As I clear and put away the decorations after Winter Solstice this year, I feel it as perhaps the ending of the decades of the Winter Solstice ceremonies I have created and facilitated. I have gathered and created these decorations in those years. I feel the words “I am packing it up.”  I am an old woman now and I am packing it up. 

Yet, “packing it up” is a saying of “yes” to the end of life, welcoming the Omega. Such thoughts are often thought of as morbid but it is an acceptance of participation in a bigger picture/story – we are specks along the way. This individual beautiful self does and can make a difference, and has made a difference, but it is always a larger self. This Winter Solstice, the new being coming forth in me is the Crone phase, the entering/re-entering a larger new being, stepping closer to immersion.

The contraction of life that is the Crone phase may be understood as a systole, a contraction of the heart by which the blood is forced onward and the circulation enabled.^[1] This Crone phase is the systole that carries all away – She is about loss, but the contraction of the heart is obviously a creative one, it is the pulse of life. Is it only our short-sightedness that keeps us from seeing the Crone phase/contraction that way? Is it because we insist on taking it all so personally, when it is not, in fact? 

I feel the Imbolc poetry coming in early this year – bring it on, this larger new being who I am. I feel Brigid, gaze upon her mask, and invoke Her: light the flame, Her flame. We are tenders of the Flame: it is not personal. We do tend our small flames, but it participates in a larger Flame, to whom we return.

Glenys Livingstone 2024C.E.

NOTES:

^[1] I owe the “systole” metaphor to Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, p.:20. He uses it to speak of an eternal pulse that lifts Himalayas, and then carries them away.