickling and pooling overtop the dangerous icy surface of walkways where afternoon sun had turned snow to slush and evening shadows had refrozen it into hard, slippery terrain. Though I remember walking to the bridge once and watching the snow--huge flakes hovering in air just above freezing, almost like soft down shook free from an old blanket--disappear into the dark, shimmering, moving waters of the river fifty feet below. And the time I went to Hunsberger Woods alone, snow several inches thick on the ground already and still falling, the sky low, layered and gray, suddenly broken by hundreds of geese crisscrossing in v-shaped flocks in every direction at once, the noise of their wings and harsh calls echoing confused in the quiet and, just as suddenly, gone again. I stood there staring up with the vertigo of watching snow fall towards me from an invisible height, feeling like the bare limbs of the trees everywhere had just exploded into feathers and beaks, feeling like a god had just slipped by above me.

Winter here... has always been tough. Several years ago, something painful happened to me at the end of October, and since then autumn has always slunk by, dulled and fractured by memories of grief and anxiety, dropping off without color or passion into a dull, slinking winter season. The first year, back when I still had television, I spent the darkest days of the year barely out of my pajamas (except when forced to go to work), curled up under blankets watching reruns of X-Files. On Imbolc, I went into the woods in Schenley Park and lit a small blue candle in the snow, sat with it as it guttered and smoked and rekindled and guttered again each time the wind turned. I was embarrassed, afraid of being caught by some jogger or a woman walking her dog. I was still new to Druidry then, still feeling exotic and strange. But no one was out, and I sat on the stone footbridge listening to the water of the stream shiver along under stiff dead leaves and frozen underbrush.

This year may be different. Usually, I'm so eager to leave autumn behind I fling myself headlong into the Christmas season, decorating my apartment with all the old ornaments and garlands inherited from my mother, lighting dozens of candles and enjoying the Christmas music on the radio. This year, fall was almost a relief. I didn't write much in this blog about it, finding it hard to put into words, but for the first time in years, autumn seemed to have color again, and shape and life to it. I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved which I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. And then, even towards the end, how beautiful and subtle the browns became, some deep like wet bark, some light and feathery like sheaves of wheat or rustling like straw, the ochre, russet, everything in sepia tones. There was a stand of sycamores outside the library in Oakland that everyday seemed to have life, each day different, moods that shifted and changed. Sometimes they were bright against the backdrop of concrete buildings and city skyline, sometimes faded and gentle, hardly distinguishable, but quiet and present. I can't tell you how these sycamores alone seemed to be, for the first time, so real to me, so very much alive.

I find myself, now, uninterested in making myself "feel Christmasy." A week ago, I walked home from work through a light snow, glancing up past the top of an evergreen at a tiny winter sun obscured by clouds. And what I felt was not a surge of "Christmas spirit" or "Yuletide cheer." Instead, I was struck by a sense of fragile, frigid rebirth, the sun gasping for breath in the cold and working its way back towards the warmth still lurking, sleeping in the earth--for the first time, I felt the coming of the solstice, Alban Arthan, "the light of winter." It was not the gaudy reds and greens, the tinsel and bells, the singing or crackling fire, it was not Christmas. It was something so much quieter, darker, farther away--yet everywhere, fine dust on the trees and frost inching up the window.

It was winter, a hush and lightness moving slowly through the deep.

That Is Not Spring

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Two more poems of my own (in honor of the Brigid in Cyberspace Poetry Reading), focusing on the realities of early February here in Western Pennsylvania, where this morning I walked to work past ice-coated and bare, unbudded tree limbs while the local woods hunches down, suspicious of the wind, and shrugs up its only shabby coat of dead, colorless leaves... The days are longer, the lights are lit--but we still have a ways to go.

Unweathered Song

What rock could withstand such air,
the diamond cut and cold of snow on stone?
Yet nestled here and there,
the chickadees note dawn in beak and bone.



Snowfall Warmed in Afternoon Sunlight

Hung muted faery tongues upon the wind,
muscles freed from voice and sense to dance
an unmeasured tune like bells, white glinting bells
strung silent as on unseen strings and tell
the flexing air of winter's long-invisible expanse,
of night, of creaking ponds of ice, and of its end.

Psalms for the Solstice

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Deep calls to deep
       at the thunder of thy cataracts;
all thy waves and thy billows
       have gone over me.
By day the Lord commands his steadfast love;
       and at night his song is with me,
       a prayer to the God of my life.

- Psalm 42:7 - 8



Song of Winter's Dark

White edged in gold, the rose of the earth,
as deep calls to deep.
Gentle the night and the star of rebirth,
as deep calls to deep.

Silent, the suffering dark of the tomb,
as deep calls to deep.
Murmuring heart strings, harp of the womb,
as deep calls to deep.

All that is withered, weathered or worn,
as deep calls to deep.
All that through love ever seeks to be born,
as deep calls to deep.

Brilliant and breaking, as deep calls to deep,
So blessed is the waking, so sacred the sleep.



(The above poem is one I wrote last year for my Solstice/Alban Arthuan ceremony.)

Winter Ember Days

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The sun has set on the longest night.

Sitting here in my quiet little living room on the night of the Winter Solstice, Alban Arthuan, I suddenly feel that overwhelming wistfulness of "wanting to go home." This silly old apartment is more my home than any place has been since I was almost too little to remember. I feel very lucky in my life--people come and go, and new people arrive and stir up stress and hope, but somehow I still feel lucky and loved and not so alone. Lonely, though. It's one of those evenings when I really wish I had a cat. I remember my cat--I think maybe she was the same way. No matter how loving and affectionate she could be at times (or tolerant of cuddles in her old age) I think maybe there was a little part of her that was also lonely, always a little lonely after our old dog died. Can an animal have that kind of loneliness?

We spend a lot of energy trying not to be sad these days, trying to avoid the risk of becoming sad. We pursue happiness--after all, that's what this country is built on, isn't it? And when a new insecurity or unforeseen need or desire arises (or someone creates one in us as a way of exercising power over us and earning trust or money from us), we do our best to placate, ameliorate, mitigate.

All I want is to learn to walk through sadness and come out the other side. I want to learn how to live a life that is not hedged in by the fear of sadness or loss. I think I'm getting better at it, at pressing onward, walking through the thick of it, the heavy darkness, dense with grief and the extinction of the grasping ego... but the other side is still lonely. Maybe because so few make it through.

So I'm wistful tonight for the home I left in order to make a new home on the other side of sadness. Maybe this is why birth is really so amazing--that we can make of our very bodies a home for an innocent new being--that, like those physical houses constructed out of sacrificed trees and broken stones, we can build that kind of sanctuary. A warm hearth, a place from which new happiness on this side of loss and hardship can begin again. Even when we have passed through sadness and loneliness, been shaped by them and scarred by them, that we can still become a bridge to the new, to the newly born, to the beginning.

The Last Snow.

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This might be the last snow of winter. All day the season seems to spend itself upon the air, a glinting dust caught in a wind which swallows it, a shimmer caught in the slant of late afternoon sun whose warmth has already overcome it. Winter spends the last of itself in a thin layer across the already greening grass. I scatter a handful of sunflower seeds on my balcony rail, and their tiny black bodies melt the snow beneath them at the slightest touch of their tiny black heat. This might be the last snow.

What is the point of all this planning? What purpose does it serve, to strive and to work? For what? Under the sun, nothing is original--the seeds are all of them small and familiar. To write the book that will open minds. To love a man with a good heart. To give voice and service, gratitude and praise. Every year, people bundled against the fickle mouth of March complain that spring has not come soon enough, that surely now--when the days have almost overtaken the nights, when the birds and the bulbs seem to have such certainty in what is coming--now there must be some relief from the cold. But winter is always too long, spring too hesitant, summer too swift. What if all I strive for, I achieve? What if I write that book--haven't others written such books before me? Haven't I learned from their examples and been inspired by their works? And yet here again, it is cold today, and the snow bites, and I am sad and uncertain. Whatever task I face, even if I should overcome it, there will be another. What is the purpose of such a struggle, when what has been accomplished dwindles to memory and what remains is only the demand for yet another feat of strength, a new moment of sacrifice or humility or acceptance?

The cardinal chirps in the empty bush. She is subtle and faded, hopping among the shriveled berries that have clung to the branches since autumn. Not like her mate--he could be singing of sunrises, of bright and unmitigated romantic passions, or of bloody war. He does not find the red, red rose of love to be trite; he is rich and blazing and self-assured. But she is like a painting which has been partly rubbed away. She is like the blood once it has dried, the wound once it has begun to heal. Only when she flexes a bit and flits to this twig or that one, does the sore sanguine of her underwing show. Perhaps she seems to flinch. Still, she sings. The sun warms the dull brick, and the snow does not stick long to the ground.

I want to choose this, to choose life. Though it is hard, I want to choose it anyway. I want to choose to participate, freely and creatively, in the stubborn play of humanity. I want to love, though nature is indifferent and people misconstrue. I want to be loved, though love cannot save me. I will not despair if sometimes my heart feels small and dark--let the sun lick the hard shell until the snow around me begins to melt, let me be eaten or let me split open. Let it all begin again.

Today's Ogham: nGetal (Broom)
(cleaning, healing, herbal lore)