Imbolc for the Frozen North
By: Zoë Wroten-Heinzmann
Tags: Birth, Groundhog Day, Paganism, Imbolc, Holidays

We should rest inside, though. (Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

I love the cross-quarter days, the pagan holy days that fall halfway between solstices and equinoxes. These are the days when I really notice the changing light, when the seasons really feel like they’re shifting. Unlike the poor unsung Lammas (at the beginning of August — we’ll get there another time), Imbolc, which comes halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox, at least kinda sadly filters into our culture in the form of Groundhog Day.

Up until today, the only thing I liked about Groundhog Day at all was that I was convinced that everyone was getting the whole thing wrong. You know the saying, the whole “If he sees his shadow, we’ll have six more weeks of winter”? I had it in my head somehow that most people were leaving off the second half, “otherwise it will be 40 more days” or some more poetic way of expressing that. A six of one, half dozen of the other kind of thing that I thought everyone was completely ridiculous for forgetting. I was talking with my good friend yesterday about it, and I was like, “did I tell you…?” and she stopped me and was like, “yes, only every February for the past five years.” Turns out that’s not the case, and the whole weather prediction thing is somehow meant to be legitimate. Whoops.

Besides my new inability to feel smugly superior, there’s a lot about the way we mark this day that’s not quite satisfying, whatever tradition we want to approach it from. Imbolc doesn’t seem to offer much special spiritual value, especially for those of us who live in a place where groundhogs aren’t even thinking about waking up yet, where the only hint of the spring to come is still in the slightly earlier mornings and later sunsets, and not yet echoed by green things stirring.

In South Carolina, where I grew up, Imbolc really is the beginning of spring: daffodils and forsythia bloom in February; it all makes sense! Here in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire, though, February is historically our month of greatest snowfall. The traditional practices of this holiday have to do with the beginning of the lambing season and the renewed availability of milk, and even if we are farmers who only consume seasonal dairy (a vanishingly small population), the timing just isn’t right.

Anyway, celebrating the return of the light again six weeks after the solstice really does feel redundant. We just went all out with the candles for Advent and Hanukkah, not to mention the half-dozen other festivals of light we might have chosen to celebrate back in December. Why go wild with a series of revels, then remind ourselves again six weeks later like some kind of half-hearted snooze alarm? Like, okay, the day is a little longer…wake me up when it gets warm.

We can talk about the solstice as the symbolic birth of the sun, but that’s the thing: it’s still just a newborn. The whole event is a triumphant miracle, yes, as all birth is! But it can be a huge source of disappointment for a new mother to look down at this new little being she’s dreamed about, agonized over, and labored to bring into the world and realize that it’s still…kind of a grub.

The light, whether we mean the actual sun or the light within us, is still in its infancy. It gets stronger every day, stays awake a little longer every day, but it’s not ready to do much besides sleep and grow.

That same friend I mentioned earlier (and whom I now owe five years’ worth of apologies for not only being misinformed, but repetitively so), is a trained birth worker and has lately been doing some lactation consulting. She remarked that although she sometimes wants to have more babies, seeing moms with newborns never makes her jealous — those days are too difficult to envy.

In many parts of the world, there’s a postpartum practice called “confinement” or, in Latin America, “cuarantena.” Neither term makes the whole thing sound very pleasant, but they both refer to a period after birth when a mother is expected to take it easy, get to know her baby, and refrain from work or chores, stirred together with a handful of more-or-less restrictive cultural and religious customs. The same concept was strongly suggested to me by my midwives when I gave birth to my first child: for six weeks, could I get someone else to shop? Could I arrange my life to thoroughly and deeply rest?

It isn’t surprising that recovering after childbirth is a concept that spans cultures and time periods — this seems like a common-sense necessity. What is interesting in this context is that the length of time for recovery seems to be a standard six weeks or so around the world. What if we think of Imbolc as the end of our confinement period?

We can even reframe that intervening six weeks in our minds. January is strange, and hard, and long, and I wonder if part of it is because we’re not letting ourselves have the recovery we need. We jump right in with plans and resolutions for the new year, and then we’re stymied by illness, snow days, and maybe simple tiredness.

On top of that, January means we’ve got to get back into the rhythms that the holiday season tossed out the window. Plus, one of the most highly ritualized times for many of us has now come and gone. We humans thrive on that kind of thing, and January unmoors us and sends us forth into the metaphorical and actual cold with hardly a cultural tradition to guide us. We get past the change of the calendar and everything feels spiritually fresh and we don’t always know where to go with that. The post-holiday letdown is a lot like that postpartum feeling that so many new mothers get (and so few feel free to talk about): the weird mingled ecstatic joy and mild disappointment, the coming to terms with the realness of it all. The answer to both might simply come down to rest and time.

If we let ourselves recover for a solid chunk of weeks, then Imbolc can become the time we plan the coming year, creatively and with a good hibernation behind us, rather than in reaction to the excesses of the winter solstice season. Or, if you’re like me and are never not planning one project or another, this is the time to harness that power of transformation, that sense of something happening that comes with the changing light, and start taking action on those plans. Maybe in future years we can let that rest period be a time for simmering thoughts, without frantically trying to shape January into the perfect start for the Best Year Ever.

Imbolc is also the perfect time for people in our region to start daydreaming about the seasons to come. Let’s plan gardens, start some leek seeds, think about placing an order for a goat or two so we can experience the true meaning of seasonal dairy farming. And sure, we can light a few candles and be grateful again, and always, for the constant miracle that is our life-giving sun.

January is the graveyard for so many of the grand pronouncements and intentions of the New Year. Maybe they’re not dead, though — maybe they’re just resting, just like we should have been doing all along. Time to wake them up, dust them off, see if maybe they see their shadows. Whether in six weeks or forty(ish) days, Spring is coming!