An Imbolc Tale

Welcome to A Wild Green Heart. Imbolc blessings to you. There is so much that could be said about this Celtic fire festival, and about Brigid, the pagan goddess and christian saint, who is celebrated on this same day. But today I'm going to stick to telling a story of a personal Imbolc ritual, which remains one of the most wildly powerful experiences of my life. Grab a cuppa, sit back, and enjoy!

Three years ago I was heading towards a very significant decision. My health had been in serious decline since 2017, which is when the bouts of fatigue - diagnosed the following year as M.E. - had begun. I was working three days a week, with a very supportive boss. But the work itself was complex, relational and systemic. Not the kind that is easy on the brain or that could be put down at the end of a working day. I had managed to keep going for quite a while, by reducing my hours and limiting the entire rest of my life to the bare minimum.

But chronic illness wasn't the only thing going on. I entered therapy in 2019 and started uncovering a world of previously unrecognised trauma. The following year we entered the covid era and all of its impacts; then my marriage came to an end, and I was living in the basement room in the house of friends, apart from my children. Towards the end of 2020 I was put on furlough, and it came as a massive relief. When furlough ended, I returned to the workplace, but with time off fairly regularly as a result of fatigue and burnout. I was also losing my passion for the work itself, and my belief that systems can be meaningfully changed.

2021 was a year full of emotional extremes, a great deal of inner work and learning. I started an exciting new relationship, which ended very suddenly, breaking my newly re-opened heart. My father died two weeks later. My soul seemed desperate for my life to change shape even more dramatically than it already had. More space needed to be made. I entered 2022 with the knowledge that my body was communicating a clear, strong message to me: “you have to stop working altogether, and focus on healing.” Imbolc became the point on which everything turned.

As it happened, a friend and I elected to celebrate imbolc together with a ritual in the woods near her home in Hebden Bridge. She met me from the train and we sat for a while in the small station café, catching up with one another's latest news while wintry gusts blew through the door as passengers bustled in and out.

Preparing to leave the relative cosiness of the our spot in the café to embark on our walk into the woods, she asked me where I thought we should go. There were three possible choices, depending on the kind of environment I wanted. The only thing I knew for sure was that I had no idea: "Let your body lead us," I said. So she did.

We walked slowly up the wooded hill, following her intuition, and chose a site for our ritual on the banks of the stream that tumbled downhill near the path. There we were welcomed by the first of two trees that this story tells of. This was one who had held my friend many times in the past. She called it the Portal Tree, and with good reason. Its gnarled branches formed an arch just to the side of the path, creating an inviting doorway to pass through, and to enter into ritual space.

It was here that I read a passage from “Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life” - a book that has proved a faithful companion on many such occasions. Here are the words I read:

The tree that the Celts associated with the month of February is willow. Known as the Queen of the waters, the willow is the most feminine of trees. Its Celtic name Saile means to leap or let go, which is why the leap year falls in February. Willow calls upon us to make this leap, but the only way is to release feeling, and so cut the ties that bind us to the past. As we do so, life changes and we surge ahead.

There is great magic in this. We can struggle and strive, seek, grasp and build, but if we are still bound subtly to the past then the chances are that we will not attain our dreams. We can waste a lifetime trying to get there this way. But if instead we isolate the strands of feeling that secure us like anchors to times gone, cut them with our anger and weep the tears that were waiting there, we leap forward and everything changes around us. This is because our natural state is one of flux. Only fear and clinging keeps us from it. This is the power of the feminine, it's harnessing of natural transformation as a force that nothing can withstand.

Willow is a tree of love, holding valentine's day within the heart of its month. But it is also the weeping willow, the funeral herb, and the tree of grief. It teaches us that love and grief are the two sides of the same coin and that life is a journey through their never-ending cycles. We cannot know love without knowing grief. Neither can we know light without knowing darkness, rising without falling, nor waking without sleeping. If one cannot exist without the other, then we must learn to grieve in order to learn to love. As long as we fear letting go then we can never surrender fully to the mystery of love.

~ Ian Siddons Heginworth

There seemed to be an enormous amount of wisdom in these words for both my friend and I. There were parts of my past life I was desperate to leave behind - but equally, things I was still clinging to. It was time to feel the grief, and all the other emotions, and seek to be free to move into a changed future.

Thanking the Portal Tree, we passed ceremonially through its threshold arch and sat ourselves by the water. I sat on a rock next to the flowing stream; my friend stood by another old, moss-covered tree, which she wrapped her arms around. Each of us contemplating what we were still holding onto. What was keeping us back. What we were wanting to leap into.

I don't usually take photos during ritual, but something about the way my friend held onto this tree provoked me to take my phone out. I'm glad I did.

I watched the water crashing over the rocks down the steep incline, and considered this unbroken stream of movement from source to sea. One continuous thread, yet never the same from moment to moment. Order and chaos united in beauty. I thought about the other necessary polarities in me that did their work together in that tension. The gift and the wound. Connection and freedom.

I also reflected further about the whole process I knew I was deeply in - that of ridding myself of all my connections to institutions and systems, as much as is possible in our society. The biggest one still left, even after the previous years of ongoing radical change, was my job. I knew it was time to listen to both my body and my soul, and to hand in my notice. None of this felt revelatory or new. I just knew it was time to make a firm vow to myself to finish work, and to make good on it as soon as possible. That was the decision I made in my heart as I sat and watched the water.

My friend and I seemed to finish up our musings at more or less the same time. She released her hold on the mossy tree and came over to sit next to me. She'd been doing some work with grief and a deep-rooted childhood issue. It was important that I witnessed her in that, and supported her as she worked something out of her body. We did this simply and quietly, two friends in gentle conversation, though we both noted that as she spoke on behalf of her younger self, the wind picked up seemingly out of nowhere, and began to blow leaves wildly upstream.

She came to a point where her enquiry was complete. There was just some emotion to let out. She opened her mouth to give it voice, and as she yelled into the wind, the earth spoke too. It came as a resounding crack from the depths of the ground. We glanced at each other. I had a sudden inner knowing, and with it I looked towards the tree she had been clinging onto. She followed my gaze.

In seeming slow motion, that beautiful old being laid itself down. Roots shearing clean off at the bank, it fell so that its twin trunks lay bridging the water and up the steep bank opposite. The tips of its uppermost branches were level with the high path, way above us on the other side.

The tree that lay down!

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15 verse 13

The ludicrous serendipity of this arboreal being, many decades old, falling at this precise moment as we sealed our imbolc rituals, released a wild, joyful spirit in us both. We laughed and danced and hooted and howled and wept in awe. It barely seemed real.

We noted how the tree now gave us something to land on as we enacted "letting go and leaping off" from our bank of the river. Now we could simply walk to the other bank, with “everything changing around us.”

I have always made the assumption that this tree was a willow, growing as it was right on the bank of the stream. There were no leaves on it to confirm this, and I'm not expert enough to identify it from the trunk alone. Perhaps someone reading can tell one way or the other from the pictures. It would seem entirely in keeping with the deep magic of that day if it is a willow - the tree of February, and of love, and of grief.

If there had been any shred of doubt in my mind about leaving my job, there certainly wasn't now! We walked away, still giddy and shaking our heads in wonder, and I pondered when I would have the opportunity to speak to my boss, and to tell her it was time for me to finish. I knew all the way to my bones that I had to honour myself in this way. I had been filled with a great sense of completion while in the woods. After almost fourteen years, I finally felt I had done everything I was meant to do in the charity where I worked.

The time together with my friend flowed sweetly right until the end. As we walked, never in any hurry, onto the platform, my train pulled in, and I stepped onto it. Ritual time had served us well, beginning and ending when it needed to, and we parted company smiling and peaceful.

My decision, sealed by the events in the woods, took a huge potential blow the next day. The one thing that made my decision practically possible was my ex-wife's offer to buy me out of my share of the equity in the house we owned together. But the very next day she called to apologetically tell me it could no longer happen. Circumstances dictated that she couldn't get the money together after all. I laughed to myself and told her I was leaving my job anyway. Tests like this seem to shrink to nothing once you've seen that the whole of Life has your back.

The day after that was the first time I was back in work and able to speak to my boss, so I made it my priority to do so. She was keen for me to catch up with HR first, as I was returning from a period of illness, but I insisted that I wanted to speak to her first. I came quickly to the point: it was time for me to leave. My body was asking me for rest. My soul was seeking other things to do. I knew I was done.

Almost immediately she interrupted me. She had been wanting to speak to me about something as well. Because at the very same time that my friend and I were performing our imbolc ritual in the woods, my boss had been speaking with the woman who did the HR work for our charity. It turned out that the last time my job description had been updated was nearly five years before. Reading through it, they concluded that I'd done every last thing on it. It seems my sense of completion was bang on!

This left them with necessary questions about how to justify my position in the organisation. They concluded that the best option, knowing my ongoing health struggles, was to offer me voluntary redundancy.

I immediately told her I'd take it, of course. My boss felt guilty - she had felt like she was betraying me by suggesting redundancy. We had worked closely together and had a great rapport with each other. I told her that she was providing an answer to prayer. The money I was offered would pay for the course I wanted to enrol on, and would also cover my rent, bills and living costs for three months. I had walked in that day prepared to leave with nothing at all.

The wheels turned quickly. I managed to engage with a full HR process and still finish work on the last day of that same month, February 2022. That same day, I received February's pay and my redundancy payout. It was time for the next stage of my initiation - and to give my body the deeper rest it was asking for.

I tell this story for several reasons: Firstly to remember Imbolc, and the powerful resonance that creative rituals in nature can have in our lives at these long-celebrated times of year. The events of that woodland ritual, the next day’s financial let-down, and the unexpected gift of redundancy the day after that, mean I have never once had cause to regret leaving my job. Even when things have been financially very challenging, I can look back and know that I have been in step with what life has asked of me.

Secondly, I tell it to honour that great tree friend, who lay down their enormous, living body at the precise moment that would mean the most to my friend and I that day, three years ago - and in doing so, gave their life back to the woods they were part of.

Finally, I tell it because, like all good stories, I believe it carries some magic and message for those of you reading or listening. Other humans need to hear tales like this and take heart. We are connected, intimately, to every other life on this earth, of every species. And, despite humanity’s diabolical treatment of the more-than-human world, these other species love and welcome us as part of the same ecosystem. They will show us this in a great many ways, if we are open to the goodness they offer. We are so bound up in the oppressive systems of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy and violence. So many of us are desperate to be liberated from these systems. The good news is that we are not alone! The whole living earth also longs for liberation, and will be our friend and ally if we trust her.

Blessed Imbolc, dear friends. Please, leave a comment if this post has impacted you in some way. And also please share any of your own incredible ritual happenings. We need to spread the magic if we are to move freely into living the lives we long for!