Imbolc Valentine Moon
Ancientrailsgreatwheel.com is officially open today. All Great Wheel postings, formerly posted here at ancientrails.com, will now be found at Great Wheel. The first, the Imbolc entry, is on there now.
I’ve been posting to Great Wheel for some time, but decided to open it on Imbolc, the closest Great Wheel holiday to when Bill Schmidt helped me launch the website itself.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
On occasion now my eye drifts out to our raised beds mounded with snow, our fruit trees 
asleep and bare, the bee hive. It has begun, that quickening, the part that knows even these low, low temperatures will not hold off the approaching spring.
The bees need checking, to see if they’ve survived the winter, but it’s just been too cold. At some point Javier will come out and prune the orchard. Seeds and plants must get ordered. Mostly now though there is that still young feeling, the quickening.
Perhaps it has always been so in the temperate climates. Perhaps this sense of delight, not really eagerness, but palpable change, is part of what caused the Celts to celebrate Imbolc, the next Great Wheel holiday. It celebrates the freshening of the ewes and the triple goddess, Brigit, of hearth, forge and poetry. Perhaps this is all part of the waking up.
Pagans, I’m increasingly unhappy with this word, but can’t think of a better one, have our 
great waking up morning every spring. We don’t have to wait for the apocalypse, the fallow time of fall and winter is enough for us. The greening comes with the joy of life triumphant, life resurrected, life everlasting.
No, this isn’t cabin fever, not yet. It’s an awareness, a tickle, perhaps a single blade of grass brushing against my foot. But, it’s a start.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Got caught up with the Climate Change MOOC, part of the process involved getting my head turned toward scientific reading, following graphs and numbers and equations. I’m past the first really brain busting part and the flow of the reading went much better this morning. Another challenge to, as Hercule Poirot would say, “the leetle gray cells.”
Spent some time with an easier task, translating more of the Metamorphoses. In these verses Neptune rides the waters, urging them on as they flood the earth, then strikes the ground with his trident and creates earthquakes. Poseidon, earth-shaker, as Homer knew him. This was an earlier human generated, outsider mediated, apocalypse. Climate change is our very own.
The Great Wheel blog continues to take shape, a bit here, a bit there. Changes, tweaks, but growing.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
So much new. There’s always a lot of energy at first, Loki’s Children and the Great Wheel, a new workout regimen, getting back on the low carb horse, Climate Change MOOC, then there’s the slog, the keeping at it when the slump hits, a plateau and another push, then more. Right now I’m mostly in the energy phase, lots of excitement and eagerness.
There will come a time though when the effort seems too much, when the energy has gone from positive to negative, becomes a drain, exhausting. That’s when past experience helps.
Learning new tools for the Great Wheel. Diving into the difficulty of reading graphs, percentages, equations, maps, pushing my body in a different way. Listening to the ideas, the splinters of ideas, the ways forward as research and writing open up a new world.
In it now and glad of it.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
We skated through the day never getting warmer than -14 by my weather station. That’s a chilly day by any standard.
Got some news on Missing. It will be back in a bit. Bob said it had a lot of capitalization and formatting errors. Oops. Plus a lot of pesky 1st person remainders from an early experiment in first person story telling. Sorta makes me chagrined, but, hey, that’s why I hired the guy in the first place. Better him finding them than an agent reading my manuscript cold.
Also got a ways into Loki’s Children today. I have a pretty clear idea about the way forward with it and I’m excited. Decided to just get at it, write away so to speak. It was fun to get in that space. Lost track of time.
So, with the work on Great Wheel and Loki’s Children, I’ve been in a creative space most of this very cold, good to be inside, day. Feels good.
Then a good workout. Plus news that my PSA was normal. All in all, a good day.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
If you want to take a peak, www.ancientrailsgreatwheel.com is live. I’m still pondering the look, the content and I don’t plan to get at it methodically until late January, so it’s very early days.
It’s easy to get obsessed with a project like this and do nothing else for a good while, but I want to let this percolate before I decide on a look and while I get the idea of content refined. I’m very open to input right now about either look or content. What’s up right now will change as the year goes on, as it does here on Ancientrails.
In other news it’s -14 now at almost 3:00 o’clock. We’ve probably hit our high for the day.
Time feels oddly, well, frozen. As if life goes on here, but has come to a stop outside. That may not be too far from the truth.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
A money meeting this morning, then a long overdue call for repairs to my gas heater here in the study. The thermostat connection has long ago died and I have a hot or cold phenomenon in these bitterly cold days. I heat it up to dispel the cold, but then have to turn the heater off because it goes past the comfort point. Then, with the heat off, the cold seeps back in. Soon I’ll have an even temp while I work.
I’m also working on a design for ancientrailsgreatwheel.com, one that will enhance and integrate with the theme. This may take a while but I have until Imbolc to get it ready. Should be plenty of time.
Gonna do something unusual later today. Visit a bricks and mortar store. I want to get a new video card for my Gateway so I can utilize two screens, but finding out what I actually need has gotten the better of me. I’m going to ask a live human being. If the tariff isn’t too high, I’ll buy the video card there in return for the help. If it’s double the online price, well…
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
A couple of new things for 2014. First, a circular calendar, which I like for reasons explained often here, and one I like even more for its clean design and it’s simple graphic showing the amount of sunshine on any given day in the year. The inside of the circle has concentric rings that go from 16 hours of sunlight a day on the outside ring, down to 2 hours of sunlight in the center. The yellow follows the curve of daytime around the calendar, or, another way of conceiving it, around the earth’s solar orbit. (at 50 degrees N latitude, which is 5 degrees north of us, passing through Germany and Canada, for instance)
You’ll notice it’s pretty beat up. The mailing tube from Germany got smooshed. Soren, the designer, and I corresponded, first about how much I liked the design and then about the calendar. He refunded my money and put me on a discount list for next year. A nice guy.
The second item is a gift from Kate. I have to work on the presentation, but you’ll get the drift.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
Winter Seed Catalog Moon
Talked myself into it. I now own the domain ancientrailsgreatwheel.com. You can look for it to be up and running by February 1. Perhaps a bit earlier.
Winter New Seed Catalog Moon
I’ve begun to mull a second blog, one that would focus on the Greatwheel, dividing its posts into 8 seasons: Samhain, Winter, Imbolc, Spring, Summer, Lughnasa, Fall and Samhain.
Over the course of those seasons I would write a beginning piece for the season as I do now on Ancientrails, but then continue through that season posting thematically about the season, holidays in that time period, special days of the year, phrenology, gardening, environmental and climate matters, probably some astronomy and archaeo-astronomy. I would include myths pertinent to the season, too. Perhaps some I’ve translated from the Latin.
This appeals to me because I’ve tried to lever myself into a theological treatise on the my neopagan faith, but the idea has never taken off. I think the notion is too abstract and the fact of this tactile, coarse spirituality, one that gets its hands dirty as an act of devotion, lends itself better to this kind of over the course of the year exposition.
Any feedback anyone might have would be welcome. Ancientrails would continue. It’s a well ingrained habit at this point. If I decide to start, Imbolc, February 1st, would be a good time.