Imbolc

A celebration of returning light, Imbolc is a Gaelic festival that marks the beginning of spring. Also called Candlemas (Christian), New Year (Tibetan, Chinese, Iroquois), Tu Bi-Shevat (Jewish). Goddess festival of Brigit, Brighid, Brigid (Celtic). It is our mid-winter celebration, prophecy, purification, initiation.

Our Lady of 10,000 Names, Suzanne Grace Mitchell, 2018

Breathe into emptiness.

Stir in the silence that winter gifted you. Touch new skin, the surprise aliveness, the contours winter revealed. There is an echoing silence that precedes every new thing. 

Imbolc is the insistence of the spring waters, pushing up through cold earth.

It is the restlessness of birdsong, the persistence of the sap. It is the dark that folds around all that is stirring, saying: Pace yourself, love. 

Imbolc calls us to be simple. 

We have nothing but what winter left us. We have nothing but our own stirring heartbeats and desires. Nothing but the fire in our bellies that warmed us through the deepest darks. 

It is time to polish ourselves.

To clear, clean, hone. To stand in the barest simplicity of our aliveness and promise ourselves to service, to spring. 

Make a simple promise.

To our wholeness, to becoming. Find the seed inside you, swollen with its own longing, that insists, with all the force of life, that it will sprout when the time is right. Simple, naked, clean, fiercely alive. 

~ Maeanna Welti © Mother Tongue Ink 2020

Brigid's cross