Today, February 1st, though it can be hard to believe, is the first celebration of spring in the pagan wheel of the year. It’s a time of subtle hints, but if you pay close attention, you’ll find plenty that mother earth is saying about what’s to come.
The light in the sky is different, for one.
And there are moments, even when there’s still snow on the ground, that I can hear the ground waking… trickles of water wending their way through dirt to find seed and root.
In the Celtic tradition, we celebrate Brigid. She’s one of my favorite goddess archetypes, overseeing FIRE and POETRY and creativity in general.
These are the things of spring, are they not? The sun is strengthening and soon heat will again penetrate skin to bone, igniting fires within, often showing up as a desire for more activity — and thus cabin fever and spring cleaning and the mountain of garden catalogs as we dream bigger and bigger the longer the cold winds blow.
It can be quite simple to celebrate this time:
Light a candle and center yourself with long deep breathing.
Take a pen to paper and write out your dreams for what you’d like to create or nurture over the coming months.
Place that paper on an altar or in a dreaming box, and when it is finally and actually time to go out and plant something, place that paper in a deep hole with seeds or plant it at the base of a favorite rose bush or favorite tree.
And take a few moments today to nurture your heart with some poetry in Brigid’s honor. In particular, you could spend some time with Haiku… little seeds that can work some big magic.