Imaginings on Imbolc

Blessed Feast of the Meeting of our Lord! Plus, a vanity project.

Season’s Greetings, friends! I’ve been observing the wheel of the year, the liturgical calendar, and the roots I have in my own little ecosystem for quite a while now, and I don’t know why, but I never realized until this year how much rich symbolism happens this month. Perhaps it’s because I used to think of February as Clive Barker told it: The great grey beast February, that eats us alive.

But another thing is that there’s a real imagery mismatch between the Imbolc of the British Isles and the Imbolc that happens here, where I live. As often as not, we have snow cover and winter weather, the snowdrops won’t burst through for at least another few weeks, and if your ewes are lambing now, they’re going to be dead in the field. In fact, we were just up at the mountain and observed exactly that-- a dead early lamb, being circled by vultures. Early February, at least, truly does contain the energy of a great grey beast.

No, for our little ecosystem here, we need to lean harder into the symbolism of the candle in the darkness, the sweet anticipation that comes from knowing that the skeletal days are numbered. In this spirit, I leave a few white twinkle lights on the railing until about St. Valentine’s Day, when the days are finally long enough to no longer desire the warding of evening light. But before we get even there, we have St. Brigid’s Day, the Meeting of the Lord at the Temple/Candlemas, and the secular but enspirited Groundhog Day. As silly as Punxatawny Phil is, he captures well the liminal nature of February-- some years she’s an early spring, but in many others she insists we wait longer and pay closer attention. And in case you didn’t hear, we’ve got six more weeks of winter according to the little prophet.

And of course we have entered the Triodion now, and Lent looms before us whether or not we’re intellectually prepared. In many ways, we are in the season of anticipation for the Season of Anticipation. Great, grey beast, but also the sweetness of prophecy and the glimmering harbinger of light.

I’m still in the middle of writing my review of Martin Shaw’s Liturgies of the Wild, and I hope to have it for you later this week. In the meantime, I’d like to introduce a small vanity project I’ve been working on.

First, a story. My Baba, my maternal grandmother, died a few years before I was born. She was 49; a missed spot of lung cancer went untreated and spread viciously. There are even more layers to this tragedy, and in many ways, the shape of her absence was a very noticeable presence in my early life.

I understand that my Baba wrote poetry her whole life. I do not know to what extent this is true, except that as the cancer spread to her brain, she burned three decades worth of journals in a bonfire. The only fragment of poetry that survived is this couplet she wrote for my Deido as a 17 year-old high school student, inscribed on a photograph she gave him when he lied about his age and signed up for the Navy in 1944:

I had a heart, it was so true,
And now it goes from me to you.
Take good care of it, as I have done,
For now you have two, and I have none.

It may or may not be original; a quick search shows me that someone has claimed authorship of it, though it postdates my Baba’s usage by about a decade and a half. Regardless, the point of this story is that I grew up thinking of the woman as a silent poet, someone I wished I could talk to and compare life experiences with. My paternal grandmother, in contrast, was a prolific crafter and sometime painter, and has left me a treasure of creations by which to remember her much longer life (she lived to 98-- twice as old!).

Because of my grandmothers, I have made a concerted effort to curate my creative endeavors for my descendants. The worst that can happen, after all, is that I leave more than is desired-- and this excess can easily be returned to the dirt from which it came. The note that lays on top of the storage box gives this instruction explicitly, releasing its finders from the obligation of continued stewardship.

To that end, I’ve made myself a little vanity project. In keeping with my commitment to implementing the principles of the IndieWeb, this new little book I’ve made is something that I wanted for myself, and so made for myself:

A handful of copies are going into that storage box. For the possibility of a grandchild or great-grandchild who might get the itch to know a little more. I’m also giving a copy to my dad, who doesn’t read on the internet, but gets a tiny frisson of pride when I hand him a physical copy of my latest thing. He usually reads a couple dozen pages and tells me I have a good vocabulary.

Sparks and Sacrament is a lightly edited compilation of my Substack essays from the past year, which all seem to fugue around the main principle of relationship: navigating the Internet as Fairyland, wielding a Nuclear Eros, and living in an Enchanted Americana. The book also has sections containing my flash fiction (including a previously unpublished piece of flash that I sent around to some contests) and a smattering of short book reviews.

Blending personal essay, theological reflection, literary criticism, and original fiction, these pieces weave together Memorial Day parades and myrrh-streaming icons, westerns and powwows, Lolita and The Realm of the Elderlings. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?

You might be interested in a copy if you’d like:

• To share my essays with someone who doesn’t read Substack

• To underline, box, mark-up or draw in the margins of an essay

• To have an artifact of analog technology from a digital world

• To support an independent writer and get something cool in return

• To refresh to your outhouse reading basket

I’ll be offering Sparks and Sacrament for a limited time-- February and March. After that, I’m hoping I’ll be ready to share an even bigger project with you in time for Pascha: the release of my next children’s book. I just got out of a meeting with my illustrator, and I’m absolutely thrilled with her work. Those of you who liked Sasha and the Dragon will appreciate how Hidden Hosannah continues in the tradition of modern Orthodox fairytale.

See you later this week!