A New Year's Eve Benediction

By the light of a post-eclipse moon so bright I could find my way down the frosted hillside without a torch, I stood alone in the meadow. The stars of Orion sparkled to the South.

Ten years I have lived in this place, ten years I have striven to tend and connect with the land. Tonight the valley lay before me in all its stark midwinter beauty, softened and silvered by moonlight on frost.

Something prompted me to make an offering, to commune with the Genius Loci, to give back in some way. I knelt and watched, and listened, opening my senses. What could I offer at this time?

Then it came to me: I could sing. The perfect gift in this perfect moment.

I sang, softly at first, a chant composed by my dear friend Donald Engstrom-Reese:

"Beauty before me,

Beauty behind me,

Beauty to my right side,

Beauty to my left side,

Beauty above me,

Beauty below me.

I have beauty surrounding my life."

I sang the chant three times, a magical number, ending with a whispered blessing:

"Blessed be all beings, seen and unseen, that inhabit this land. Blessed be all that have walked this land. Blessed be the Spirits of Place. Blessed be, Blessed be, Blessed be."

Then I walked back up the hill. By moonlight. Blessed Be, and a Happy New Year to all.

Review

Snowed in on a cold, icy Christmas Eve, I have finally found time to look back over the last twelve months.





This year, I have mostly been

• Picking up the pieces of my life and starting over


• Re-finding myself and remembering who I truly am


• Giving thanks for the beloved friends and family who stick with me through thick and thin


• Stumbling my way back into paid employment for the first time in many years


• Realising that my home is now my home, and making it truly mine


• Mourning significant losses


• Trusting my intuition as never before


• Getting away from it all in Spain, Sussex, Somerset, Kent and Dorset with some of my favourite people

• Finding that actually, I can be organised and efficient!
• Contemplating a whole new world of possible futures
• Enjoying having family living close by
• Quite unexpectedly finding new love...

What have you mostly been doing this year?

Blessed Yuletide, Merry Christmas, and the Happiest of New Years to you.

Raining Cats and Dogs - And Chickens...

The stormy winds blew all night, throwing down sheets of rain. By morning they had subsided into intermittent gusts and showers, but when the chickens came out of their house a strange sight met their eyes. In the adjoining run were some new chickens - three more Light Sussex and a pair of Black Rocks, the sun highlighting the iridescent green sheen on their feathers.

"I don't like it, I don't like it at all!" complained Bella the Cream Legbar, who was by nature highly strung.

"I've heard the humans speak of it raining cats and dogs, but never chickens..." muttered Mac, an ex-battery hen and the thinker of the group.

Could it have rained chickens? It was a very rainy night.

The little flock looked expectantly at Blanche, the head chicken (and a Light Sussex to boot). She would know what had happened.

Blanche looked at their waiting faces, and puffed out her chest importantly. "If it can rain cats and dogs," she opined solemnly, "Then as chickens are the superior species it stands to reason that an unusually heavy downpour would produce chickens."

The others nodded in agreement. The logic was watertight, even Mac couldn't deny it. It would go down in poultry history. The night it rained chickens.

D.I.V.O.R.C.E.

(The title of this post being part nod to the Tammy Wynette song, part acknowledgement that this is Big Stuff and hence deserving of capital letters.)

I feel a little tightness in my chest even now as I say it. Divorce. My divorce is finalised. I am divorced.

Don't get me wrong - I am glad it is finally over, able to see it as a new beginning, and perhaps a good thing for both of us. Yet still there is a sadness, a grieving for what has been lost.

I grew up with parents who had a stable, loving marriage, and that was what I expected for myself, and what in fact I thought I had. T and I were together for a total of 23 years and 2 months before he dropped his bombshell and left. I realised the other day that it was just over half my life. And as I had absolutely no clue about his infidelity until that fateful day, no wonder it knocked me sideways.

Yet in the intervening months I have begun to look more closely at the fault lines in the relationship, the ones I hadn't even noticed or hadn't considered problematic. Yes, we loved each other but there were also fundamental differences in the way we approached life, and what we thought was important. For me one crucial difference was that T hated to talk about his feelings and his unhappy childhood, even to me. In the early stages of our relationship I thought that eventually he would feel safe enough with me to share those things. Over the years that failed to happen and I began to tell myself that was just the type of person he was. I now believe if he had been able to talk about his feelings more openly we may have been able to negotiate a course around the obstacles that eventually derailed the relationship. But that is all academic now. What's done is done, and no doubt T has his own version of what went wrong and why. There are after all two sides to every story and no one person holds full responsibility for what happens.

Yet still... 23 years. A huge chunk of my life was spent with T and most of that time was good. That is what I grieve for, and plan to release - or at least begin to release - at this time of Samhain. A time of ending and new beginnings, a time when we enter fully into the dark half of the year, a time to turn inward, meditating on what has been and dreaming of what will be.

I can feel myself changing. I believe I am becoming more fully myself. I am accepting this end and grieving for it. But also knowing that each end is a beginning, I am moving forward into the next stage of my life, eager to see where this new road will lead me...

Honest Blogger Award

I am honestly honoured to find I have been awarded The Honest Blogger Award by Sue (aka The Purple Pixie) at her wonderful blog, The Creative Spirit. The award was ceated in response to Sue's post 'Telling It Like It Is'.

The Award states:

WE ARE Honest Bloggers!



the Sisterhood of SHIfT HAPPENS!



As honest bloggers we: (Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Add To... As You Wish)

• Speak our truth from the heart and tell it like it is.


• Share openly and honestly our true feelings without fear of judgement, blame or shame.


• We write to share our achievements so others can also share our joy.


• We write about our bad times too, knowing that the love and support of others is around us and perhaps heal another’s pain in the process...


• We are human beings with real feelings and emotions and REFUSE to hide behind a mask.


• We dare to be different.


• We are Free Spirits.


• We realise that by spilling out, we lighten our load.


• We acknowledge our strengths and weaknesses and don't see them in terms of success or failure.


• We laugh together and cry together.


• We are all following our own journey in our own unique way.


• Above all else, we may lie on the floor, screaming and kicking, or feel like life is collapsing around us once in a while… but at the end of the day, we drag ourselves up, dust ourselves off and rise to fight another day.

For we are Warrior Women and we write not to please others, stroke our own egos or be judged, we blog because we care! Our blogs are our therapy, and through sharing SHIfT HAPPENS!

*********

I haven't Cut, Copied, Pasted, Deleted, or Added To Sue's words as I love them just as they are. I feel truly honoured to be included in such august company! Apparently I now also have the right to bestow the award, so I plan to be passing the baton very soon...

The Beach

Today Elizabeth and I walked on the beach, a lonely beach empty of other people. Heavy grey skies reflected pewter in the water. A solitary heron staked out the shoreline, poised and intent; seagulls swooped and squawked and squabbled.

Up on the hillside, the bracken was turning to rust, and autumn began idly plucking the leaves from the trees.

So still, so quiet, so magical. This place of eery peace felt as though it would be an easy step through into another world if only the entrance could be found or the right words spoken.

But we could not find the magic portal; our tongues could not conjure the necessary incantations. We left the wild and enchanting lonely beach, retracing our sandy footprints back to the land of humans.

But if I close my eyes, I can still hear the cry of the gulls...

The Mystery and Magic of Balance

Today is the Autumn Equinox, also known to the Pagan community as Mabon or Madron. It is one of only two days in the solar calendar when night and day are of equal length. As such it is a potent symbol of balance, and many Pagan celebrations of the equinoxes focus on this aspect.

The thought occurring to me today is how rare that perfect balance is in nature and in our lives. After all, there are 365 days in a year (or 366 in a leap year) and yet on only two of those days are night and day perfectly balanced. How often do we truly feel that we have the work/leisure balance right in our life? How often do we experience the right balance of sun, wind and rain for our gardens to flourish? How often is there a glut of this, or a scarcity of that instead of just the perfect amount?

It would seem that perfect balance is something to strive for in our lives. After all, life in perfect balance is a life of ease, right? Well, yes... kinda. But at the same time, to truly flourish, life needs change. True balance equals stasis, an absence of change or growth or decay or innovation or evolution. And admittedly, all that stuff can be scary. Change is scary. Don't we all often find it easier to stay in a difficult or uncomfortable situation than to break away and try something different?

Last night I watched a re-run of the film 'Pleasantville'. In the film, two modern day teenagers are somehow transported into the seemingly idyllic world of Pleasantville, a 1950's TV show about a wholesome and 'perfect' small town. In Pleasantville everything is, well, pleasant. The townspeople are cheerful and friendly. Everyone lives pleasant middle class lives in comfortable homes. The youngsters are sweet and innocent, the school sports team always wins. Everyone is contented with their lot. And yet... to the outsiders, the drawbacks to life in Pleasantville soon become glaringly obvious.

To maintain this harmonious lifestyle, Pleasantville is in a kind of stifling stasis. The people are friendly, courteous and 'nice', but have no meaningful emotional life or true connection to each other. Each person fulfills his or her role within the town, but they are incapable of breaking free from those roles or using their initiative. The road in and out of town is actually a huge loop, leading to nowhere but Pleasantville. The books have titles printed on the spines, but the pages are blank - no room in a world like Pleasantville for ideas from 'outside'. Of course, the arrival of the newcomers soon sends ripples of change through the community, inevitably leading to strife. And yet the benefits of change are seen to be worth all the upheavals they cause. Gradually, Pleasantville's monochrome world changes to colour; the pages of the books become filled with words, stories, ideas; the townspeople experience hitherto undreamed of emotions - love, happiness, anger - and begin to live authentic lives, with all their inherent joy and pain.

This is the mystery and magic of balance. That in order to achieve it, we need to be constantly changing. That once we find it, something somewhere will shift and change and oops - yet again we will be juggling and adapting and altering, but most importantly learning and growing.

On this day of balance, I take time to notice and be grateful for the areas of balance in my life. But at the same time I remind myself that change is constant, inevitable - and what life is all about.