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On Wintertide
29 November 2021 10:12Now that the first version of the Reading List is up, the next big project is building up the Book of Days: a ritual cycle that satisfies me, and that has been tested and recorded.
The process is, more or less, to do a writeup for each festival as if I was educating a student - then, becoming that student, i try out what I proposed, and see if it works for me and seems pleasing to the land and right for the spirits - and hopefully, after a year or a few, I'll have notes made so that others can easily pick it up and go (or, at least - I can)
Wintertide is a proposed festival on the last weekend of November, or first weekend of December, somewhat incorporating Advent Sunday and Stir-Up Sunday which, in the Christian calendar, carry the energy of welcoming in a sacred month and also making preparations for it. I'm attracted to this because of the ADHD, which makes actually getting a fixed ritual done quite hard. But conceptualising festivals as tides is very forgiving with my natural pattern of energy: the magic is built up over little actions, across days and weeks.
I'm struggling so much at the moment; a great hopelessness, settled like sludge upon the soul. I suppose this, more than anything, is the mood in which to call out to the spirits of this tide: to the Winter King for resilience, the Lightbringer for hope, and the spirits of the snow for the solace of beauty in the dark (the brilliance of winter stars). I am not Walking, because the effort is too great; and I am not Disconnected, because I am too filled with sorrow to feel myself capable of becoming pure.
The year is depressed, and so am I - the Winter King retreats to his halls and isolates himself from his retainers, swaddled by the furs of autumn's hunting, one candle lit against the dark. Hope is buried in barrow.
It's always difficult to keep up with religion when there are other problems in your life; even though, in a very real sense, its the one thing you ought to always do first. I am trapped upstairs in my house (that's a Changeling feeling; the spiritual secrets of being a fairytale princess), and cannot move due to clutter on the floor (our dog situation has got out of hand). And so I have not lit a candle; I cannot get to the box of Christmas things; and my husband has not been socialised-as-Christmassy, so he has no interest in making a Christmas pudding, or any of those smells and tastes of the season. And I try very consciously to Not Buy Objects, which is always hard at this time of year and makes my rites so much less lovely; but i am committed to the idea that practices cannot be land-based if their elements are not, and i cannot touch tinsel or pretty things in the shops without a sudden jolt of not-knowing-yet-suspecting how they were made.
Memories of Lammas are heavy with me: I tried to put ritual into practice then, and i ended up somewhere that was just dark. I wrote about it then - the difficulty of LARPing something you, in your heart, envisage as a community time - when it's just you. I'm reminded about the moments in Merlin and Excalibur where the magical characters speak wistfully about the time of the old gods being gone, and need to rewrite what I do to be solitary - not just an adaptation of a group ritual, but solitary-first, solitary-in-its-soul.
What have I done?
is that enough? is that enough? it doesn't feel like enough because i am not enough. such is the way of wintertide, a sparseness and a yearning; the absence of something desired, and the way our hoping brings it into being.
The process is, more or less, to do a writeup for each festival as if I was educating a student - then, becoming that student, i try out what I proposed, and see if it works for me and seems pleasing to the land and right for the spirits - and hopefully, after a year or a few, I'll have notes made so that others can easily pick it up and go (or, at least - I can)
Wintertide is a proposed festival on the last weekend of November, or first weekend of December, somewhat incorporating Advent Sunday and Stir-Up Sunday which, in the Christian calendar, carry the energy of welcoming in a sacred month and also making preparations for it. I'm attracted to this because of the ADHD, which makes actually getting a fixed ritual done quite hard. But conceptualising festivals as tides is very forgiving with my natural pattern of energy: the magic is built up over little actions, across days and weeks.
I'm struggling so much at the moment; a great hopelessness, settled like sludge upon the soul. I suppose this, more than anything, is the mood in which to call out to the spirits of this tide: to the Winter King for resilience, the Lightbringer for hope, and the spirits of the snow for the solace of beauty in the dark (the brilliance of winter stars). I am not Walking, because the effort is too great; and I am not Disconnected, because I am too filled with sorrow to feel myself capable of becoming pure.
The year is depressed, and so am I - the Winter King retreats to his halls and isolates himself from his retainers, swaddled by the furs of autumn's hunting, one candle lit against the dark. Hope is buried in barrow.
It's always difficult to keep up with religion when there are other problems in your life; even though, in a very real sense, its the one thing you ought to always do first. I am trapped upstairs in my house (that's a Changeling feeling; the spiritual secrets of being a fairytale princess), and cannot move due to clutter on the floor (our dog situation has got out of hand). And so I have not lit a candle; I cannot get to the box of Christmas things; and my husband has not been socialised-as-Christmassy, so he has no interest in making a Christmas pudding, or any of those smells and tastes of the season. And I try very consciously to Not Buy Objects, which is always hard at this time of year and makes my rites so much less lovely; but i am committed to the idea that practices cannot be land-based if their elements are not, and i cannot touch tinsel or pretty things in the shops without a sudden jolt of not-knowing-yet-suspecting how they were made.
Memories of Lammas are heavy with me: I tried to put ritual into practice then, and i ended up somewhere that was just dark. I wrote about it then - the difficulty of LARPing something you, in your heart, envisage as a community time - when it's just you. I'm reminded about the moments in Merlin and Excalibur where the magical characters speak wistfully about the time of the old gods being gone, and need to rewrite what I do to be solitary - not just an adaptation of a group ritual, but solitary-first, solitary-in-its-soul.
What have I done?
- I've started trying to learn an alcohol-free spiced-apple-drink recipe, a properly medieval tasting brew that I can put in my book of rites as something special for the season.
- My husband bought me a pontsettia.
- I have picked up some soft-ginger biscuits in christmassy shapes.
- I nicked some conifer branches out of a skip, and wove them round into a wreath for my door.
- I have started making a Wintertide playlist.
- I made an important, difficult commitment in my relationship - something about care, something about what a marriage is for; bittersweet, but i am looking for the strength to be equal to it.
- I did make a first draft of Wintertide notes for the website, but I'm aware of important gaps - I haven't written up a couple of necessary god profiles and am aware that their presence is based more on instinct than gnosis, and am not quite sure how to speak to them easily to learn more. I suppose that now is the time.
- each night as i go to sleep, i think about those furs in the dark - not inside the hall just yet, but sleeping in a yurt outside the gates, as the snow howls outside. The hall is there to be approached, but not yet entered. As I lie there, I think about the Winter King: strength to endure, protection when the horror is so close, loneliness among a crowd, trying to make it through to the dawn, and I do feel comforted. It's not quite the same as a "real" ritual, but I find those feel a little silly to me, and i'm still at a loss to what a ritual process would look like. But this isn't nothing: a couple of moments at the end of the day to call out and say, here I am! hear me as I hear you.
is that enough? is that enough? it doesn't feel like enough because i am not enough. such is the way of wintertide, a sparseness and a yearning; the absence of something desired, and the way our hoping brings it into being.
