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Tonight, at my house, we’re preparing to celebrate Lughnasa tomorrow, the feast of the First Harvest.  The house is clean, the altar is already set.  Tomorrow morning, a quick trip to the farmers market will provide veggies for the feast, then we’ll bake up a small loaf of bread and gather sunflowers, wild wheat, and blue cornflowers for an offering.  Just like every other year.

Beginning on New Year’s Eve, I begin to take note of the various divinations that are being made about the year to come.

The one I follow most closely comes from Havana, Cuba and is issued by priests of La Regla de Ocha, an Ifa-based AfroCuban religion, known more popularly as Santeria, my hearth tradition. Over the New Year holiday, these priests gather to divine on every aspect of the year to come: politics, war, technology, the environment, personal behavior and opportunities for luck. Devotees of Ocha, these predictions are the foundation of many of the decisions we make for the year to come. They guide our behavior so as to avoid the inevitable challenges and hardships of the year to come, and to maximize our luck, safety and success. Here is a link to an excellent article, in English, on the Letra del Ano (Letter of the Year) for 2021: https://oncubanews.com/en/cuba/letter-of-the-year-for-2021-olokun-sign-of-the-fierce-ocean/

Last year there was a winter of ice, and a summer of fire, where the ice melted.

Last winter, things suddenly got worse.

We’re all just walking each other home.

-Ram Dass

Come away, O human child!

                                                                                                                          To the waters and the wild…

                                                                                                                          For the world’s more full of weeping 

                                                                                                                          than you can understand.

                    As part of my devotion to the God Pan, I usually make special offerings to Him in mid February, when the Lupercalia would have been celebrated in ancient Rome. On this holy day of misrule, youths dressed in goatskins would run through the city, carrying leather straps they would use to whip married women, thereby increasing their fertility. While I don’t get that ‘authentic’ in my own devotional practice, I was thinking about the wild revel as the beer, honey cakes and barley were laid out on his plinth.  Shivering in the cold, with snow threatening in the white air, it was sometimes possible to sniff out the pulse of the coming Spring.

                    This year that whiff of the changing season took a while to make itself known.

                    This year, as the Winter lingered, I felt the wildness in me shrivel up.  Nature-deprived—no camping or hiking for over a year, limited time outside of inhabited places—I was limping around half-starved without realizing it.  Spring’s slow arrival—only now are the trees getting knobbly with buds, only now are the first bulbs pushing forward, and the willows fanning out their catkins—has reminded me how much my wildness has eroded. Cooped up for the Winter, the flame of the wild in my soul was flickering low.

                    Worse, I was watching a wholesale war on the wild parts of the planet unfolding in front of me.  The state of the world’s oceans, with elevated salinization levels and the infiltration of plastic into every level of the marine environment; the collapse of insect populations; the extinction of species after species; the eradication of wild places and indigenous people by newly emerging right-wing governments (such as Bolsonaro in Brazil)—all of these are individual calamities that compound the effects of climate change, and chip away bit by bit at the fragile state of our planet’s health.

                    The loss of habitat and species, the despoiling of shared resources such as water, air,and food ,and the ideology that excuses that kind of degradation as ‘progress’ are threats to our collective survival. They have the additional distinction of being as harmful to the human soul as to our physical health. We may feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of calamities, and feel unable to effect any positive change, but there is good news as well.  There are spots where the coral reef is recovering. There are species thought to be extinct that are suddenly re-appearing for the first time in decades. There are new species we never dreamed of finding, being discovered in some of the harshest environments on earth. All of these point to a struggle to bring the planet and its living systems back into balance.

                    And for us, the longing for the wild doesn’t really go away, no matter how much we may bury or repress that longing, no matter how much we may try to sublimate our urges, or talk ourselves out of what we want. There is a violence we do to ourselves when we deny our wild nature, when we refuse to indulge the joyful, messy, scary pleasures of our essential selves. 

                    As the Spring advances, and the whole world comes to life, tap into that soft, wild, inarticulate piece of your soul. In the rising light of Spring, allow that soft animal self to run into the meadow and sniff out the blessings of this season, holy and wild.

On the night of the Winter Solstice, the sun set at 4:37 pm.

                It had risen at 7:24 that morning, making for just over nine hours of daylight.

October is a time of transition. As we approach Samhain, the Veil becomes thin, and communication between the sunlit world of the living and the shadow world of the spirits becomes easier. This is the hinge of the year, a time when the movement of the Wheel accelerates. The Year at Samhain shifts radically, from the time of growth and light to the time of the Descent, into darkness and decline.

                This year the time of descent and introspection has been made harder by one of the most challenging astrological transits, Venus retrograde. As with any retrograde, Venus retrograde throws into shadow all things in its purview: partnerships, relationships, love and all matters of the heart. Because Venus rules all emotional matters, the usual challenges of a retrograde transit are made even more personal. We are compelled to revisit and re-evaluate some of the most painful and powerful moments of our past: betrayals, break ups, the loss of loved ones, all out regrets and missteps.  The shadow-time of Venus shines a harsh light on our past misconduct and brings forward out unresolved pain and insecurities.  We are not able to hide from those things we attempt to conceal even from ourselves, those repressed and degraded parts of our selves and our memories that we cannot bear to look at.