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

 

“A Reason for the Season”

Christmas Eve, early. The magnolia leaves and glossy red nandina berries  are spread….finally… over these old mantels.

Southern traditions are different.  I come from  the North and realize  now how decorating differs in both regions.  People used what they had.  Magnolia leaves are broad and glossy, and look lovely spread over overmantels, tucked behind paintings, and on mantels with these nandina berries I have only seen in the South.  The glossy leaves and berries come into their best in this early winter.  Nandina bushes are rather frothy, with orange, grape-clustered berries that turn to a bright red at Xmas.  Perfect.  Some pine cones, which down here tend to be all sizes…from tiny, perfect ‘buds’ to huge cones you can put an eye out with.

There are 4 fireplaces in this old house and all of them drafty.  This spring I am going to paint ‘firescreens’ to place over the andirons and close off the drafts.  But by the time they are finished it will probably be summer.

I am making mimosas this afternoon, and oyster stew for the evening meal, and then to bed.  It’s just Husband and House this year, as our son has left for Navy deployment Dec. 8th.  It is a tenuous and bittersweet Christmas this year; the first in 22 years sans enfant.

(We just received our first letter from our son:  a whole page and a half of closely written letter on Navy stationary saying it’s cold up there and the food is good (but not as good as mom’s) he has a cold or flu that showed up after all his shots, and  bemoans his Navy haircut.  Sounds like he’s doing fine.  Hope he has Kleenex.)

But the cats have his old room and they are very happy.  The dogs keep looking for their buddy….he has disappeared into the ether. He has a favorite cat, Hana, who is a nutcase.  She is a beautiful tortoise shell calico and  gets beaten up by another two females.  So she has ‘special needs’ emotionally as our son proclaims.  She must have because she sleeps in his sleeping bag…at the bottom.

It is gloomy outside, a cold rain  probably  perferable to the snow up North.  But I don’t know.  Each year I pray for some snow and this year we got 6″ March 1st.  Very unusual.

So hope springs eternal for some of that ‘stuff’.  This morning I noticed cardinals and bluejays squabbling outside in trees.  They divebombed each other but I think this will settle down because Winter looks like a long one this year.

This short essay was written last year.  It still works for me this year.

Merry Christmas.

Lady Nyo

A REASON FOR THE SEASON

I saw the Cooper’s hawk this morning. She landed on the chimney pot, probably looking for my miniature hen, Grayson. Four years ago she was a starving fledgling who mantled over while I fed her cold chicken. She’s back this holiday, my spirits lifting. A good Christmas present.

In the middle of the commercialization of Christmas, Nature closes the gap. I have noticed squirrels with pecans in mouths leaping the trees, hawks hunting low over now-bare woods, unknown song birds sitting on fences, heard the migration of Sandhill cranes as they honk in formation. You hear their cacophony well before they appear. Their chiding cries float down to upturned faces.

There is brightness to the holly, washed by our early winter rains and the orange of the nandina berries has turned crimson. Smell of woodsmoke in the air and the crispness of mornings means the earth is going to sleep. We humans should reclaim our past and our fecal plugs and join the slumber party of our brother bears.

Jingle Bells will fade and our tension with it. Looking towards deep winter when the Earth is again silent will restore our balance and calm nerves with a blanket of peace.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2008

“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

“Winter Afternoon”

Today is the Winter Solstice.  It is, and has been,  a rather sacred time for me.  It signals, officially, that ‘dark, mysterious season, where the light doesn’t quite reach the ground.’

It also puts in place the leisure for reading Robert Frost and Robert Burns and other wintertime poets, or those who feel like wintertime poets to me.  I try to do this every year, but life gets in the way.

Even though we are in the South, I pray for snow, because there is no better time, once the woodstove is stocked, to sit back with a hot drink and read poetry.

I will work on a poem soon because…well, there won’t be too many more events of this nature to write poetry around, and it’s a precious time for me…especially this year.

Lady Nyo

Winters pale afternoon

Creeps into night like skim milk

Poured from one china bowl to another.

The thin crescent moon appears,

A broken cup of feeble light

That spills upon the ground,

Too watery to brighten the road.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted 2009

Winter Solstice in place of Xmas….

Every year it hits. A general unease with the season…or more, the ‘holidays’ and every year I determine I must do something about it.

This year I have talked to family and friends and it’s rather interesting. Many feel like I do…except my son and Husband.

They are the holdouts….spoiled by the previous Xmases. Having only one child has allowed us to spoil him in certain ways. He is a good young man, 21 now, but I could see it in his face when I said: “How about no Xmas this year?”. A look of panic, like the world has stopped turning. A bit of the same in my Husband’s expression.

In Christian tradition Xmas is a time not for self-indulgence, but for sharing in ways that promise renewal for ourselves and others.

Seeking a deeper meaning for this time of year, as I am spiritual, not religious.

And that is the rub. All around are the Churches….the different denominations we have attended over the years….Episcopalian (from youth and more recently) Quaker, Mennonite. But I don’t fit.

Perhaps it’s because I have never really ‘felt’ like a Christian. And that was helped along when I realized that I was part Jewish..though that ‘secret’ was only revealed after my father died. But I was born on the wrong side of the stick, I am told by a Jew, and I am not a Jew because my mother wasn’t.

So, that claim to religion is out. But then again….I think religions…of all elk, are superstition. Or something like that. I just never…well, bought it.

I think how I would describe myself best is I am really a pagan. No, not human sacrifice, though there are some folk I would gladly throw on a merry pyre, but I don’t delve too deeply into the modern paganism that I see and have once experienced. Silly stuff, with a lot of rules and regulations.

I go more towards the worship of the Earth…the turning of the seasons, what I understand and make of it all. There is such magnificence and splendor in the Earth and nature, that why do we seem to gravitate towards tinsel and ho-ho-ho?

There is enough within nature, and what we have made of it to celebrate. I came across something about the “Holy and the Ivy” and had never understood the basis of this song. Long ago, holly and ivy were considered the male and female symbols within the forest. Songs narrated their often rowdy vying for mastery in the forest or the home. Sounds much more interesting than what we are served up with plastic boughs and plaid ribbon this time of the year.

So this year I am going to institute a celebration of the Winter Solstice. It happens on December 21. I will decorate this old house with holly (we got a large tree , a male…and we have a neighbors female tree…with berries.) and Ivy we have aplenty. Fir boughs on the mantels and windows and over the doors. We will dwell in the beauty of the Solstice, and we will light candles for the appropriate reasons.

We will strive to avoid the crowds, the tinkling bells, but we will give to the Mennonites because they seem to have a strong tradition of service.

And perhaps, in essence, this is what the season is all about: charity and service to others.

Lady Nyo

A REASON FOR THE SEASON

I saw the Cooper’s hawk this morning. She landed on the chimney pot outside, probably looking for my miniature hen, Grayson. Four years ago she was a starving fledging who mantled over to me while I fed her cold chicken. She’s back this holiday, my spirits lifting. A good Christmas present.

In the middle of the commercialization of Christmas, Nature closes the gap. I have noticed squirrels with pecans in mouths leaping the trees, hawks hunting over now-bare woods, unknown song birds sitting on fences, heard the migration of Sandhill cranes as they honk in formation. You hear their cacophony well before they appear.

There is a brightness to the holly, washed by our early winter rains and the orange of the nandina berries has turned crimson. The smell of woodsmoke in the air and the crispness of mornings mean the earth is going to sleep. We humans should reclaim our past and our fecal plugs and join the slumber party like our brother bears.

Jingle Bells will fade and our tension with it. Looking towards deep winter when the Earth is again silent will restore our balance and calm our nerves with a blanket of peace.

Jane Kohut-Bartels

Copyrighted, 2008