Winter Solstice Celebration and a poem: “Samhain, a Celtic Winter Song.

 

 

 

Dark mysterious season,

when the light doesn’t

quite reach the ground,

the trees shadow puppets

moving against the gray of day.

 

I think over the past year

praying there has been a

kindling in my soul,

the heart opened, warmed

and the juiciness of life is

more than in the loins–

a stream of forgiveness

slow flowing through the tough fibers

not stopper’d with an underlying

bitterness

but softened with compassion.

 

This season of constrictions,

unusual emptiness,

brittle like dried twigs

desiccated by hoar frost

just to be endured.

 

I wrap myself in wool and

watch the migrations–

first tender song birds which harken

back to summer,

then Sandhill cranes,

legs thin banners

streaming behind white bodies,

lost against a snowy sky.

 

They lift off to a middling cosmos,

while I, earth-bound,

can only flap the wings of my shawl,

poor plumage for such a flight,

and wonder about my own destination.

 

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2017  (“Samhain” published in “Pitcher of Moon”, 2014, Amazon.com)

“The Divine is preceived and experienced in many different ways by individual and religious groups.  Orthodox religions have codified their own approaches to the Divine in diverse ways.  Many have been helped and encouraged by such approaches, but others have not,  feeling their personal mystical experiences can not be so defined.”

     —-from “Celtic Devotional”, by Caitlin Matthews,  Fair Winds Press, 2004.

I am one of those who have found, over the years that religion has not been helpful or encouraging.  For forty years, I have ‘gone against the tide’ of my brother’s Christianity.  I found it abusive, misogynistic, deadening.  But perhaps that is the fault of my siblings, not Christianity.  This to me is not worthy of emulating.   If this is Christianity, I want no part of it.  And I don’t think their God wants it either.

The Winter Solstice falls upon December 21th, at 11:28 EST, Thursday to be exact.  This is the year’s longest night.  We celebrate it with lights, candles and a roaring fire in the wood stove.  We include prayers and an expression of gratitude above all else.  It has a particular signifance to us that prepares us for the new year.  It opens our hearts and eyes to the beauty and peacefulness of the Winter season.  It allows, demands a stillness that only such a fallow season can bring.  It calls for a mindfulness that centers us, a looking back at the past year and an anticipation for the new one coming.

Instead of the tinsel (which I like…) and artificial trimmings we gather magnolia leaves, nandina berries, holly and fir boughs.  We decorate the four mantels with these gifts from Nature and when they dry out and lose their ‘life’ they give the gift of heat as we stuff the woodstove with their bounty.

There is so much more mystery in the Cosmos than we can imagine.  A time to dedicate ourselves in gratitude,  to show a random gratitude to those ‘wise’ ones, relatives who are gone but not forgotten, to settle down in thought and silence. To await another season of rebirth.  To wrap ourselves in the wool of love for each other.

The Light can not be truly appreciated without the Darkness that surrounds us in this season.  Each season of the year provides us with many doorways  for fresh spiritual revelations and a personal response.  I am glad that after so many years of conflict, my hsuband and I have found this pathway.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

 

For Frank Hubeny:

Merry Christmas!

Clach Mhullinn….home

 

Merry Christmass to All who follow this holiday.

Jane

 

Religion and other bothersome matters…

Painting: "Irish Coast", watercolor, 2005, j.kohut-bartels

Lately I have been thinking  about religion and spirituality.  I don’t see these as the same, and I struggle through a lot of nattering influences to come to a place of my own.

I went through a period of searching for a religion where I felt I could belong.  Raised haphazardly Christian (Episcopalian) or as my brother the holy roller likes to refer to this as “raised by wolves”….nothing of organized religion seemed to ‘fit’.

A short while ago an Orthodox Jew (who turned out to be a bad example of Jewishness and humanity), tried to harangue my husband about “the Saints”.  I guess to this Jew’s thinking my husband looked like a Christian.  I had to laugh because my husband was and is a Buddhist of 25 years standing.  His wife finally told him to shut up because she didn’t want to hear this stuff.  Good girl.

His religious narrowness didn’t put me off the Jewish religion and for a year went to classes about Judaism and attended Temple.  Somewhere my father’s family was Jewish, and though it was on the wrong side of the blanket, I wanted to understand something of this religion.  Finally, it was, to me…..just rituals.  About as mystical as those damn Saints.  I couldn’t suspend my disbelief.

I have a lot of friends who come from different religions.  Muslims, Ba’hai, Christians, pagans, Jews, etc.  The Christians break down into many various parts.  Episcopalian, Unitarian, Quaker, Unitarian Universalists, etc.  With the Jews it was Reform, Orthodox, Conservative.  The Ba’hais were pretty consolidated.  The practicing pagans were just down-right silly to me. Perhaps I had grown far beyond such  stuff.

But still there was a nagging issue of spirituality.  This, I believe,  is something that encases a broadness  that perhaps the religious dogmas can’t touch.  For me, it comes down to a question of Gratitude.

I am grateful for the breath of life, for the ability to awake and walk, to read, to laugh, to see the marvelous passage of clouds and time, to commune with nature and friends and family, and all this is wrapped up in Gratitude.  To receive love that sometimes I don’t deserve.  To give love and to mean it.

I fight this battle with myself and at times it gets overwhelming.  It’s more than I am, and more than I can solve.  I’m out on a limb here, and the answer isn’t  within these accepted forms of worship. At least not for me.

Today it was a perfectly beautiful day…one which was memorable for nothing except the perfection around me.  The sky was marvelous, from dawn to dusk, that sharp sentiment of expectation in the change of season, and the season to come;  the beauty of the still-green leaves and overwhelming, huge trees here in the South; the winds that made themselves known, not as gentle blowing breezes, but as swooshing dervishes, rotating branches and making their power known.

I felt such gratitude in the presence of this day: what wonderful beauty was before me.  There was no way around gratitude.

I came across something tonight, and it struck me as a coda for the day; something that brings a definition or a conclusion to this marvelous beauty before me.  It gave structure and meaning to what I was seeking.

Lughnasadh

“The Autumn quarter of Lughnasadh brings the gift of maturity and is a time of physical harvest and spiritual garnering. It sees the greatest change in weather from broiling heat to dark and chilly nights.  It is the time for celebrating the harvest and sees the busy preparations for winter.  In the human growth cycle, Lughnasadh corresponds to the period of mature adulthood when a certain steadiness and responsibility have been established.  It is a good time to celebrate the lives of all who have helped stabilize and uphold the noble values of life, of all who have exercised good judgment and steered the doubtful into the harbor of certainty, of all holy ones whose guardianship has saved us from life-disabling mistakes.”

From “Celtic Devotional”, by Caitlin Matthews.

Funny, this hits the spot.  It incorporates the Gratitude I am feeling and it gives a particular direction.  It gives hope.

Lady Nyo (with a fond hug to Margie and Bren)

“The Shortest Day”, from a reader, Berowne

Sent by Berowne, from the “Revels”

http://www.thelostland.com/shortest.htm

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.

I awoke after the shortest day to blazing sunlight, surely a promise of what is to come: Hope and Light.  Unseasonable weather, but since the woodpile is scattered all over a part of the property, and I haven’t stacked any yet….I’ll take it.

I also came across a poem, a Greeting to the Winter Solstice:

Brightener of Darkness, hail!

Keeper of Clearness, Opener of the Depths….

Gifts of plenty are arising,

Winter wonders, white snows’ fall.

Joyful be the heart within us,

Open wide the guesting door,

Wisdom wakens in abundance,

Warm our beings to the core.

From “Celtic Devotional” by Caitlin Matthews