“Look how light it is, even at 4:35 in the afternoon.” In my partner’s delighted observation of the Earth's dance with our Day Star, I heard the echo of ancient winter festivals. To welcome the lengthening days and return of life to the land, northern ancestors celebrated the “Wild Nights’ in revelry and feasting. It was a moment of epiphany.
Join me for COMING EVENTS (click EVENTS)
January 25, February 8, Book Group with Our Lady of the Prairie Retreat.
January 17, REWILDING OUR STORY with Guild for Spiritual Guidance. February 15, What the Evolutionary Dance has to teach me!
What’s an Epiphany? To folks born and bred in the Christian briar patch, it's a manifestation of the divine! A fantastical story tells how Magi followed a star until it stopped directly above a stable where the prince of peace, God's own son, lay in a manger of hay. Being tTimes of foreign oppression, the revelation was a light in the darkness. January 6th is the 1st day of the season of Epiphany in the Church's calendar.
My epiphany, (aha, enlightenment, evolution of consciousness) was a little less dramatic. Light in the darkness of winter has always made these early January days holy days. In Northern Europe, children make star-shaped cookies to leave for the winter goddesses - Baba Yaga, Frau Holda, Befana, Holle, and more. Their names, often derivative of words for bright, luminous, and glorious, refer to the Divine Mother who comes to leave blessings for the new year. The oldest of festivals, it hit me, are based on an ecological calendar.
Walking into 2023, another year of weird weathers, global warming, and pandemic, I saw how clearly the Christian-and national calendars have been human-centric. Excluding the more-than-human world, they contribute to the ecological crisis. {attributing photo Andy Holms https://unsplash.com/@andyjh07}
Enter eco-spirituality, the rise in Gaian religions, science and its new cosmology of an unequivocal and essential interdependence. In fact, let me shine a light on the extensive calendar of Earth-centred observances in 2023, the U.N. International Year of Millets. There are in fact 65 Celebratory Environmental Holidays.
So, what? The question came from a woman in a Book Discussion on the Evolutionary Dancer. Where do we go from here? Questions are always thresholds to epiphanies. The Magi, remember, went home another way. Epiphanies reveal an alternative path forward.
In this case, that means paying attention to the ecological calendar and Mother Earth's daily dance with Sun. To begin, I'm going to be writing a book rewilding our stories and rituals.
It doesn’t mean I'll forget my tradition’s epiphany: even the humblest incarnate the divine light and response ability to follow the golden rule by which you and I can cocreate an age of global unity. That still inspires my life.
It does mean following the brilliance of Thomas Berry. Everything in the cosmos, he noted, is a mode of celebration, part of a vast cosmic communion. The Blue Spruce on my walk, the fox crossing my lawn with a squirrel supper, the Cardinal in the Cedar, the full Wolf Moon. Every aspect of Universe, to him and other mystics before him, are manifestations of some Originating light; everything, he saw, as a mode of celebration! That's another way to come home to the wholeness for me, in 2023.
“Look how light it is at 4:37 in the afternoon.” It's a year for celebrating, it's a season to marvel that the amount of daylight grows two minutes a day mid-month and three minutes a day next month. If Father Berry was right, and the first revelation is creation itself, every day’s an epiphany.
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