Daily Archive

Blogger Ginger Root posts about today’s holiday, Imbolc a.k.a. St. Brigid’s Day a.k.a. Candlemas and even Groundhog Day, a holiday that in her words is, “so very, well, in-between.”

It makes me realize how much we do need a holiday for that time when we’ve been in winter so long that we’re tired, but its end is still very far off. If I were in snow country right now, this would be the theme for our midweek service. Here in northern California, we don’t really have a meteorological analogy for the dreary gray mid-afternoon of the soul. But we do know what it’s like to experience the soul-tiredness of having traveled a long way in to a barren time, and knowing the other side is still a long way off.

Maybe it will be the theme anyway, and I’ll just remind everyone of how this time of year feels when you live in a place such as Imbolc’s originators lived in. Most of the people who will be in the room have experienced long winters; they do know what the literal February feels like, as well as the metaphorical February.

As a child, right now was usually the time for my re-reading of The Secret Garden. I didn’t plan it that way; it was just my instinctive reaching-out for assurance that spring was really on the way.