It’s cold. Friggin’ baltic as we say over here. It feels like Winter proper. A welcome feeling because the past few Winters have been too warm, making us feel season-less and lost.
Winter Solstice, Alban Arthan is approaching. A time I have grown to love as I evolved from my immature, pre-trauma, sun lover into an appreciator of dark and The Shadow. Solstice is a time of beginnings as the Sun returns to us again. The longest night, a time of stillness and silence before the wheel tips once more into lengthening light. I’m choosing this years Solstice to mark my Irish Citizenship with a ritual. Usually, there is an official ceremony in Ireland where you receive your certificate and take an oath of fidelity, but due to COVID-19 my acceptance came with a bit of a quiet whimper. A brown envelope in the post in December 2021 and a quick photo in front of the fire.
This suited my Hermit tendencies, a couple of days away with hundreds of other people at a formal ceremony is not my thing at all, but what it has done is make my transition into my Irish identity feel lacking somehow. My Irish roots are very important to me, my family, the O’Donnells from Donegal fled the Gorta Mor (Great Hunger) and ended up in Scotland and then sometime later Northern England. I subconsciously found my way back to Ireland and it is now my beloved home. I feel rooted here, reconnected to my ancestors whose trauma and subsequent uprooting is in my DNA. I have never felt ‘English’ and always like a fish out of water when I was there. I have journeyed to meet my ancestors and they are glad I am back, I am home and healing the relationship they had with the land.
This brings me to the importance of ritual and how in Western Society in general we have lost the ability to mark rites of passage in any meaningful way. We look at transitions as yearly birthdays and New Year. They get celebrated but usually in a pretty perfunctory way. Yet there are so many transitions and rites of passage in our lives, childhood to adulthood, old house to new house, a change of relationship or job, deaths, births, traumas, illness, the stages of menopause and transitions in our sexuality and gender identity. The ability to look deeply at these events and to mark them is something, I feel, that is fundamental to our psyche. We too easily let things pass and wash over us without marking and processing, that it becomes part of the soup that sits in our subconscious begging to be acknowledged and when we don’t, we can become overwhelmed and over wrought.
I love ritual, my spiritual practices over the years have allowed me to look at ritual and it’s importance. Ritual for me, is a charging of the batteries, it focuses energy and I always feel fabulous after I’ve taken the time to craft a solo ritual and then perform it. Ritual doesn’t have to be complicated or involve lots of trinkets and gee gaws, or be held in a sacred well or inside an ancient cave. It can be done quickly indoors or in the shower and sometimes all you need is some paper and a pencil or a single candle and some alone time to sit and journey and process
What delights we uncover when we enter our internal landscape and explore. We are not confined by our existence on the material plane, we can meet whatever or whomever we want and ask questions, listen to wisdom and enter places not possible with our solid, lumpy human bodies.
So, here we are thinking about my ritual for the Solstice, a time where I’ll enter the liminal space to bond with the land I call home and thank it for its beauty and its acceptance, where I hope to hear the voices of generations past who have lived, loved and struggled here, who will hopefully receive and welcome the tie to their home I have now created.
Creating meaningful ritual is the way of the Hermit. It is a door to a deeper sense of self that we miss and is sorely needed. Try it.
The Hermits Grove 