Today we bid farewell to the Beloved Dead, the ancestors and the rest of the Dead who have been with us since Samhain. In this house, we will close the door to the house of the Beloved Dead on our altar that we opened at Samhain. (Having spent mid-late December away from home, we didn’t have any decorations to take down.) We’ll burn some incense in farewell, and also needles saved from last year’s tree, since we didn’t have one this year. At the same time we’ll usher out any unwelcome spirits and tell the welcome to “go if you must, stay if you will”, and for all of them, “may peace be between us until next we meet”.
The liminal time is over. Back home in England, the darkest time is past and the wheel is turning upwards towards Imbolc and spring, and it’s a time of joy for me. At home here, it’s full winter now, with temperatures down to -40 and feet of snow (though today, as if in blessing, we actually have a day above zero) and it’s a difficult time for me. Two sides to the face, two edges to the blade.
For me, it has very much been a time of grasping my tools again. I’m hoping the liminal space I’ve been living in involuntarily since Lammas will start to pass away, though in honesty I don’t fully expect that until Imbolc itself.
But I have an auspiciously-times appointment today to help me, so I have some hope. And I am aware of the tools I have once again, and as (I think?) Ivo Dominguez said, not to use your tools is a form of self-abuse. Yesterday in a three-card-draw in readings with jasminekoran and bethirstyqueerheart, the card for the present was the Magician, moving away from the Heron. I know that I will always walk in the runeline track of the Heron, but I must grasp the Magician’s staff and start to move, rather than the utter stillness of the hunting heron. The reading was very much about agency, moving towards the Otter and the Woman Made Of Flowers.
I still have a very, very long way to go. But I hope that with the blessings of the Two-Faced Gods, I will be able to start the journey. That I am starting, have started it. As well as a terrible, terrible time it’s also been a period of stillness, and of rest in its way, and part of me wants to whine (like Tennant’s Doctor Who, ha), that, “I don’t want to go.” But I cannot – and will not – stay in this place. I need to grasp my walking-stick, which is also the wand and the stang and Woden’s staff when he wanders the land, and follow in the path of the Ancestors and Powers who have come to guide me, as well as on the Heron Track Way.
(The Ancestor Card from the Greenwood Tarot by Chesca Potter)
A few days ago, doodling on the supercheap graphics tablet I was given for Christmas, I found myself drawing a Caribou Lichen Woman. (I’m not going to reproduce it here cos I am not the best artist XD). Like the caribou to the north of here, like the reindeer who my own long-ago ancestors followed, I have to seek for sustenance under the snow. The sun *is* waxing, even if the weather outside is still frightful and will be for months to come.
I am still Witch and Magician, even in the grasp of this terrible sickness. The sickness itself reminded me of it, as I lay in the mists of heron dreams. It’s time to take that gift and grasp it.
(With thanks to shelby-villagewildswitch, whose generous reading helped me to focus these thoughts.)
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A random fact for today:
Harold Godƿinson, last Saxon king of England, was crowned on this date in Westminster Abbey.
weald and wold 