Category Archives: Great Wheel

Great Wheel

Beltane, 2013

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Beltane                                                                         Planting Moon

Yes, the Great Wheel has turned again, according to the calendar.  But.  Not according to my window.  For some inexplicable reason this Beltane finds snow falling on the somewhat greened grass.  Snow.  Since 1891 there have been 6 instances of 2 inches or more of snow in May.  Today, tonight and tomorrow we may get as much as 5 inches.  So, that’s the first thing to say about Beltane 2013.

Beltane celebrates the marriage of the lady and the horned god, the introduction of fertility among the cattle and the fields of ancient rural Celtic lands.  Labor contracts for the year got made.  Hand-fast marriages through a hole in a fence were for a year and a day.  As with all the Celtic holidays, there was a week-long market and festivities that included huge bonfires (sympathetic magic to heat the earth), couples jumping over bonfires in hopes of children, cattle driven between bonfires to cure them of disease.  And, on Beltane eve and night, couples in the fields, coupling.  Like the sympathetic magic of the bonfires human lovemaking transferred to the fields the fertile passions of all the couples.

We got seeds in the ground and bees in the orchard over the last couple of weeks.  The
magnolia wants to bloom but has a hard time imagining blooming during a snow.  The garlic has emerged, as have the daffodils though they have not bloomed.  The scylla and the grape anemones out front are blooming.  They don’t mind the cold.

It is this combination of the practical and earthy with the mythic that has kept the Great Wheel present in my life for over 20 years now.  As Kate and I work with the soil, with the plants and trees, the bees, we follow in our labor the movement of the sun and the seasons, long observed closely out of dire need, now out of wonder.

John Desteian has challenged me to probe the essence of the numinous.  That is on my mind.  Here is part of that essence.  The seed in the ground, beltane’s fiery embrace of the seed, the seed emerging, flourishing, producing its fruit, harvest.  Then, the true transubstantiation, the transformation of the bodies of these plants into the body and blood ourselves.  A unity, a circle, rhythm.  Plant, grow, harvest, feed, be.

There is some kind of resurgence of these deep feelings, these always have been connections and the resurgence gets expressed in what might seem extreme ways, but I find them encouraging.  Hopeful.  Google Edinburgh Fire Festival 2013.

 

 

Dreams, Garden, Great Wheel

A Conductor Filled With Rain

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Spring                                                                             Planting Moon

As I pushed leek plants into the soil this morning, I saw my dream night in a different way. Each spring the dead earth, the decayed plants and animal carcasses join together, strike up a symphony for life that waits only the warmth of the audience hall and a conductor filled with rain.

Then, that terrible moment of late fall or early winter when everything becomes dormant, goes chthonic, or dies, gives witness to its eventual purpose.   A work of music so vital, so alive that it will fuel a whole growing season, bringing movement after movement after movement until the applause dies down in late October.

(Persephone_Opens_Likon_Mystikon–a mystic winnowing fan.)

That icy hand of death in whose grasp I felt my soul earlier can be seen, perhaps ought to be seen, as the hand that turns the compost barrel, keeping the fertile loam of humanity rich and ready for the next season.  A season in which I can rise again, vital and alive, a movement, another movement, in another season.

These times between the seasons have abundant mythological content, gathered in by poet harvesters and folklore gleaners, just so we will not forget what is so obvious.  That death is not an end, not an end no more than birth is a beginning.  They are, rather, rests in the music of the spheres.

Garden, Great Wheel, Poetry

Soon, I Imagine

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Spring                                                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

The Daffodils
by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A Poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Great Wheel

Between

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Spring                                                                    Bloodroot Moon

A rainy Saturday.  The snow has begun to melt faster and the front yard has a few wide expanses of what looks like moldy grass.  Which, of course, is what it is.  This next week or two will see the daffodil, crocus, scylla and bloodroot bloom.  Then we’ll have emerging and  blooming that will last well into fall.   Work for ourselves begins, too:  planting, weeding, tree felling, fire pit and area finishing, bee keeping, bagging the apple blooms in the orchard.  The dogs of course have hole digging, barking and animal hunting.

These kind of days are the portals between the seasons when one lets go, grudgingly, and the other insists, sometimes gently, sometimes not on ascendance.

A fire in the fire place, a good book.  Or, as I’ve got right now, another sentence from Ovid.

Aging, Great Wheel, Retirement, Third Phase

In Spite of the Evidence on the Ground, the Sky Says It’s Spring

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Spring                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

I’m beginning to wonder whether I misnamed this moon.  Not sure the bloodroot’s gonna bloom before it wanes.  16 degrees out now, headed down to 2 tonight.  Average daily high now 40 degrees.  But, in terms of astronomical events today is the day we shift past the  the celestial mid-point and the celestial equator. (see illustration)

That makes spring the formal designation.  Meteorological spring began on March 1st, but I follow the stars as does the Great Wheel.  The Vernal Equinox has a long tradition as not only the start of spring, but of the new year.  It lost its spot as the New Year in 18th century England, 1752 to be exact, when Lady Day, March 25th (a fixed date to celebrate the coming of spring and the new year and the feast of the annunciation), lost its New Year’s Day status to January 1st as the Gregorian calendar reforms began.

Today neither meteorological spring nor astronomical spring puts us in that season.  The weather is not co-operating with the calendar in either instance.  There’s a lesson here.  Rules, no matter how precise, or how ancient, no matter how usually reliable or hoaried with veneration, can never overcome, as the military says, the facts on the ground.

The lesson of the Great Wheel will, however, grind its way toward truth.  At some point the winds will shift.  The cold air will retreat back to the North Pole.  The snow will melt and the grass will green, flowers bloom and children ride their bikes in the streets.

Even though today doesn’t shout out verdant or shorts and t-shirts the vitality of Mother Earth is only delayed, not denied.  When we use the seasons as a metaphor for human life, we can imagine that we have passed the spring time of our lives.  This is not so.  Our bodies, yes, they continue on, hammered by entropy, drawn back toward the earth by the gravity of our years, but our soul, or whatever that mysterious piece of us is that hovers in and around that body, renews itself over and over.

Take down a new book.  Pick up a hammer, or a carving tool, or lines of computer code.  Perhaps a paint brush or a blank page.  Visit the grandkids or an old friend or make a new friend.  The sparks of love and creativity in our lives can rejuvenate us over and over again, turning a winter, even one that seems determined to stay too long, into a springtime.  Those seeds you planted when you were twenty, but forgot to water?  Remember them.  This is their season.  Wake them up.

Great Wheel
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Imbolc                                                                            Bloodroot Moon

Several years ago I asked the naturalist at Cedar Creek Ecological Station, a UofM site here in Anoka county, what he considered the first sign of spring in Minnesota.  Without hesitation he said bloodroot.  When the bloodroot blooms.  That’s why this moon is the bloodroot moon.

Great Wheel, Weather +Climate

Seasonal Fulcrum

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Imbolc                                                                      Valentine Moon

Brilliant.  New snow, a sun climbing the heavens, reaching for summer.  That hope for release from a long winter.  A space shuttle ride to the green of spring after 5 months of death and decay.  Yes, I love winter.  I love the snow, the cold, the sense of enclosure, the lengthening nights.  And, yes, I love spring.  Bloodroot, daffodils, new leaves of green.  Birds and dogs and kids and all the blooming buzzing confusion. (yes, william james)

This point, right now, is like the fulcrum of a seasonal teeter-totter as the cold of winter still sits dense and heavy on its end, holding spring up high, faraway from the ground.  Spring, unlike other strategies in such a situation (you know, piling on more kids or calling for mom and dad), simply smiles on winter until winter lets up, first balancing the long board, then letting spring’s end come all the way down to the ground.

There is an energy that pours itself into the bones as these seasonal changes come, as if the body wants to merge with the onrushing transformation.  Bones feel lighter now.  Smiles come a bit more often. Toes want to be stood upon. Shoulders no longer cry for more sweater, more coat, more scarf.  Instead they want to be open and warmed.

No.  It’s not yet.  Not yet.  But I can see winter’s resolve beginning to melt and spring’s end of the teeter-totter slowing beginning to inch its way up.

Great Wheel

Waiting for the Green (Enjoying the Snow)

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

As the sun climbs the sky, the days take on that remembered glint, the one that comes with green and growing things; yet, because this is halfway to the northpole, it does so glancing off snow cover and enlightening cold air.  It feeds no flowers, no leaves on trees, no viny processes.  Even its warming leaks away as it bounces off the high albedo white.  No season gives way in straight sets.  Well, not usually.  Though here in Minnesota it does sometimes seem that we skip that warm and scented time plunging instead into the heat and insects of summer.

Still the heart knows and so might that tiny organ located somewhere inside our enlarged brains; you know, the one that would help us navigate by the northstar if only we stopped thinking so damn much, the one that says, oh, this is the time to pick up our family and move to the valley where the warmth will have broken free the streams and perhaps some edible grasses have begun to grow.  Let’s go.  Let’s go.

But no.  We no longer listen to that impulse.  Instead we investigate the numbered calendar, read thermometers, measure the angle of sun.  Wait anxiously for the whirring and blinking of large machines eating those numbers and so many more, past numbers and ideas of how one effects the other.  Then, the model speaks.  But, like early man who built his tower toward the sky hoping to join the Gods, these machines cannot speak in one voice.  This means we wait.  Watching the sun climb, the ice melt.  Waiting for the green.

Great Wheel

February

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Imbolc                                                                   Valentine Moon

February has come down to this, 2 days.  This short month, even at its most expansive still the shortest, ends on the 28th.  Then March.  The spring equinox, another magnet for the human urge to celebrate astronomical events, coming up.

We still have some weeks of winter yet, maybe as many as 4, since we have a deep snow cover, though not as deep as many years.  The deeper the snow cover, the more muted the temperature changes even though the sun climbs higher and higher in the sky as we put a lot of space between us and the orbital moment of the winter solstice.

I’m glad the change will come slowly since I’m still in winter mode, not ready yet to shed the coats and the cozy feeling of the cave.  That will come.

Today I’m happy to have snow outside the window, cool air and a long poem to translate.

Great Wheel, Myth and Story

Imbolc: 2013

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Imbolc                                                                           Cold Moon

In the early Celtic faith this day was a holy day and a market day, a cross quarter holiday that celebrated the freshening of the ewes.  When the ewes became pregnant–lamb in the belly, in the belly=imbolc, they would once again have milk, adding some variety to a food supply that had been stable since Samhain or so, the last harvest.

Brigid, the Celtic triple-goddess of hearth, smithy and inspiration, all fire related–is the goddess honored on this holiday.  She was, like so much of the old religions, hoovered up into Catholicism as St. Bridget, reportedly born of a good Christian woman and a Druid, thus straddling the transition from the old faith to the new.

She had a center at Kildare in Ireland, where the Catholics built cell dara, or cell/church of the oak.  A great oak was there.  This Cathedral of St. Bridget went up in 480 ad.  That is very early, the Roman Empire was not quite dead.  Even so, the followers of the Goddess had been there much longer, with 19 priestesses who kept lit an eternal flame.  Catholic nuns dedicated to St. Bridget kept up this practice until the Reformation era.

“On February 1, 1807 Daniel Delany, Bishop of Kildare, began the restoration of the Sisterhood of St. Brigid. Their mission was to restore the ancient order and bring back the legacy and spirit of this amazing figure. In 1993, Brighid’s perpetual flame was finally re-kindled in Kildare’s Market Square by Mary Teresa Cullen, who at that time was the leader of the Brigidine Sisters. The sacred flame was kept by the Brigidine Sisters in their home and on February 1, 2006, the flame was brought back to the center of the Market Square where it has been permanently housed in a large glass enclosed vessel.”  see website sourced above.

(Brigid’s fire temple)

There was, too, a holy well dedicated to Brigid, also in this same location.  There are holy wells all over the Celtic lands, many dedicated to gods or goddesses, others revered as places for certain kinds of prayers, both blessings and curses.  These wells have since ancient times been considered portals to Faery or to the Otherworld, thus offerings left by the wells honor those of Faery as well as those who have died.  Dressing the well makes an offering at a holy well, i.e. surrounding it with flowers, plants, homemade things.  The Celts also use strips of cloth tied onto tree or shrub branches as offerings in a fashion very similar to certain native american traditions.

Given Brigit’s triple orientation–hearth, smithy and creative inspiration–today is a day to celebrate domestic life where the fire of the kitchen activates the home, and the fire of the smithy where the tools and weapons of a life lived close to the land are shaped, and, finally, the inspiration which comes to each of us from the holy wells deep within our own being.

This is a time to stop, take a look at the home fires.  How are they?  It is also a time to think about the tools for gardening.  Are they sharp and oiled, ready for the spring.  Then, too, especially for those of us who rely on the mystery of creative inspiration, are you being careful to tend your inner well?  Keeping it dressed and well-maintained?