Winter into Spring

Have you noticed the back and forth tug between winter and spring?

Patricia Waters

The warm days followed by bone chilling winds, followed by calm clear skies followed by biting rain. The ice turns to water which turns to ice again and then to water. 

This is how it goes when we change identity. This is how it is in nature, and what happens in nature happens in us.

The Celts have a story about this: One story says that Brigit, the Goddess of springtime, awakens at this time, rises up from the earth and wrestles the land from the cranky old woman, the Cailleach, the Old Bone Mother, the goddess of winter. Same say it is the wrestling between mother and daughter. In that wrestling we see this wildly changing weather.

Another story says that the Old Woman of Winter grows tired, and makes her way to a small boat. She sails across nine waves to an island. She painfully makes her way to the center of the island where she finds a well. Exhausted, grieving, barely able to stand, her quivering hand fills a cup with clear blue water from the well. She drinks, sinks to the ground, and falls asleep. When she awakens the next morning, she is Brigit, the maiden goddess of spring time.

Both versions speak to the weather, but they speak too of how we change our identity. Maybe it's a fight between the old and the new. It's full of confusion, anger, resistance and victories as layer after new layer unfolds in us and old layers crumble and fall away. Or maybe it's a lonely, grief-filled journey as we make our way to the well of wisdom, to sip the regenerating waters of Spirit, the waters of new life.

The drum this Saturday initiates a series of experiences I'm called to offer in April and May that focus on changing who we are. Call it Transformation. Call it Initiation. Call it opening to new life, blossoming, coming into your authentic self. Call it the inner song of the Hyacinth and tulip. Call it raising your Akashic, Aquarian, Celestial, Atlantean vibration. We are, each and every one of us, transforming our identity in small and large ways, as individuals, as a culture, as a species. This process involves, as the old Celtic wisdom proverb says:  

The eye that sees what is

The heart that feels what is

And the boldness that dares to follow them. 

Another way to say this: To leap into our next shape we need Vision, Healing, and Courage.