Tuesday was the Celtic festival of Imbolc. It is a word meaning ‘in the belly’ and it heralds the spring-that-has-not-yet-sprung; the things still growing in darkness, stretching towards light. I wrapped up and took my mobility scooter to a quiet place under the winter sun and I said out loud to the day, "I do not know you. Show me who you are? Show me what you mean?" I had to peel off twenty years of conditioning to say those words and they felt as sharp and clear as the sunshine.
I always used to celebrate the old festivals, years ago: the wheel of the year. There is something rich and delicious about their names and traditions and I thought celebrating them might make me someone wild and different. There are books full of esoteric scripts and folklore for each special day and I would read from them enthusiastically, but I was play-acting. The language, flora and fauna ascribed to each festival meant very little amongst the urban concrete of my isolated, disabled life. Each festival day was presented to me like a dress that wasn’t my size and wasn’t my colour but, convinced that the problem must be me, I obligingly squeezed my world and self to fit it. Deep down, I knew it was ritual devoid of any real connection and it left me empty, confused.
Older now, wiser, I think I’d like to try again to celebrate the year’s turning in a way that really means something to me. It comes alongside a growing hunger to make marks - not just in my creative practice but in my slow behaviour, in all the things I do through the day and the year. I can see now that ritual done well might be another kind of mark-making that comes from your gut, from the very essence of who you are, what you feel, and what’s really happening. It could be a way of underlining something, putting your hand to it, shaking off passivity and moving beyond thought into your body, to act, to make something visible. It could be a manifestation of ultimate honesty.
I take these new thoughts into Imbolc and begin again.
Rather than fixate on what the books tell me I should see and do at this time of year, I look at what’s actually here around me. There are no pretty snowdrops in my industrial estate, no early lambs, no reeds or rushes to make neat Brigid’s crosses. So what is there?Â
There is new graffiti blooming in the underpass, and the green grass and the green moss of the graveyard I turn into is so saturated it shines and drips. The ground stretching around me feels like it’s underwater and when I drive my electric legs over the turf to get closer to the trees, my wheels leave a long and gentle double wake. I feel happy. No, there are no snowdrops, but daisies are beginning to stir in the grass, just one of two here and there, turning their faces up to the sun after their long sleep.Â
The air is full of great tit song. They are bold and ready before many other birds, while little long-tails weave their shyer peeps and their flight between them. I see two great crows stalking between the headstones, their whole bodies moving with each stride as if they were pulling themselves along the ground by their beaks. And there are mole hills, mole hills everywhere. Tunnels between the graves down into the dark, the cold ground broken, letting new air in. I wonder what it all means and know now that no book could tell me.
The evergreens have shrugged off the long winter months as if it’s been nothing, as if they’ve barely noticed it, while between them, bare deciduous trees still huddle, shivering. The fierce winds have left the ground littered with great long sticks and I pick up the best ones - holly, willow - stashing them on the floor of my scooter, thinking I might sand them down and make them into something. There are few unchewed cones left under the firs and pines now, and the squirrels are looking skinnier, wilier. One rests his front paws on a gravestone to watch me pass.
I make an offering to the birds, sprinkling seed onto the ground to encourage them to keep going. It is the stone urns I notice next. Suddenly, I see the old town graveyard is full of empty containers, many tipped and resting on their sides, exhausted, and the light is shining into their bellies, the sun high enough now to reach inside them. I think about my body, my belly, and later, when I get home, the great belly of the house that stretches around me too.Â
I have been reacquainting myself with Brigid - the old fire goddess associated with this day of bellies and growing. ‘Goddess of medicine, of smithing - of making - goddess of poetic inspiration, of healing and hearth’, the words say. This Imbolc, I wanted to see if those things were connected and why they mattered. Rooted in the real things I’ve seen and felt, I begin to feel how body and home work as concentric containers around the fire of my big ideas and yes, there is something here, I think, something meaningful. My home protects and nourishes my body and keeps me safe, and, wrapped in my body, there in its middle, there is the energy and spark of the things I still need to grow and make. All life long, we are birthing and smithing little children through our thoughts and behaviours, little beings that will run from us and touch the world, or pinch and scratch it. I am a mother, but also soil, a greenhouse, an anvil. There are many ways to think about it.Â
This Imbolc, I could see how a force and an idea like Brigid might act like a belly or the soil, somewhere to hold our seeds safe while things still feel cold. I can see also how we might need someone to act as healer, mender and protector of the containers that surround those things that are precious to us when life is stormy. She shows me that I am allowed to prioritise my healing and mending and to desire it on my own terms. I think, too, that we might need someone like her and a day like this to show us the importance of fire and light so we can start to see clearly again, so that what has existed as just thoughts in darkness can begin to be poured into action: into something that can be made real and visible, when the time is finally ripe.
I get a sense of all this as I sit and make a doll to represent this Brigid, because why not? Why not do that and make something real that can sit beside me? I give her flame-red hair and fill her belly nice and fat. I make her a dress that fits just right. I whisper words to her, telling her all about the creative work I want to do in this broken body of mine and I see how she will help me to grow it. She will challenge me to care well for my body and home, knowing that they are the essential containers within which my idea is cradled and forged into something that might move and change things. I think, maybe, she might be willing to lend me her strength in that, sister, midwife and smith, to grip my hand and encourage me to keep going, rubbing my back when it all feels too heavy. I think she will keep steering me back to what’s at the heart of all this: taking action, making marks. Making things as real and as solid as the daisies and the birds, rooted in who I actually am and what’s really going on.
I think maybe all this is true, meanings overlapping and spilling together. This is why I tend the house and open the windows to the early spring air. And this is why I rest now and choose healing. I see that this is how good things ‘in the belly’ will have a chance to find real life beyond ideas, beyond thoughts. This is where action starts.Â
This is real ritual: alive, pulsing, vibrant. I believe I might have found something meaningful here, at last.
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