Wild Earth Season
samhain fades, advent begins & yule dawns
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We are in a Moment of Pause
Although the season of Samhain lingers, harvest time and Thanksgiving are now a memory. Yet Samhain, the time of deepening darkness and death, continues until Yule at mid-winter.
Celtic Advent, Martinmas, and Catterntide, our ancestors' gateways into the winter season, have opened a door. We begin to understand that fullness dissipates and turns into emptiness. Samhain has two halves. Early Samhain, and thus early winter, retain much of the energy and look of the autumn harvest. But, at least here in the United States, Yule's look, feel, and power begin to assert itself once Thanksgiving has passed.
Whether you primarily celebrate Yule, the winter solstice and the birth of the Sun, Christmas, the birth of the Divine Child, the Son, or both, you will recognize a period of waiting and anticipation has begun.
It's taken me many years to develop a deep, loving relationship with Winter. To be sure, winter is a difficult season. The weather is biting, the storms wreak havoc with powerlines, and days are unnervingly short. The possibility of being housebound because of ice, snow, cold, and in the dark without power is genuine.
But there is something else that I have noticed. The correspondence of Winter with the direction of North, the element of Earth, the mythical earth spirits known as Gnomes, and the land-shaping crone, the Cailleach, have offered profound ways to connect with the physical plane and the material world.
Winter brings us close to Mother Earth in her most ancient guise. This encounter is particularly true because ancestral memories of the most recent ice age are still near the surface of our collective unconscious. Snow, ice, and darkness haunt our collective dreams.
During this uneasy time, I find the Earth rises to comfort me. In my yard and all around me along the Connecticut shoreline are great glacial erratics, huge boulders deposited on the land as the glaciers melted 10,000 years ago, and large moraines of rubble skirt the edge of land and water.
Winter is Wild Earth Time
When the trees and all vegetation save the evergreens have gone to sleep, it's easier to sense the spirit of the trees. The quiet woods and frozen ground make the stones more alive, and their presence is palpable.
The severe weather, the night sky filled with the crystalline clarity of starlight, and the frozen waters make nature's elemental spirits more visible.
During this earthy, wild time held within the tradition of Celtic Advent, I decided to use wild foraged bittersweet and grapevine to weave an advent wreath.
The day was chill and gray, and I went along the edge of the woods looking for vines that wound up into the trees. With a snip of my shears, I freed the trees bound by the thick, winding vines.
The vines are initially unwieldy, long, and serpentine, but with persistence, they can be controlled and formed into a circle. The chaos of nature tamed into a geometric form, the prime geometric form, the circle symbolic of eternity, wholeness, renewal, and divinity. My hands do the work, a work reflective of the great work of the hands of the Creator on a tiny microcosmic scale.
The wild-crafted wreath becomes a metaphor for the primordial becoming the principal patterns for reality. We play the part of the Divine Architect in a great psycho-drama each time we make something, bringing order and pattern to raw materials.
Ritual works that way: an embodied act, a creative moment. In this case, I take part in the archetype of the Maker. If God is a Geometer, then by standing at the edge of the wild woodlands and weaving an eternal circle from the vines of the Earth to use as an Advent Wreath, I also become a geometer, someone who calls forth order out of chaos.
Capturing the Sun
This humble circlet of bittersweet and grape vines has the power to hold the sun. I recognize that the wild wreath resembled a crown of thorns reminiscent of what the Child would one day suffer and the spikey crown worn by the Holly King, who reigns in winter.
Green groweth the holly, so doth the ivy.
Though winter blasts blow never so high, green groweth the holly.
As the holly groweth green and never changeth hue,
So I am, ever hath been, unto my lady true.
As the holly groweth green with ivy all alone
When flowers cannot be seen and greenwood leaves be gone
~ King Henry VIII of England
The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown, of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.
The Holly and the Ivy is a traditional British folk Christmas carol, listed as number 514 in the Roud Folk Song Index. The song can be traced only as far as the early nineteenth century, but the lyrics reflect an association between holly and Christmas dating at least as far back as medieval times. ~ Wikipedia
The bittersweet vine highlights the bittersweet sacrifice of life to ensure re-birth, and the grapevine is nothing less than a nod to the Holy Grail. In this, we find perennial wisdom winding its way in and out of pre-Christian and Christian stories.
Celtic Advent can take the wild and tame, the pagan and Christian, the cosmic and earthly, and infuse this time of year with hearty, pulsing physical and spiritual life.
My wild-foraged Celtic Advent wreath still needs to be completed. I'm keen to get some holly and a few other things to create the essence of the Advent Season.
If you want to walk the wild path of Celtic Advent, you can still download your guide HERE.
Starting Sunday, December 3rd, you'll receive an additional Sunday email for the four Sundays of Advent. These will be short reflections to help you walk quietly through the hushed nights of anticipation leading up to Christmas, Yule, and the Winter Solstice.
Have you stepped into the wildness of Celtic Advent yet? Do you have rituals or traditions connected to the winter? Do you thrive in this season of darkness or struggle to make it through till spring?
The comments section is a safe and welcoming space to share your insights and experiences.
Comments and conversation are always appreciated and enjoyed, so feel free to let your voice be heard. I read them all and try to respond to each one.
Thank you for reading Hedge Mystic and participating in this vibrant and growing community of creative, spiritual humans. You are always welcome here, appreciated, and loved.
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I loved reading this. My spiritual path has been all over the place, with the majority of it spent in Christianity of which I stepped away from a decade ago. I do not know how to follow the Celtic Advent Calender, so am thrilled at this opportunity to learn. Thank you so much.
Thank you for putting into words so beautifully my feelings about Winter. I always find it difficult to explain to my friends who wish six months of the year away, why this is such a magical time. The sleep and pause ahead of Spring’s joyful rebirth is an important time of creative contemplation for me.