[1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th]
No surprise, midway through this series and this post has been a tough one. I drafted a few paragraphs this morning, then had to step away for a while and return later.
/|\ /|\ /|\
Whenever I lack a sense of how to proceed, the guidance of the living green world rarely steers me wrong.
But snow?!
Well, snow in the forecast, a picture of a snowy owl, and a winter memory quietly guide me. For this theme of the Fourth Day of Samhain, then, I found myself turning toward the midwinter thaw that often arrives in Vermont sometime in January or February. Not Samhain-y at all, you might think. Temperatures rise, the air warms sometimes to short-sleeve heights, and everything seems to pause on the hinge of change.
But while it’s a reprieve of sorts from the coldest months, it’s an echo, no more. The dedicated waking comes not around Groundhog’s Day or Imbolc, at least for New England, but later, after the Spring Equinox. Then there’s a greater chance that warmth might stay, or at least wake the beginnings of Spring. A kindling. Or is it a second kindling after all, after that first one from the winter thaw?
And what waking at Samhain? For I don’t need to wait till Equinox, or Samhain itself, for that matter. Things wake up, or can, all the time. A dedicated waking is fuller, the kind that comes not in the middle of the night, though I may stir and turn on the light and read for a little. The dedicated waking comes later, when I actually get out of bed. I’ve committed myself. Morning coffee calls, and the day beckons. We live by such choices, thinking nothing of them. But let a spiritual opportunity like Samhain arrive, with ancestors knocking, and it pays to listen harder. Will I?
If this is the season that marks the start of hibernation, why should I care about waking up? I’ve got sleeping to do. Well, for one thing, because the other hemisphere is awakening into spring. Beltane and Samhain, yin-yanging it across the planet, nestling in each other. Anyone celebrating Beltane is also probably hearing from the ancestors, if they give them half a chance.
I’m curious now. What are they saying?
/|\ /|\ /|\
A Druid Way 