It’s been a whole season in pagan time since I last updated: Alban Arthuan, the celebration of the Winter Solstice, has given way to Imbolc, the first wakening of the earth, commemorated by the Church and popular culture as Candlemas, the feast of St. Brigid of Kildare, and Groundhog Day. While my part of North America has had unseasonably warm and even humid weather during this time, I’ve been undergoing an appropriate hibernation, a cold and dark winter of the spirit that I think is just beginning to lighten.
I dislike using the words “dark night of the soul”. St. John of the Cross, who coined that term, meant something specific by it, specific to his type of Christian mysticism. While I don’t claim to understand what he meant, I do feel sure that a good many people who use the phrase are not having the experience Fray Juan had out of which he coined that description, especially if they are using it to mean a depressed and sleepless night in a comfortable bed. So I won’t say I had “a dark night of the soul”. “A winter of the spirit” seems to work, however. If the external weather was more like late fall than deep winter, if even January was warmer than it’s wont to be, my internal weather has been pretty bleak. Magical work has ground to a halt. The gods who seemed so present, so communicative, for most of last year, fell silent and seemed to disappear, as if they’d gone south with the birds. There were days I did not know how much longer I could bear getting up before the sunrise, waking my companion birds in order to feed and water them, working in a windowless office, then coming home after dark. The one bit of leaven in this heavy loaf was that I began writing in a notebook again, keeping a journal on paper, doing Morning Pages a la The Artist’s Way, and generating lots of raw creative material in daily writing practice.
I spent a lot of time thrashing around, internally, flailing helplessly, starting things and not finishing them, and asking the gods Why? and Where are you? and What have I done? I didn’t make any progress flailing and thrashing, and I haven’t gotten any answers to my questions. But as so often after these periods of trying to save myself from drowning by an agonized dog-paddle that has me going round in circles, I find myself back where I started, ready to get my feet under me. I always come back to quoting “Little Gidding”, from Eliot’s Four Quartets:
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
After all my exploring, in the dark, I arrive again at Druidry and know it as for the first time, know that no other name better fits my spirituality, no other spiritual tradition best fits my need. My Anglican background is deeply important to me, and I watch the fighting in the Anglican Communion from a safe distance and with dismay, fearful lest all that is good in that tradition be lost to literalism or progressivism. I learnt the practice of magic from the New Hermetics
, and I’m excited as I’m about to undertake teaching my first student in that tradition. There is room in Druidry for those Anglican influences, there is room for the magic of the New Hermetics, there is room for the creative writing that has obsessed me at least since first grade, there is room for sacred housekeeping and sacred sexuality and a center for all these in nature spirituality, in a luminous world.
The world was luminous this morning as I walked to work under clearing skies. Sunrise is getting earlier, sunset later, and the sun’s daily track higher across the sky. I felt more alive than I did yesterday. May your world be luminous also.
