Endings, Beginnings
Kindling the Need Fire: Rituals of Thresholds (April's Digest)
My Mother passed on November 11th, 2022. This April marked the 6-month journey, the time when one grows accustomed to no longer having a body, completing unfinished business such as airing grievances, supplicating, and making amends. In my work, I often see it as a time when one simply becomes a well ancestor on their own or becomes part of the larger collective of death pollution, those who are anchored to the Earth whether by choice of not wanting to move on or in need of greater repair. Having not crossed the initiatory liminal threshold, they are the defunct, stuck in limbo as it were. It is here where the living support the dead by engaging in some form of Ancestralization on their behalf.
This 6-month threshold is not just for the dead but for the living. As a trained therapist I learned that when most people experience big life events, in terms of adjustment, 6 months is the threshold by which if one is able to cope, they are within the arc of adaptability. If they are still experiencing impact, then we might look at moving into the realms of things like complicated grief, prolonged depression, etc. For all intense purposes, it is a living limbo, where the living have not initiated into the new configurations of their life.
For every ending, there is a beginning. These are thresholds. Thresholds are recognitions that something has come to a close and beyond that something different is emerging. I have found thresholds require intentional witnessing, salient as they are when marked by ritual honoring, they become liminal cairns in our soul’s evolution.
These landmarks of our felt experiences, when held as holy, become intrinsic to our interconnectedness with life, our anchors, our identities. When held in a good way, witnessed, cared for, we have completion with their stories. There is a grounded sense of closure, regardless of outcome. When these liminal thresholds/initiations are not tended, observed, and/or avoided, we are the restless unsettled living. One whose dreams, actions, and ruminations seek rectification, often times lost in the malaise of human misfortunes.
Much has been done to distract us from what is actually helpful for us. I could argue, intentionally, for with our identities fully reconciled we are less prone to the wiles of consumerism, earth disconnection, and other forces that seek to control our agency. That is another reflection altogether, but if you pause for just a moment and think of the vices that are at our disposal that numb us, in one fashion or another, you can see how easy it is to become the uninitiated, detached from our purpose.
There are intact cultures that have never lost their ways of honoring these potent thresholds in life while most of us have been exiled from these ways, the ways of our ancestral heritage. Within our blood, bones, and sinew there is ancient knowing, and driving this knowing is a need for repair and reconciliation of all the felt harms we have done to us and therefore have done to others. Countless times people speak of disembodied ghosts, those who are unsettled, as existing outside of themselves in phenomenon. While true, these hungry ghosts are also within, part of the symbiosis of memory and experience alive within our DNA, the uninitiated seeking their holy witnessing.
So how do we go about engaging in these thresholds when we have been alienated from the profound ways of honoring them?
One of the ways to move towards belonging to ourselves is to acknowledge to ourselves that we need to be held, we need to be witnessed and we need an outward expression, a cairn, if you will, to hold the place when we have laid down a significant life event. We need not only do this with other humans but also in our relationship with the Earth, the elements and forces of nature whose sentience also sees and experiences these tender moments with us. We are of these bodies, interconnected. They too need these rituals. If we lose someone in a house fire, not only do we lose the human beloved, but the spirits of place grieve the loss of the relationships, they also endure the harm of being scorched, they too need the threshold rituals to hold the significance of what they have witnessed and endured.
A needfire is a ritual of purification traditionally kindled usually by the friction of dry wood in times of distress in the belief that it would offer protection by warding off spirits who are unhelpful. Traditionally this ritual is observed during May Day celebrations known as Beltane. Those who hail from the Celtic lands and whose diasporan ancestors observed the seasonal shift between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice would snuff out all the fires and candles in their hearths and make towards a bonfire which was intentionally built by a need fire, rubbing kindling together to build up the larger effigy. Two were traditionally built and herders and farm folk would pass their cattle and families between the two fires for protection. A candle was lit and then brought back into the home to bless the house for the harvest season.
It is profound to me, the unconscious harm that is done throughout time, by not honoring these passages of our ancestries, those of fellow human and non-human relations. I am guilty of it, conditioned through colonization, exiled through ancestries, and cut off from holy belonging by systemic oppression.
Reclamation does not happen overnight. It most assuredly is not easy. The consensus of the current collective consciousness is one that rallies against such awakenings, our invisible archetypal bully made manifest through ignorance and outdated social norms. If enough people worship at the feet of this, it does get fed by the principalities that feed off their blind offering. The resistance we feel is not imaginary, it is very real.
So we must prevail, persist and overcome. It is a reawakening of the senses. Let them all have a seat at the altar of your psyche. It is the rebirth of your intuition. Let it be recognized as the truth sayer that it is. Then engage in the profundity of reclamation to honor each of the passages of time in your lived experiences that were not heralded and honor those who seen and unseen also were impacted.
Guided Intention
Under the auspice of the New Moon, in the wake of a solar eclipse and our favorite Mercury going retrograde, I invite you to a potent and tender imagining as we prepare for the threshold witnessing of the beginning of Summer: Beltane which is May 1st.
Take a moment, to settle in and gather your inner resources, whatever that may look like for you. It could be focusing on your breath, or it could be calling in your trusted powers and asking them to resource your space.
With supportive allies in the liminal realms present, Imagine you are at the liminal threshold of an ending in your life, something that had an impact on you that was perhaps not observed, witnessed, or held. As you observe it, what do you need in those moments that you didn’t receive at that time? What support can you ask your helping spirit to provide for you at this time to bring a sense of resourcing and closure in this moment? How were the spirits of land and place impacted and a part of your experience? What is the intention of your needfire? Stay curious here and as the need arises for you to resource yourself, continue to do so. What ritual can you engage in to mark the rite of passage for all involved? With this ending, what begins to emerge as you cross the threshold into a new beginning or a holding of yourself? Stay with what is happening and extend your curiosity to what gifts, opportunities, new ways of being emerge. What is helpful for you to know about what you are experiencing? Stay with the practice until it feels complete for you and then bring your attention back to your present awareness and environment.
Journaling Prompt
I invite you to continue to observe endings and beginnings in your life. Make note of those moments in your felt experience where you feel you might have needed more support. At the time, what was your sense of how those in the unseen realms were anchoring you? What’s your sense of how they may have been affecting you adversely? What is one step towards reconciliation of your experiences that can be supportive for you at this time?
Happenings
I hope to see you at one of the many opportunities to gather as a collective, to witness these potent times in our lives within safe space with the seen and unseen who are holy, wise, and caring. Click on the links underlined on each offering for more details and registration.
New Moon gathering for paid subscribers, April 20th at 3pm-4pm Eastern. Link in the Mighty Network Space.
Open Ancestor Circle on April 23rd from 3 pm-4:30 pm Eastern, Details and registration here.
Beltane, The Needfire Ritual of Thresholds, Sunday, March 31st, 3 pm-6 pm Eastern: Details and registration can be found here.
Enrollment for the Foundations of Psychopomp is open. Please join me for a talk about the Foundations of Psychopomp work with several practitioners who have graduated from the program on May 2nd, at 3 pm Eastern
Enchanted
As we are crossing the threshold of the midway point between the Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, we mark this occasion in the Rituals of Beltane. It is a time when humans connected with land spirits for rituals of appeasement for protection of their families, their crops, and livestock. It is a fire festival, as a ritual nod to the sun emerging at its peak, bringing with it fertile abundance. This stoking of the needfire was important among our ancestors to ensure the crops and farm beasties yielded abundantly to have enough reserve for long winters. Of course, these rituals of appeasement were dedicated to the fae who in their mischievousness would often emerge from their settlements to steal away hard-won yields. So the offerings were placed out, as to not only not provoke but satiate the fae and other land spirits and to ward off misfortune.
Sight
Celebrating the Coming of Spring in Art, by Victoria Rodrigues O'Donnell provides us with an early visual history of the season’s inspiration. It comes as little surprise that the first of May is better known around the world as International Workers' Day than it is for the rituals which honor the interconnectedness of the wider web of relations. The history of how this day was made the former is well documented by Peter Linebaugh in this historical essay, The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of May Day I see the correlation between the two resulting from the absence of honoring the other than human forces, disrupting the connections that are kindled in rituals which honor the reciprocity of nature and human kin, creating vulnerabilities, exploitations of land, man and the other than human relations, and these misfortunes that were promised. The nod of a day to mark the exploitative nature truly becomes lip service on the back of the long-suffering of the many.
Sound
Let us return to the honoring of the day. Amhrán Na Bealtaine is a traditional Irish tune sung on May Day (Lá Bealtaine). A Gaelic Summer song that could date back to the late Middle Ages. It is a Beltane Blessing, or Am Beannachadh Bealltain, a Gaelic song that was written by the Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael. He published his findings in the Carmina Gadelica. The lyrics of this blessing are in Scottish Gaelic.
The Gloaming live2012 (Martin Hayes violin)
Beannaich, a Thrianailt fhioir nach gann,Â
Mi fein, mo cheile agus mo chlann,Â
Mo chlann mhaoth’s am mathair chaomh ‘n an ceann,Â
Air chlar chubhr nan raon, air airidh chaon nam beann,Â
Air chlar chubhr nan raon, air airidh chaon nam beann.Â
Which translates to:Â
Bless, O Threefold true and bountiful,
Myself, my spouse and my children,
My tender children and their beloved mother at their head,
On the fragrant plain, at the gay mountain sheiling,
On the fragrant plain, at the gay mountain sheiling.
Words
It is customary within our Gaelic/Celtic kin to extend a blessing on the festival of Beltane. Let us endeavor in our own way to extend a blessing to one another on this day. Here is a traditional Irish Blessing, but by all means extend your kind words to your fellow human and non-human kin. The world will be better for it.
May strong arms hold you
Caring hearts tend you
And may love await you at every step.
May your joys be as bright as the morning,Â
And your sorrows merely be shadowsÂ
That fade in the sunlight of love.
Bless you and yours
As well as the cottage you live in.
May the roof overhead be well thatched
And those inside be well matched.
Bless the four corners of this house
And be the lintel blest,
And bless the hearth and bless the board
And bless each place to rest,
And bless each door that opens wide
To stranger as to kin,
And bless each crystal window paneÂ
That lets the starlight in.