Well, Spring
The Earth draws her breath
before exhaling the spring.
Imbolc: here not yet
Last night the cross-quarter festival of Imbolc began. The cross-quarter days fall directly between solstice and equinox. They are times of preparation for the coming season. Imbolc (pronounced: IM-olk), probably comes “from the Old Irish i mbolc meaning, ‘in the belly,1’” referring to the time of lambing and preparing the fields for spring planting. Traditionally, it is a time of renewal. Of throwing open the doors and windows of our houses, or souls, scrubbing down everything we want to keep and pitching what we no longer wish to hold on to. Field, seeds, and gardening tools are consecrated and made ready for planting. Fires are rekindled. Ideas that have sprung out of the stillness of the past season of endarkenment are held up to the growing light of the new year and considered more seriously. It is a time of burgeoning energies…and I’m not ready for it. Not yet.
“I don’t think I’m ready to get well yet,” I said to my health coach today. It was an admission I haven’t made even to myself yet. Several months ago I started working with a functional medicine doctor to help me address a number of recurring issues. One of the first things they asked me to start doing, every day, is to visualize myself at optimal health, the very best self I can imagine, in detail. Oh! I thought, I love that idea! For about a month I tried really hard to do it every day, like I was supposed to. Then I started experiencing a lot of internal resistance whenever I would try. Going to bed as soon as I got sleepy was the other thing I was supposed to start right away, and that was even harder, even though I was told time and again that is was the very best thing I could do for myself. After a while I realized I had stopped trying to do either. During our monthly phone appointment today my health coach asked about the visualizations. I said I wasn’t doing them anymore. I told her why. Speaking the words aloud felt like putting down a heavy weight too abruptly. There was relief, but also disappointment. Shouldn’t I be stronger than this? Her response was a long syllable of understanding and sympathy. I was making progress, she assured me. But when I hung up the phone my body felt like dead weight. What kind of person doesn’t want to get well?
This week I read a Scottish folktale to my girls, about Brighid and the Cailleach and the well of eternal youth. In the story, the Cailleach (pronounced: KAL-yach) is an old woman, one of seven sisters who laid the foundations of the land and kept themselves young by bathing in a sacred pool. All the sisters were gone but the Cailleach, who spreads winter over the world while she waits for the well of life to rise up so she can bathe in it and become young again. Before she can do so she is outwitted by Brighid (pronounced: Breed), a young woman captured by the Cailleach in order to serve the old woman. Aided by a Druid, Brighid turns the Cailleach to stone and takes her power, calling the waters of life to spring up from the well and cover the land like rain, melting the snow and bringing spring2. I found myself singing an old song from my childhood:
Spring up, O well, within my soul Spring up, O well, and make me whole Spring up, O well, and give to me that life abundantly3
I thought about that song while dressing a candle for spellwork with symbols of passion and energy and new beginnings. I wasn’t ready to light it yesterday. I stared at the cross on my kitchen wall given me by my mother, printed with the painting of the Lord’s Supper and inscribed with John 6:35, “He who comes to me will never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst,” while making Brighid’s sun-like crosses with my daughter out of strips of raffia woven together. Hang one of Brighid’s crosses on the wall at Imbolc, it is said, and your family will be protected “from fire and famine4”. She is a hearth goddess, both the eternal flame and the well of healing are her symbols. I started this week with a cold dip in a lake, a breathless rush into and back out of icy water and a long time steaming beside an open fire. The energy high afterwards was amazing, I could have done anything. Later, I poured water I had collected from a spring into a bowl and led a healing ceremony. Bandage-like strips of cloth called “clooties” are dipped in a ceremonial “Brighid’s Well” and imbued with an ailment of body or mind, something that the seeker wishes to leave behind as they move forward into the growing season, before being tied to the branch of a sacred tree (I used an oak branch from my yard). I want to leave behind my fear of getting well and moving on, I said, tying my clootie to the branch. Synchronicity dictated that, a few days later, I picked up Dr. Galit Atlas’s Emotional Inheritance for my third attempt to finish the book since starting it last fall.
“I fucking hate that book,” I said to my husband. That’s not actually true, but it does inspire strong feelings in response to the cases she presents and the connections she makes. It’s a compliment, really. The final case in the book is about loss and mother-daughter relationships. Reading it, a flame of understanding flickers alight. My hesitance to heal is probably a result of some kind of survivor’s guilt. Three years ago this month we received the diagnosis that would lead to the death of my sister. Seven years ago I entered my third trimester with the baby who could not live outside of me. Twenty years ago next month my baby brother was stillborn. I have spent the fall and winter walking backwards through every remembered childhood anguish, revisiting every trauma of my life, searching for a way to forgive myself, God, and my parents, for the pain and brokenness that has left me scarred. But I can only heal myself…and not soon enough for my girls, who, according to Dr. Atlas, already carry my unhealed trauma in their DNA as well as their subconscious minds. I can change my body and mind’s responses to that trauma, and I can show them how to do that, too, but I can’t do the work for them. I can’t do the work for anyone else, no matter how much I love them, no matter how hard I try.
Wow. Breathe. I need to sit with that for a bit…as long as it takes to stop hearing failed and bad mommy.
There is no magic spring that I might bathe in and be reborn, whole and unblemished by my past, my parents’ pasts, my grandparents’ history. The well I am tending this Imbolc, the well that is currently springing up in me, is grief. Not only grief for those I have lost, not only grief for what I have lost, but also for the fact that I will need to move on in my healing without being able to bring my loved ones on the journey with me. It is mine to do alone. I will not deny them the right to their own journey, any more than I can be kept from walking my own path of healing.
But, not yet.
Tonight I do not have to bless the journey forward. Tonight I can look back, one more time, grieving the ones I leave behind.
Tomorrow is time enough to step ahead.
Kiernan, Anjou. The Ultimate Guide to the Witch’s Wheel of the Year. Quarto Publishing, Beverly, MA. 2021.
Matthews, Caitlin. Illustrated by Helen Cann. “The Cailleach of the Snows.” Fireside Stories: Tales for A Winter’s Eve. Barefoot Books, Cambridge, MA. 2007. Note: In this version of the story Brighid is called Bride, but the goddesses are the same.
Casebolt, L. “I’ve Got a River of Life.” Hymnlyrics.org. Transcript of lyrics. https://www.hymnlyrics.org/requests/ive_got_a_river_of_life.php. Accessed: February 2, 2023.
Kiernan, Anjou. The Ultimate Guide to the Witch’s Wheel of the Year.