A Cross-Quarter Day Upon the Wheel of the Year

Actual posting — as opposed to putting up YouTubes by people who, admittedly, have a lot more to say than I will ever have — has, I confess, been a bit scarce lately around these parts. My job has been keeping me really busy — as in lots of all-nighters and lots of long weekends — for the last few weeks. (It’s a good thing that I love my job and that my work is really, really interesting. It makes the long hours much more manageable; believe me, I’ve had jobs where that wasn’t the case.) These long hours will subside, eventually, but, in the mean time, I’ve had too little time for my family, this blog, my friends, some writing obligations that I’ve assumed, and my resolution to spend more time doing things that I love (ballet, museums, public gardens, time with G/Son, knitting, etc.)

Tonight is Imbolc and I spent a wonderful block of stolen time outside in my woodland garden, under a cloud-hazed waxing Moon. I made love to my two lovely magnolias and sent worried protection to the already-spiking Voodoo lilies, aka Drancunculus vulgaris. Two years ago, I went out onto my porch on Imbolc, only to be snowed in for days and days shortly thereafter. This year, I don’t expect that to happen. In fact, I’m hoping that this weekend will be free and I’ll be able to spend time with G/Son, go to a local seed swap, and show up for the monthly massage that I promised myself.

Meanwhile, outside my little self-contained pod of research and writing on oddly arcane legal topics, the world continues to go round as fast as it’s able. There’s lots of lovely internet observation of Imbolc. Anne Hill is sponsoring her annual Brigid Poetry Slam.

Celia has a lovely song out about Brigid, that celebrates Brigid’s morphing into St. Brigit.
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Joanna Colbert has a lovely song to Brigid, in Her role as bringer of the Spring and keeper of the flame:

Yeshe Rabbit has up wonderful post about accepting challenges, both self-selected and imposed that, IMHO, is a wonderful way to think about the coming season of serious growth.

If your cosmology, as does mine, revolves around the death of the old and the adoption of new goals around Samhein, reflection between Samhein and Winter Solstice, and planning between Winter Solstice and Imbolc, then now is the perfect time to begin to really put into practice new plans, to plant new seeds, to get into gear and go, to swing that hammer onto that molten metal. It makes sense that now is when we worship a Goddess of inspiration, poetry, craft, childbirth, the kind of new beginnings that come from fire and hard work.

The Goddess Brigid is one of only a very few Goddesses who have visited me in my dreams. I relate to Her most intimately in Her role as the Goddess of poetry — an art form that I love. But I also find Her in those long, late nights at my desk when I am “doing law,” when, in the words of my legal research prof, I am, and he was more correct than he knew, “learning to love the law.” There, She seems to me to be the Goddess of blacksmithing, that strenuous craft wherein one bangs hard Earth into the necessary shape, into the shape needed for the task at hand. My hands lack Her callouses, but they embody Her arthritis. And it is the connection between the firing neurons in my brain and the muscles of my hand upon the computer keyboard that mimic what I imagine must have been Brigid’s love of the blacksmith’s hammer.

But Brigid is, foremost for me, the Goddess of Poetry.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love poetry. My mom used to read me Mother Goose and A.A. Milne‘s poetry and that seemed completely natural to me. I didn’t even think that it was “poetry.” It was just what was. (Where am I going? I don’t quite know. What does it matter where people go? Down to the wood where the blue-bells grow — Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know.) As a girl, I loved the embarrassingly romantic stuff at which people nowadays like to laugh. The first time that I had to read poetry aloud to a group (sixth grade?) I chose the overly-long poem The Highwayman. (I knew a lot about what I liked and not much about how to choose something for an audience; that’s a lesson that I’m still honing in my love of the law.) I loved that poem then, and I love it now. (Well, in the late Sixties, loving bad boys, well, it made somewhat more sense than it, well, seems to make, well, now. But I didn’t love it, even then, for the sense that it makes. I loved it for the tiny allowance that it made for a woman to be heroic. (OK, and for the mention of a love-knot in the moonlight. “Look for me by the moonlight; I’ll come to thee by the Moonlight, though Hell should bar the way. . . . The trigger, at least, was hers.”) Later, I grew more caustic and I spent too many of the days of my teen-age-years reading and memorizing (sign of a misspent youth) Dorothy Parker, whom I can still quote today at the drop of a hat. Now, my tastes tend more towards Mary Oliver, Blake, and, well, he’s old, but, well, Shakespeare, but my tastes are, in my defense, more and more eclectic.

Whose poetry sounds of blacksmith hammers upon your heart?

Here, in honor of the great Goddess Brigid, is another of the poems that shaped my life. It’s by the American poet, Robert Frost:

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
The judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

I’m still playing that dance just now, that dance between my avocation and my vocation (at once, my work life seems so divorced from my work as a Witch, and, at the same time, these lives seem, to me, to be so much the same thing.) Between that place where my two eyes are one in sight. I’m still dancing between that place where love and need are one and work is play (as, I admit, it’s far too like to seem to me) for mortal stakes.

May Bridgid the Bright help me to find my balance between inspiration and the strike of the hammer upon rare Earth. May She guide me in my work. May She bless you upon your path.

Picture found here.