The Seasons

The Festival of Imbolc (in the belly) or Oimelc (yew’s milk) or Candlemas or St Brigids day, (the goddess in her aspect of maid), was honoured by many last week.

It is the beginning of spring and the return of the sun as life begins to stir once more.

The snowdrops with their delicate white bonnets peek up at me from the moist and dormant flowerbeds and the daffodils trumpet happily, bobbing this way and that in the fresh easterly winds.

In the northern hemisphere, where the thurses of ice and snow abound, where winter is harsh and cold, the watery rays of the new spring sun are welcome indeed. The sun is needed to melt the frozen rivers and to warm the fertile soil, ready for the sowing of the seeds that will ensure our continued nourishment and prosperity.

One asks though here in the southeast of England, have we even had a proper winter yet. I have only had to scrape the frost from my windscreen once or twice this year so far.

Here in my corner of the world, we enjoy four distinct seasons; Four Seasons, a tenuous thread linking otherwise disparate individuals such as Vivaldi, Franki Valli and Sir Thomas More. An article in ‘howstuffworks’ asks whether we should redefine the seasons and goes even further to suggest that ultimately with ‘climate change’, they will become obsolete

The four quarters of the year each bring forth their own tasks and treasures. Our mythology emerged from our changing landscape, stories were woven from the rising and falling of the tides, danced to the rhythm of the cycles of time and revealed the face of the Goddess as she transfigured from Maid, to Mother, to Crone.

As we become ever more disconnected from our environment and more of our lives are played out in the virtual world, it becomes ever more difficult to discern the real, the natural, the truth from the fake, the false the lies. With our eyes glued to a portable screen, travelling with us wherever we may be, who is looking up? The chemtrails increase daily, brazen in their crisscross patterns but who is watching the blatant disregard for nature and who is assessing the consequences for our health and wellbeing.

Is it just an inevitable part of middle age that we look back through those rose tinted spectacles and yearn for the days of ‘used to be’... I said to my partner last evening, that we are the last generation that will remember how it used to be before the blue skies turned white, before the world was at our fingertips, before we knew where each other were every second of the day, before kids were incessantly stimulated and never allowed the gifts of boredom or unsupervised play.

And our memory is short; what this generation knows to be lies and falsehoods will soon become facts that have always been. The distortions of our environment which are manifesting as strange lights and weird cloud formations are now hailed as ‘new discoveries’, so said a presenter on one morning show as they explained away the clouds created by chemtrails, with a flimsily disguised smokescreen that put it all down to the fact that cloud formations have not been reviewed or revised for 30 years. Some sources suggest that chemtrails are being edited into old films in an attempt to prove that it’s always been like this...

Do you remember during lock down, when air traffic was much reduced, how clear that azure blue sky was? The cynical might say we were gifted the warm, clear spring to soften the blow of our right to liberty being breached.

I remember when I was  girl how the garden would be covered by a carpet of sparrows and starlings and every evening was heralded by the shadow of huge flocks of birds swooping, changing direction and forming kaleidoscope patterns across the sky, before settling down for the night. The flocks nowadays seem a quarter of the size at best and I often hear birds’ song in the dead of night – is that right?

Going out for a breath of fresh air has now lost all meaning, unless perhaps you’re up in the peaks or the lakes, or the highlands of Scotland but the heavy metals will still be twinkling in your lungs and bloodstream even there.

My blood boils, how dare they dim my sun and pollute my air...

Yet, I shall continue to mark the seasons and remember the Old Gods and ancient traditions that were born of the landscape, the weather and the environment, whomsoever’s foot trod the green hills through the ages, even as my friend reminds me ‘it never was as good as it used to be...’ maybe not but at least once upon a time, the air was fresh and the spring skies clear and the seasons waited their turn.