(Cretan Iris, Iris cretensis, which blooms in January and February, photo my own)
My dear readers, I have two different pieces for you this week which wanted to appear together. I’ve recorded them for your listening pleasure as well, in case you prefer to absorb words that way.
The first was brewed up over the last day or so, straight up out of the winter-seeded-with-light feeling of the midway point between solstice and equinox here in Devon, where I have had a high fever and struggled with the cold and grey and then gone down on my knees with joy at the snowdrops and a rainbow and the sun through clouds; where hundreds of my Venus Year books have at last arrived on palettes and I've left out a scarf from my girlhood for Brigid and seen beautiful sun coming through stained glass in the medieval church; where I've been very solitary and thoughtful and sometimes very tearful about a hundred things; where I've remembered how being pressed from all sides can suddenly make an ember in you, like fire by friction, the bearing down and down of the spindle to the fireboard until there out slips the bright coal onto waiting moss with its tuft of smoke, to be breathed to flame in the tinderbundle.
So, from all that some words came, and they have warmed me, and I hope they warm you too.
Second of all, because this moment in the year is about that promised bud of light returning to all things, and about the milk coming in to the ewes, and about blessing the women who have given birth, I thought to include an essay I wrote in Crete a couple years ago (in October 2020) about Hestia/εστία, that beautiful ancient Greek word and concept referring both to the goddess of hearth and home, and to the origin point itself.
May your hearths be warm and high with embers until spring, and all your candles be blessed.
(with thanks to Gail Faith Edwards, dear teacher & herbalist of Southern Italian folk medicine, whose reflections about Candlemas inspired the inclusion of the two doves below)