The studio resonates with the tapping of keys on my new (ergonomic) keyboard, the background thrum of electricity and intermittent traffic from three stories below.

Otherwise quiet and still, I send my awareness inside, eyes softly closed. There’s a wee tremor of something… anxiety or fear? After all, the world feels particularly provocative right now.

But no, this pulse feels more positive, hopeful even. Could it be?

Yesterday’s storm has cleared and the sky is a pale blue, liquid with a hint of cloud. On the weekend, we saw the first of the whin blossoms.

A week or so before, wee fairy bells of snowdrops trembled on Bothwell Bank, on the River Clyde.

The whin was once a mighty bush on the edges of an abandoned school playing field. One time, we approached to gather blossoms for ink-making and a deer and her young sprang up and out from her nest inside.

Some local eejits set that bush on fire a few years back, deer, thankfully, not in residence.

The whin has regrown to perhaps a quarter of her previous girth. The skeletal branches from her previous life form an inner scaffold, a spine of sorts.

Life reawakened from literal ashes. Tiny golden yellow jewels of hope and promise.

The gateway in our ritual year that speaks to me most of resurrection approaches: Bride’s Day or Là Féill Brìde.

We have reached the midpoint between Yule and Ladie’s Day (Là na Cailleach), solstice and equinox, many know as Imbolc.

Like the whin that has risen again, this gateway is full of promise from the depths of what rests underground—unseen but not unimagined.

In the Gaelic and Scots tradition, this festival’s symbolism abounds and provides a rich loamy ground to fertilise our imagination.

There’s Bride’s Cross and candlelight, more familiar from the Christian practices that have survived in our contemporary culture.

One of my most favourite symbols of this time is less familiar: the serpent, said to emerge from its wintering in search of heat. 

More symbolism of this festival is explored in detail for our ALIGNMENT and GOING DEEPER courses. 

Outwardly, my attention now is on my practice of ALMANAC making.

The whin and the snowdrops are wee bulbs of natural light on the moodier days of January and February that see so many of us struggle.

Aside from their brightness, they share a quality also found in the fencepost lichen across the river…

They are tiny.

But in no way does their size diminish their impact.

How can these tiny wee beings out there by the Clyde offer hope against such seemingly impossible conditions?

And here, I speak not only of winter storms and impenetrable frosts, but of the increasingly authoritarian regimes that hold power over us, endless wars and genocides, the discrepancy between rich and poor and the enshittification of, well, everything.

I am reminded of the first principle of adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy: small is good, small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small.)

How can we make this principle matter? 

“…what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system… This doesn’t mean to get lost in the self, but rather to see our own lives and work and relationships as a front line, a first place we can practice justice, liberation, and alignment with each other and the planet.” (Emergent Strategy, page 53)

 It’s been a good few years since I read this book, but I’m thankful for my wee commonplace book, where I recorded passages that remind me (for we all need gentle reminders) that the work of being human is the true purpose of our lives.

Perhaps you can also take this gentle reminder into your celebrations of this marker in the year to help encourage your attendance to this task, even as you react to outside events;

“I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making.” (Emergent Strategy page 54)

And perhaps a small piece of encouragement that you can make a difference;

“Get involved! Get into an experiment or two, feel how messy it is to unlearn supremacy and repurpose your life for liberation… Be able to say: ‘I invest my energy in what I want to see grow. I belong to efforts I deeply believe in and help shape these.'” (Emergent Strategy page 120)

Now is the time for us to dream harder than ever into existence the world as we want it to be.

For that, we need to activate our imagination beyond the dominant culture. For some of us, there is the healing of trauma, for others, the complications of grassroots community action.

In between, there is a place for us all.

Let this gateway in the year infuse your being with an emergence of hope and energy (however small) towards a remaking of culture to benefit everyone.

Notes:

A few years after I crafted the ALIGNMENT and GOING DEEPER courses, Scott Richardson-Read released his beautiful exploration of Scottish Folk Belief & Folk Magic, Milldust and Dreaming Bread. If your line of inquiry leans this way, then you can find out more about them here.

It is from Scott’s book that I have borrowed the Gaelic naming for what we know here in the Scots as Bride’s Day—Là Féill Brìde—and Ladies’ Day—Là na Cailleach. I’ll likely return to my Scots presentation in future articles, but I wanted to include both here, as they are intertwined in our modern experience of being Scottish. 

The image used at the top of the page is by Mandala Magician, Claire Maclaine and features a Bride’s Cross in the centre.