[Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four]
Now that we’re nearing the month-away point for the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, the Summer Solstice in the southern half of the world, it repays listening to inwardness, to meditate on shapes and images for these two planetary and spiritual events.
Here in a picture is near-solstice light, solstice darkness, light snow dusting our backyard, looking approximately southeast, earlier this morning. In this picture, of course, it’s our back shed that hides the morning star, but on a larger scale, the planet itself blocks the sun, till time moves us back into the light.
If one mythic image for the Summer Solstice is Stonehenge on Salisbury plain — “in the eye of the sun” — a corresponding image for Winter Solstice is the passage tomb of Newgrange, deep in the earth. Till time moves us back into the light. At both summer and winter turning points, the Light still shines. We just see it differently, one in plain day, the other in hidden night, the waking and sleeping of the awen-self, creative always, but often in different modes. You can feel the winter-you drowsing, while the summer-you longs to be up and doing. Sometimes you sense the tug between the two right down in your sinews and bones.
I’ve posted here before of our local Vermont stone chambers, and of Ohio’s Serpent Mound — the serpent power alive in things — in us, too, as one of those things, willing at intervals to shed its skin and be reborn. We can feel such restlessness in us at each turn of the planet, each shift of the sun.
As J. M. Greer observes in his Mystery Teachings from the Sacred Earth,
Everything in existence exists and functions on one of several planes of being or is composed of things from more than one plane acting together as a whole system. These planes are discrete, not continuous, and the passage of influence from one plane to another can take place only under conditions defined by the relationship of the planes involved.
This isn’t some kind of Druid theology, of course. It’s not dogma, not something to be swallowed simply because an authority says the words. But it is a valuable experiential observation one person has made and presented to others, something to be explored, poked and prodded, unpacked and tried on to see if it fits usefully or not.
Participation in ritual can help set up those conditions that allow “the passage of influence from one plane to another”. So, too, can personal practice. I can invite such passage by making one out of my days: marking out a dedicated period of inner and outer work, hallowing it with attention and intention.
As above, so below; as within, so without: if I make and mark a dedicated passage of days to mirror and invite a specific passage of influence from one plane to another, what will happen?
Want to try it out with me?
Stay tuned.
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A Druid Way 