Soul-stice

delightful snow falls gently and fat today. Before long it will be Imbolc. Bridget waits framed with the first real winter blast.

Winds whipped the snow in large sheets but now there is a simple constant stream of individual flakes. 
Good packing snow.

Wow so much event this season.
the end of the world as we knew it.

Meteor showers.

We changed the date of our ritual to the 20th, the Mother’s Night, celebrating the re-birth of the sun.

The first of 12 nights.
It is now the seventh.

Strange up and downs but a certain anxiety is gone. A nervous undercurrent of wyrrd seems put to rest.
The end of the world or something.

Trying to get through the holiday crawl of sending out packages and ordering packages and planning and preparing all with no focused spirit, just an obligatory calendar drawing one forward. On this day this and then that. Fortunately weather held off and things got done.

And the strangeness of the automobiles.
First the electric haywire flashing lights death and rebirth, and then the headlight out, summonsed, fixed, rechecked, and then left on to dead battery. And then the other car with a headlight out. And then all fixed. phew.

And the strange discomforts.
Lyme, pained joints, almost fevers or chills, fatigue. Real physical challenges messing with our normal balance.

And now it is the 12th and final night. 

Holidays have come and gone and we wait until midnight for the new year.

We need this new year, a new start, a new life. To live true, true to our art, true to our heart, to make it all work, to make our work our art.

Somehow the days have once again drifted fast. Hard sometimes to share or retell the time- the space of ritual, how we come to ritual and how we come out is doable, but the place we go into during ritual is framed only by the fire.

Quietude in the morning making food and cleaning as always, but this time alone is rare and sacred.

Slowly stacking sticks in trios and diamonds in the fire pit by the house, newly re-dug with all the old branches and sticks removed. Empty and clean like our spirit.

Lighting the fires with 4 matches as prayers in each of the directions,  and a final one which brings it all to flame.

More about the ritual proper on the morrow, the new day, the new year, but suffice to say that our fire burned strong and clear and through the late night snow and flooding rain until the wee hours. Magical glowing light in the long night.