Imbolc's wintry passage

Imbolc or Candlemas, Saint Brigid’s Day or Groundhog Day — whatever it might be called — the calendar shift from bleak January to bleak February is an important time of year for me. I have a long history of seasonal affective disorder. Waning and waxing sunlight can order my life in ways that are not pleasant. Fortunately (thank you, Lady Fortune) this is a good year where my mood continues resilient through the dark months.

It helps to be outside as much as possible. Yesterday I spent three hours out of doors, an hour walking and two working at the verge of my yard’s wooded area. I felt that mysterious swell of contentment, a calmness within, generated when I do simple tasks among trees. It’s a wordless appreciation for and connection to this waning winter season. Well … gratitude to the absurdly mild winter here in Georgia where I came in my latter years for the climate. I’ll never learn, personally, to appreciate winter up north.

Here in Georgia the first, early daffodils are blooming which is confusing even as it is delightful. Much as I appreciate their cheery lion faces, their February appearance is not considered proper in the view of my sour inner scold — just not right, she mutters, damn unnatural.

The original Imbolc celebrants lived in high northern latitudes where winter nights are longer than ours and the weather more harsh, yet they seem to have been a more optimistic bunch than the dour mid-westerners of my childhood. It gives me pause to read how in the Celtic tradition Imbolc is not a winter holiday at all, but celebrates the beginning of spring. Lambing time is the marker rather than temperature or the slant of the sun. They were some trusting souls, to dance and sing about warmth while the world was still cold.

For me, the whole point of this mid-quarter marker is to acknowledge the silence and dormancy of winter. The divinatory bear and other hibernating mammals wake up momentarily, look around and mutter, still winter, then go back to sleep.

In my emotional memory, the first half of February is when the cumulative effect of darkness deepens and the freeze hardens, when spring is impossibly far away, achingly unreachable. The wheel of the year is nocked at this point of its circumference as a reminder, a prompt, and a promise that the sun will return — I’m hoping for the groundhog’s early spring prediction but am resigned to the possibility of longer. In February it is only memory and tradition that assure us of a future different from the frozen now. Imbolc is the midpoint of the return journey from darkest winter, the point of potential despair when I am exhausted by the melancholic season yet have so much further to go. That moment is when St. Brigid’s* unquenchable flame is needed to warm chilled hearts.

Saint Brigid in the north window of the Church of Our Lady and St. Kieran, Ballylooby, County Tipperary, Ireland

Humans have the unique ability to create counterfactuals (such a funny, self-conscious word) — to construct mental stories of alternate possibilities. The conscious self has a compulsion to revise its past and re-imagine its future. The unconscious self is more placid, accepts without question the present moment and lives within its circumstances, not judging moods triggered by that minute, be they joy or suffering. The conscious self is a busy, easily discontented creature, always comparing and contrasting this present moment with fantasy scenarios. Good Jungian than I am, I believe life is best when all aspects of the Self are balanced and honored.

Calendar holidays are celebrations to put us in touch with that balancing act between passive endurance — the strength to bear hardship, and vital imagination — the power to envision and make change. Sacred days pause time and open space for reflecting upon the journey of the year. For me, Imbolc is when I shudder at the memory of my recent encounter with total darkness, the goddess of death, she who will eventually claim me, but not yet. Imbolc is that not yet, when the contract to live is renewed — some years with exuberance, some years with grimness — and I resume the upward climb back to the sun.

header image: Frost* by Bertha Lum 1920