The Darkness Within & the Decade of Death

After a post like the last one, I find that I have a hard time wanting to move on and post something new.  But with another funeral in the works, I find myself pondering a lot of things that I might as well get out of myself and into writing.

Recently I was updating a few of the tradition's websites, and in doing so I did some searches on google that lead me to a very old post on another website's forum.  In the thread, one of my coven mates was discussing the tradition with some other individuals with similar interests, and when a couple of those individuals asked where they could learn more, she directed them to our tradition's informational website.  Then I came up.  I suppose that somehow through the website, one of the people she was chatting with found a link to some personal page of mine.  I don't know what...a myspace page, perhaps?  At any rate, she told my coven mate that her High Priestess (me) didn't seem to actually live the balance of light and dark that our tradition teaches, and that I present myself as someone with darker leanings.

I remembered reading this post at the time the discussion was actually happening, and coming across the archive reminded me of how I felt about it at the time.  My initial reaction was defensive.  I can still say that I don't know how anyone could come across anything about me online that would actually give them enough information about me to make such an assessment.  I usually don't put that much in-depth information about myself online.  So this really would have been based on "appearances."  Yes, it's true that I have always been a person who has gravitated toward a sort of gothic aesthetic, and not even necessarily always in my physical appearance, but in things like decor, art, etc.  So chances are that this person probably saw some personsal site of mine with such an aesthetic.  But I personally know about myself that I probably actually live a balance of light and dark more than most people.  I can be completely comfortable in the land of darkness, and in some ways these things are fully ingrained in my being.  But in other ways, I am more old-fashioned than most people might think, and many of my hobbies are far more wholesome than most would guess.  I collect cook books, love to bake things from scratch, garden, knit, quilt, cross stitch, etc.  I love spending good old-fashioned quality time with what family I have left, and hope to the Gods that one day I get to be a grandmother just like the one I had.  At my core, I truly am part goth rock vampiress, and part Betty Crocker.  That's balance!

My secondary reaction, though, was "so what?"  Yes, on the surface, I may be someone who seems to lean to the darker side, but what does it matter?  In a tradition that teaches the value of a balance of light and dark, does that necessarily mean that every single member has to be perfectly balanced between both ends of the spectrum at all times?  Because they aren't, and in most cases it's because people struggle more with embracing the darkness within themselves.  So could it not be considered an asset in such a tradition that there are a couple of people who may be more at peace with those parts of themselves than others, and therefore capable of helping to teach the value of the dark side to other members?  In all honesty, it's a part of myself that I feel I should embrace more, rather than push away shamefully.  Why?  Because I'm truly beginning to believe that it is supposed to be part of my function in life to be a walker between this world and the darker realms, and to help teach the lessons of those worlds to others.  And it's not for nothing that I think this.

The past ten years has been a chunk of time that I have come to refer to as the "Decade of Death."  But I believe the stage was set for this farther back than ten years ago.  When I was 15, before I had even embarked upon my path in the Craft, I was visited by the Grim Reaper.  Yes, I know how weird that sounds.  I will readily admit that if I had not had this experience, I don't think that such a being would be a part of my theology.  But while I know how absurd it sounds, I had the experience nonetheless, and all of the terror that came along with it. I was young, inexperienced in dealing with such energies/beings, and didn't understand how you could interact the Grim Reaper (or at least whatever energy it was that presented itself to me in that guise) without dying yourself.  Since I did live, I spent the next few years considering myself lucky, and doing my best to distance myself from the experience.  Now, I look back at this moment as a time when I was sort of marked by death.  If I had been able to open myself up to it at the time and accept it as a calling of sorts, it might have made the years that would follow a little easier on me.  But I am just now coming around to that idea, which means that I have had to learn to deal with death in a "trial by fire" sort of way during the Decade of Death, which has included the following passings...

September 2001-Jedediah James Joseph Ormsbee: I was 21 when Jed died, and he was even younger.  He had been one of my best friends for years.  He was killed in a car accident, and was the first person I had ever lost that I was close to.

May 2003-Billy Joe (Jody) Goforth:  This was my daddy.  I was crazy about him, and still am very much like him.  He killed himself with a shotgun wound through the mouth.

August 2003-Lucy Mae Goforth:  This was my Grandma (my dad's mom), who was basically the most responsible for raising me, and the most responsible for teaching me what unconditional love is.  She is the person I most aspire to be like.  She died of lung cancer.

January 2005-Jim "Big Murph" Murphy:  This was my great-uncle who was hilarious, a lot of fun, a huge prankster, and a brilliant steel guitar player.  He had played with such musicians as Loretta Lynn, Johnny Paycheck, Hank Williams III, and Asleep at the Wheel.  While his death didn't hit me as hard as some of the others, because he hadn't been as instrumental in my life as some of the others, he was a horrible person to have to loose, because he was so full of life and so much fun to be around.  He died of lymph node cancer.

January 2009-Thomas Edward Morris Jr.:  Tommy was my youngest sister's biological dad.  When I was in the 3rd grade, he went from being my stepdad to a true second father when he legally adopted me and my other sister. It was bittersweet, because I was so close to my dad and I felt coerced into going along with the adoption by my mother.  But Tommy was nothing but a blessing to have in my life, and he was really another dad to me.  He was right up there will my dad and my Grandma in showing me unconditional love.  He was hit head on my a drunk driver and died on the scene of the car accident.

January 2009-Etta Lucille Whitley:  This was my great-grandmother, who we called "Moy."  She died on the day of Tommy's funeral, which made her death pretty surreal.  Fortunately, she had lived to a ripe old age and died of natural causes.  She lived in the country in Arkansas and I loved to visit her house when I was a little girl.  I am now starting to realize how many of the things I love to do are so like her...gardening, quilting, sewing, etc.  Even just living in the country.  I can see how she influenced my life in many ways.

May 2010-Jacklyn Elizabeth Morris:  This was my little sister.  She was was 27 when she died and would have turned 28 just under a month later.  She killed herself with a gunshot wound straight through the heart.

November 2010-Thomas Edward Morris Sr.:  Tommy's dad died in his sleep, of what could be called "natural causes" related to his poor health and diabetes complications.  His is the funeral my youngest sister and I are currently planning, because as this point we are his only living family.  He died at the end of November, the the funeral arrangements are turning out to be a drawn out process, so this is the death that is carrying us into the final month of the decade.  Let's hope it's the last.

This isn't all of them.  There was my husband's grandmother and his aunt somewhere in there.  There was also Tommy's grandfather and his aunt.  Those included on the list are just the ones that have been the most present in my own life.  

In light of all of this, I have really come to feel that perhaps death is meant to be more a part of my life than it is for some others.  Maybe all of this would seem normal for someone who was in the later years of their life, but I just turned 31 three days ago.  I can't think of anyone else I know, other than my own sister, who has seen this much death at that age.  And so, shortly after my sister's death, I began to do some death work, finally accepting this as a part of my reality, and embarking on a mission to find something constructive to do with all of this.  I had hoped that by trying to form a relationship with death and better understand it, I could help others better understand it in their times of grieving.  I still feel that this is part of my calling in life, but what I did not expect was that I had a few lessons to learn of my own first.

I have come to a point where I am at piece with death.  Not so much with loss.  I don't think I will ever fail to mourn the loss of someone I hold dear.  If I were to lose my husband, my nephew, or my other sister, for instance, no amount of "understanding death" would prevent me from grieving, which I know is not the point.  But on a personal level, when my own time comes, I know that I will be ready.  I will be at peace with the idea, and prepared to let go.  

What I didn't expect was the lessons death has to teach about living life.  I have come to realize that dealing with all of this death has changed me at the core.  I can look at my own personality and see that I am different.  If I look further down the road I am on, I can see myself becoming bitter, jaded, detached, and joyless.  This is not the road that I want to go down, and if I want to prevent it, I have to make a conscious effort to focus more on living life, because there is no life in death.  Death offers many wonderful things, depending upon what we each believe it holds in store for us...peace, release, rest, freedom, nothingness, rebirth...but most of these things are not meant to fill up life.  It may sound cliche, but life is meant to be lived, and I think that the reason we still hear that sentiment espoused is that for some of us to truly understand its depth, we have to come face to face with death and still choose life.  I realize about myself that I have come to a point in my own life where this is a difficult choice to make.  It's not the same as being suicidal.  To me, it means making an effort to focus more on the moments and the joys that make up life than on the longing for the release that death has to offer.  It all comes back around to that balance.  Maybe I am someone who leans more toward the darkness, and maybe that's because the darkness has been a driving force in my life.  That means I'm not perfect...but do I have to be?  Do I need to have perfectly achieved that balance in order to see its value and encourage others to pursue it?  Spirituality is, at least in part, about making sense of life, and death. It's about growth...constantly moving closer towards the person we hope to be; the person we are meant to be.  Once that stops, it's over.  Alive or not, we cease to be living.  For better or for worse, I am at peace with the fact that even if that balance is never perfectly achieved, constantly working toward it is valid in and of itself.  As I say to my students all the time, the Craft is just as much about the journey as the destination.

And Then There Were Two...

Or, RIP Jacklyn Elizabeth Morris

It has taken me about a month and a half even to be able to post this.  On May 30th, my sister died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in the heart.  I am posting this information here for a couple of reasons.  One is that it is the cause of me being out of touch, and likely will be for a while longer.  The other is that I know it will change everything for me.  It will shape and direct my path just as any other major life event would.  In my case, I believe it will take me deeper into the land of the dead and closer to being able to truly walk between that world and this one.

Since the birth of my youngest sister, when I was 8 years old, it has been the three of us.  While I am acutely aware that I don't know anything about what the future will hold, this one thing has always been clear.  I have always believed that the three of us were meant to go through it together.  I envisioned us growing old together, a single unit, and I saw it so clearly that nothing could have shaken me more than this.  Now there are two of us, and both of us feel unsettled and disconnected as a result of this loss in a way that I can't quite describe.  Now my life has absolutely no certainty.  I have no expectations, because I can no longer believe that I can count on the permanence (or even semi-permanence) of anything.  This leaves me in a state of mind like nothing I have ever experienced before, and all I can hope is that something of the significance of all of this will be revealed to me in the aftermath.  I suppose I am open to what experiences and lesson might lie ahead, though I am in no way able to anticipate what those experiences and lessons might be.  At least, I think, there isn't much left that could really surprise me.

The Life and Times of a Busy Witch

I really don't post very often, and I try not to feel guilt about that.  In fact, when I decided to start this blog, I made an agreement with myself that I would have no rules or guidelines about how often I expected myself to post, and that I would make it as sporadic as I wanted to.  Why?  Well, because I actually have a very full Witchy life as it is.  As the leader of a coven and a founding member of a tradition (on top of having a house and husband to keep track of, numerous animals to take care of, acres of land to tend to, and my own business to run), I typically have more on my plate than I know how I'm going to handle.  Of course, this begs the question of why I would put another thing on my plate by starting this blog to begin with.  I guess it goes back to the general theme of this blog, which is balance.  As much as I love my coven and tradition life, I know that I need an outlet and a project that is entirely my own.  I need a venue where my mind can be exercised and decompressed, before I have to jump head-long into the next task.  This is why I didn't want to pressure myself to have a self-imposed posting schedule.  The point of this is to create a way to de-stress....not to create more stress.

Still, though, with all of the things that consume my time, it can be hard to find time to tend to this blog as much as even I'd like to, which does sometimes create guilt.  Not because I believe I'm letting my numerous readers down...come on, I have 3 followers!  Really, it's because it's just one more indication that I'm probably not taking the personal time that I need for myself.  But as the list of coven and tradition tasks I need to complete gets longer rather than shorter, it's hard to justify spending any amount of free time on something as seemingly pointless and unproductive as a blog post.  Here is a taste of what I'm talking about...

On the coven level, I have to coordinate things between all of our meetings, making sure that all of our members are on the same page about where we're meeting, what we're doing, what they need to bring, etc.  Sometimes the simple act of scheduling can be a minor miracle.  At these meetings, I have to help create and take part in amazing rituals and activities that hopefully leave everyone feeling fulfilled.  The picture above is of me being face-painted by one of my coven sisters in preparation for one such ritual--our annual Greening of the Earth.  I also have to teach our coven students, and help provide materials and resources to other teachers in our coven, making sure that everyone is getting what they are supposed to out of the experience.  I have to help make sure that there are events that our seekers can attend, and hopefully attend them myself, so that these people who we don't know yet have some opportunity to get to know us if they feel drawn to a path with us.  And then I have the ever-exciting task of helping to figure out the best, most positive, least harmful way to handle problems when they arise.  That's a basic overview.

On the tradition level, I have to do what I can to maintain the integrity of our fledgling tradition, making sure that all of our members are on the same page, and are staying on the same page as we move ahead.  I have to do something to make sure that all of our members across the country feel in some way connected to one another, which currently means things like working on the tradition-wide newsletter and maintaining our online forum.  I have to periodically touch base with other coven leaders in the tradition, to make sure that things are going OK for them, and ensure that all of our members are informed about the important stuff and on the same page with one another.  I have to help teach our distance students.  I have just finished with one, and am just getting started with another.  And, on top of this and more, almost two years into it, I am still working on the process of formalizing the whole thing, getting everything down on paper.  Why, you may ask,  is that taking so long?  Part of it is because certain jobs, such as writing all of the classes for our student grove, were just huge tasks to begin with and were just going to take a long time no matter what.  The same could be said for other projects, such as the coven bylaws.  The other part of it is that as we go along, new needs present themselves, which we knew would happen.  So new things get added to the list, such as outlining a solitary path within the tradition, which wasn't really part of the original plan.

All in all, it's a lot of work, and I don't really have any way of knowing when it will let up.  If things continue to be added to the list before other things are marked off, maybe never.  All of this brings me to the point of this post.  It isn't a complaint, though I know it could be read that way.  In truth, I love it and I wouldn't have it any other way.  I am just one of those people whose spiritual paths are intended to be largely fulfilled via spiritual leadership, and I don't think that will ever change.  For much of the time I have been on this path, even in times when I have thought I was too burned out to keep up that role, it didn't take long before I felt that call again.  The point, I guess, really does go back to balance.  Seeking a balance in the Craft isn't only about seeking out both the  light and dark energies of nature.  It is also about seeking a balance between the drives and desires within yourself.  It is about balancing your path as a Witch against all of the other responsibilities, hobbies, and tasks of your daily life, making sure that you are leaving yourself time for each (and how many of us let our Craft fall to the wayside in the face of everything else?).  It is about balancing your personal Craft against your coven life, making sure that you are contributing to your coven what is expected of you, without neglecting your own personal growth.  And particularly for someone like me, in a leadership position, it is about balancing the administrative tasks that are related to my path against the real magic of being a Witch, making sure that I am not drowning in responsibilities to such an extent that I don't give myself time in the day to feel that spark that magic ignites within me and inspires me to be a Witch.  

It's an ongoing struggle for so many Witches I know.  Sometimes I feel it is brought about by the fact that our path is one that doesn't always fit in seamlessly with the rest of our lives.  Of course it informs our every action and we do find ways to weave magic throughout every part of our lives.  But the fact is that the real pursuit of our Craft isn't always supported, whether the culprit is the spouse who would much rather have you hang out and watch tv with him than go off into the other room to meditate, the employer who doesn't want to give you time off to celebrate your holidays, the family members who try to talk you out of your choice of path, or the customers who really expect your store to be open on Yule because they are still doing their Christmas shopping.  Expectations surround us that don't allow room for this path that is still pretty far off the beaten one.  When we immerse ourselves in our spirituality and our coven, we are simply viewed much differently than those Christians who choose to immerse themselves in their faith and their church.  Of course, the other side of the dilemma is that Witches often tend to be creative, eclectic people who have diverse interests and a desire to enrich themselves on multiple levels.  So sometimes we are our own culprits.  We try to pursue more interests and activities than we could possibly have enough time in the day for.  Whether the culprit is the expectations of others or the expectations we have of ourselves, I don't really know what the solution is.  I just know how important it is to seek out that balance, and make sure that you are doing something every day that reconnects  you with the magic of Witchcraft and reminds you why you embarked upon this path in the first place.  It won't happen in big ways every day.  It simply won't.  And it isn't productive to feel guilty about that.  So maybe the answer is to focus on the simple wins.  Sometimes that moment might be as small as finding yourself outside in the evening, awestruck by the smell of honeysuckle and the sight of fireflies reaching up toward a crescent moon.  But at least it's something, and in the right mindset, moments like that are magical.  So personally, I'll take those simple wins where I can find them, and everything else will be icing on the cake!  Such are the life and times of a busy Witch.

Coming Back to Life

"I was staring straight into the shining sun."

The above quote is from the Pink Floyd song "Coming Back to Life."  While the majority of the lyrics may not necessarily tie in, there are moments in that song that keep coming to mind at this time of year.  This is a time of year when even those like myself, who admittedly lean more toward the darker side of life, cannot help but feel the energy in the air and give into the giddy thrill of it all. Spring has officially sprung, and seemingly overnight the earth has been covered in a carpet of lush greenery.  To me, it is the absolute essence of magic to watch as things that once appeared dead spring back to life.  Watching as the first flowers bloom, listening as the first birds sing, smiling as the first frogs croak...it all fills me with such a deep sense of the power of this earth, and reminds me why my spiritual path could be nothing other than a nature religion.

To me, it is such a magical time to be a Witch.  In my tradition, the time between Ostara and Beltane is when we observe the Greening of the Earth, and it's the time of the beginning of spring, of national Arbor Day, of Earth Day, and of the earth physically transforming itself and donning its annual splendor.  During this time, covens and solitaries in my tradition all do their part to put a little energy toward the health, healing, strength, and transformation of the earth.  This annual observance is a tradition that really helps to connect me to this time of life, growth, and newness.  I need that balance.  I need to be forced out of my normally solemn and hard-nosed nature...forced to wear pastel floral prints, hunt colored eggs, and dance around with flowers in my hands at Ostara...forced to play the part of the coy maiden and weave colored ribbons around the maypole at Beltane...forced to cater to the delicate nature of baby seedling plants.  I tend to resonate so deeply with the height of intensity, whether it's the crazy wild intensity of the summer heat that leaves me feeling just shy of spontaneous combustion, or the deep woeful intensity of the barren winter that threatens nearly every year to carry me right down into the Underworld. Without the balance of the light-hearted energy of this season, I would simply take life way too seriously!

So here's to the stirrings of your inner child at Ostara, the wild frenzy of hormones at Beltane, and all the magic of the Greening of the Earth! 

Worshipping Between the Worlds

A few years ago, my husband built a wonderful corner cabinet, with three shelves at the top and doors at the bottom.   Because of the layout of our living room, there is really only one place it can go, and there it has stayed since it was first created.  So about a year ago, when I decided that I wanted to built a family altar, this cabinet was where I decided to house it.  It was built by my husband, and pretty much stays put, so it seemed appropriate. 

However, there was the trouble of what a family altar was going to be all about.  I have several altars in my home.  I have a permanent "working altar" in my room, which stays set up and is where I do things like meditation, magic, etc.  I also have a kitchen altar on the windowsill in my kitchen, which is probably the room in my house where I spent the majority of my time that isn't spent sleeping.  So I had to think of what purpose a family altar would serve, and my original plan was to have it be a simple place where both my husband and I could turn when we felt like we needed a little magical or divine intervention.  The set-up was very simple.  I placed it on the lowest shelf of the upper part of the cabinet, and made sure that the gods and the elements were represented.  In the center, I placed a little prayer box with small sheets of paper, flanked by a white taper and a black taper.  The idea was that either one of us could go over at any time, write our request down on one of the pieces of paper, place it in the box, and then light the appropriate candle...black to banish or white to attract.  It sounds simple enough, but in actual practice, the altar kind of just sat there.  This system was set up in response to an interest from my husband in being able to do a little more hands on magic, but the fact is that he just isn't a very magical or religious person, so while he like the idea in the beginning, it soon fell off of his radar.  As for me, because I have my own personal working altar, this new and simpler method wasn't entirely necessary.  Sure, I made use of it at times when I received a spontaneous prayer request.  When my nephew was staying at my home and we received word that his dad had been killed in a car accident, it was very helpful to have such a simple system at the ready that I could use with him to submit prayer requests for his grandfather.  Still though, I wasn't entirely satisfied.  It so rarely saw any use, and I wanted something in the central room in my home to represent and connect me to my spirituality in a meaningful way.

Every year around Samhain and Yule, my house becomes transformed.  My husband and I are big decorators for those holidays, and we love to see the house go through a period of dark morbidity at first, and then come out of that into a period of extreme light and joy.  During that time of year, the day-to-day trinkets that fill up the flat spaces in our home get boxed up to make way for the seasonal fare, and we yield first to skulls, ghosts, pumpkins, and haunted houses, and then to evergreens, candles, snowmen, reindeer, suns, and all things sparkly.  And so it was this past holiday season.  In the course of all of this change, the family altar remained more or less the same, with seasonal touches added. 

Then comes the packing up.  This is also a time of the year that we love, because when we pack away all of the holiday decor, it's almost like starting with a clean slate.  Everything seems blissfully sparse in contrast, and not everything has to go back just the way it was before.  It was during this part of the cycle that a new idea for the family altar came to me.  I stared at the corner cabinet, with our little family altar on the bottom shelf and two empty shelves above it, and an idea came to me.

In my tradition, we really resonate with the Shamanic idea of the Three Worlds.  We have included this idea into our theology as a representation of our belief that there are an infinite number of worlds other than our own, and that we can connect with each of these worlds.  The Three World ideology kind of sums up this concept in the Overworld, the Middle World, and the Underworld.  Looking at my three-tiered cabinet, it occurred to me that making a three-tiered altar that represented the Three World structure was the perfect way to utilize this space and give the family altar a bit more meaning.  Here is the result...

  
 

The Underworld Level...

On this level, I have several treasures that represent Underworld energies to me.  In the center is a God of Death statue that my husband and I bought on our honeymoon in New Orleans, which is absolutely one of my favorite possessions!  Next to it is another New Orleans purchase...a VooDoo wish stick.  The goblet to the right was a Yule gift from one of my coven mates, and it depicts the face of the Crone.  The alligator head is from Florida and represents my totem animal.  The black taper candle is placed in a gargoyle candle holder that my husband gave me.  I love the idea of gargoyles as these dark and protective entities, and consider that imagery very useful in magic.  The statue of the woman on the left is a purchase from an antique store in Helen, GA, and to me she is very representative of the Dark Mother aspect of the Goddess.  Her energy is dark, fierce, and protective, which seems very well-suited to the Underworld.  The other smaller items in the front are a shell to represent the connection between the element of water and the Underworld, a small candle holder that holds a red tealight in representation of the element of fire (which I also consider to be connected to the Underworld), and a tiny Egyptian sarcophagus.  

The Middle World level...

The Middle World level of the altar is very earthy.  The large glass jar in the back with the iron topper and base is full of dried flower petals from the flower arrangement I made for my dad's funeral.  Perhaps it would make sense to have this at the Underworld level, but I have placed it here for a few reasons.  On the practical side of things, the Underworld shelf was already quite full, and this item is also a bit too tall for that shelf (the shelves aren't all the same height).  However, I also view this as being connected to my last Middle Worldly interaction with him.  That flower arrangement was the last thing I did for him that was connected to this life, and for that reason, I can just as easily justify placing it on the Middle World level.  An earth Goddess statue and a golden reindeer represent some of the Middle World aspects of the gods.  The element of earth is represent by several pentacles (a green pentacle disc, my pentacle tart warmer, and the pentacle carved on top of the prayer box), as well as pine cones, acorns, small pieces of wood, stones, and other such items that I have collected from my property and on nature walks.  The large antler candle holder houses a green and very earthy candle that I used at my coven's Inner Grove Retreat this past fall, which was supposed to represent myself.  In the center of this level is the prayer box that I mentioned before.

The Overworld Level...

Of all of the Three Worlds, the Overworld is the one that I have the hardest time connecting to, which is probably evident by how sparse this level of the altar is for the time being.  However, building this altar has helped me to realize that this connection is something I need to work on, and so it has provided a valuable lesson.  The centerpiece of this level is a mother and child statue, and to me this evokes the sense of the Mother Goddess watching over us from the heavens.  The moon and sun candle holders represent those celestial aspects of the Gods.  The element of air is represented by a celestial incense burner and feathers I've collected from my property.  A white taper candle is also included, as well as a small angel.  Typically I'm not big on angels, but this angel was given to me from my dad's aunt's collection after she passed away, so it seemed appropriate to give it a place of honor in my home.

The items included on this altar are just items that I already had in my collection, which I had never previously thought of categorizing in this way.  However, by sorting them out into representations of the Three Worlds, I have been able to create an altar that helps to keep me connected to each of these worlds.  This altar isn't necessarily as beautiful as some that I've set before, but it is very meaningful.  It can still be used in the same way that it was used before, for simple prayer requests, but now each time I look at it, I am reminded of the Three Worlds, and it foster my connection to them on a daily basis.  I also feel that it brings a bit of the energy of each of these worlds into my home, which creates a nice balance.

Out of Darkness, Into Light

I recently finished writing the ritual for my coven's upcoming Imbolc celebration, and it started me thinking about what Imbolc represents to me.  I have known several people who struggle to connect with Imbolc, and have a hard time grasping what it represents.  In all things in the Craft, I believe it is important to find your own personal meanings for things, your own personal ways of connecting to them, and your own personal set of symbolism.  This is how I found a way to connect with Imbolc.

Of course, there is plenty of readily available information about Imbolc, and what it's place on the Wheel of the year represents, but just like many of the associations connected with each of the sabbats, much of what it represents has become more abstract than practical in modern times.  The name Imbolc derives from the old Irish "imbolg," which means "in the belly."  Another name for the holiday, "Oimelc," means "ewe's milk."  Each of these names refers to something that certainly would have been a cause for celebration at a time when life was much more dependent upon agriculture--the pregnancy and lactation of ewes.  By this point in the season, winter stores may have been running low, but it would have still been too early and too cold to plant for the new season.  Dairy would have provided a welcome new food source, and would have been a very early sign that the tides were turning and warmer, more fertile days were ahead.  Celebrations of this turn of events would have been natural, but for those of us in the modern world who aren't farmers, it can be hard to relate.  Sure, we can logically comprehend the significance, but as people who can drive to the grocery store and pick up a gallon of milk anytime we like, it can be difficult to truly put ourselves into the shoes of those who would have rejoiced at the lactation of sheep.  Again, this provides us with more abstract symbolism than living significance.

Another popular association for Imbolc is that of the Feast of Brighid.  This is a wonderful way to approach the holiday, as Brighid rules over many things that could be considered seasonally appropriate.  Brighid is a goddess of fire, poetry and healing, and through her associations with the holiday, Imbolc could be thought of as a time that bring the light and warmth of fire, creative inspiration for the new yearly cycle, and healing and regeneration for the earth and those living upon in.  Still, though, while this symbolism is slightly more universal and translates into modern day a little better, the problem remains that not everyone will be able to connect to it.  This is primarily due to the simple fact that not everyone connects with the goddess Brighid, or wants to honor Her specifically every year at this time.  The general themes may be more universal, but the connection to a particular goddess in the Celtic pantheon may not be considered as universal.

So where does this leave Imbolc?  I have found ways to connect with all of the symbolism mentioned above, but there was a time earlier on my path when I too struggled a bit more with Imbolc than I did with some of the other sabbats.  It took a few years of living the Wheel and really thinking about what each spoke on that Wheel represented to me before I began relating to Imbolc in my own way.  In observing and connecting to my own environment, in present day, Imbolc has come to very much represent a time between darkness and light to me.  It does not represent the same balance as, say, an equinox, but rather--it represents a turning point.  Imbolc lies half way between the longest night of the year and the official start of spring.  At this point on the Wheel, though the days have been growing longer for several weeks, that change has not yet become very apparent.  And yet, we know that by the time Ostara comes around, the changes in light and the differences in the land will be quite obvious.  Imbolc, then, is truly about helping to turn the Wheel.  It is about overcoming that final hump of winter...casting off the final layers of darkness and cold.  It is about calling the earth out its slumber, so that it can begin the process of donning its annual greenery, beginning again the age-old cycle.  It is a time of emergence.  This is how I connect with Imbolc.  It is a time to step out of the darkness, and into the light.  It is a time to lend my energy to the building momentum of the new turn of the Wheel, recognizing all of the blessings of the darkness, but leaving them behind to emerge into life, into light, and into the creative cycle once more.