Song of a Daily Druid

The No-Time Before Beginning

We cannot always be rushing full speed ahead.

Druidry teaches us that there are cycles, seasons that turn over and shuffle through one another. At Samhain, summer’s end, we enter a time of darkness, before the rebirth of light on the winter solstice. Now is a time of dissolution, and sacrifice. And bad chest colds with persistent, aching cough. Amber and rusted-ruby bleed through the tree leaves along their brittle veins, and I notice how they scab around the torn edges of old holes chewed out by summer insects now sluggish or dead. Outside my window, rain shivers down through the evening fog and clings to every surface, and slips, and falls, and clings again; each leaf wavers limply in the breeze, damp but still shining, ablaze like the sun’s going-down. They are so devoted. They mimic her, like the rain; they fall. We are all going down, stepping gently into the dusk, into the coming dark.

Last year, I dreamt often of brilliant mountainsides, spattered with the reds, oranges and yellows of foliage. My dreams were suffused with autumn. I noticed the subtle shifts as the season moved, changes I had never noticed before. The blushing rouge at the beginning, like wounds or lips opening up here and there among the worn summer green, just beginning to spread from tree to tree. The quaking yellows and golds at the height of the season, the whole woods cut through by low, bright sunlight and seeming to glow, the limbs of trees dark like veins starting to show through a papery sky, reflected in the surface of half-hidden streams gliding through layers of yellow leaves that had already fallen. And then, even towards the end, how beautiful and subtle the browns became, some deep like wet bark, some light and feathery like sheaves of wheat or rustling like straw, the ochre, russet, everything in sepia tones. There was a stand of sycamores outside the local library that everyday seemed to have life, each day different, moods that hesitated and seemed to revise themselves shyly, while no one was looking. Sometimes they were bright against the backdrop of concrete buildings and city skyline, sometimes faded and gentle, hardly distinguishable, but quiet and present. It would be hard to explain how these sycamores alone seemed to be, for the first time, so real to me, so very much alive.

This autumn, I’ve spent too much time sick in bed. The wind elbows its way through the darkening evening like a disgruntled old man too proud to admit he feels ignored and forgotten. I have missed too many sunsets; I have slept restlessly, wheezing, through too many dawns. The brilliance and color I remember from last year? Replaced with cold-shouldered windows rattling unkindly against every draft, and a body that just cannot find a comfortable position amidst piles of pillows and layers of blankets. Sometimes, autumn is not romantic, or brilliant, or even eerie with the smell of old blood, the smell of ancient slaughter to thin the herds for winter, the smell of our ancestors, the memory of their warm bodies moving and sweating and churning just on the other side of the thinning gossamer veil between the worlds. Sometimes, autumn is dull and cramped, a voiceless throat and the practical drug store necessities.

We spend a lot of energy these days trying not to be sad, trying to avoid the risk of becoming sad, or sick, or vulnerable in any way. We do our best to placate, ameliorate, mitigate. We believe in a steady, if not perfect, state of health and happiness, despite the evidence, despite the change and flux that surrounds us constantly.

Sometimes, what we really need to learn is how to walk through sickness, and sadness, and come out the other side. Not singing or laughing, perhaps, but mindful and fully present all the same. We need to learn that this pressing onward, this walking through the thick of it, the heavy darkness, dense with grief and dissolution–this process is not beautiful, or romantic. Sometimes it is annoying and a bit mucous, and there is no moment when suddenly the way is clear and everything resolves into celebration and relief. Sometimes, we simply recover, gradually, so slowly that we barely notice, each day a little less difficult, each night a little easier to sleep through.

??

So I’m less-than-perfect tonight, with a sore throat and a headache that makes concentration difficult, let alone philosophy or spiritual musing. And I am wistful for last fall, for the home in that season I left in order to make a new home on the other side of sickness and frustration. But we make homes of our bodies all the same, in all their imperfections, as we make our homes in the landscape with its cycles and rhythms, its withering and renewal. But perhaps this is why birth, too, is so amazing — that we can make of our very bodies a home for an innocent new being — that, like those physical houses constructed out of sacrificed trees and broken stones, we can build that kind of sanctuary. We gestate within these old bodies a new self, like the god descending into the dark womb to wait the rebirth of light. A warm hearth, a place from which new happiness on this side of loss and hardship can begin again. Even when we have passed through illness and loneliness, been shaped by them and scarred by them, that we can still become a bridge to the new, to the newly born, to the beginning.

Now is a time of dissolution, and sacrifice. Now is the no-time, the end of one year, before another begins. We press on, through the darkness, the breath of our ancestors barely stirring us. The rain falls, in imitation of the leaves, the leaves who slide loose and fall as the sun goes down.

Blessings, readers, on this Samhain. See you on the other side.