Last night the small but active Pagan student group at my school celebrated Imbolc, the festival of the first signs of spring. The official date of the holiday is February 1st/2nd; it’s one of the “cross-quarter days” midway between the four great holy days of the winter and summer solstices, and the spring and autumn equioxes. As John Michael Greer notes in The Druidry Handbook, “… the eightfold year makes a perfect seasonal cycle of festivals for a nature-centered spirituality. Each station of the cycle has a counterpart on the other side of the wheel of time: winter balances summer, spring balances fall, harvest balances planting, life balances death, all reflecting the balance of the world of nature. A new festival comes every six and a half weeks on average, far enough apart so that each has its own seasonal character, close enough so that every point in the cycle relates to the others” (76).
The eight of us gathered in Chapel after sunset, the nearly full moon bright overhead. This time the president proposed that we try a more free-form ritual. With the smell of sage filling the air, we sang sounds for each of the elements and the circle formed. Several said they could sense it flowing around us. At one point when we discovered we needed the circle to be larger, we sang the sound of the south, and almost immediately two students said they felt the circle grow. We’d planned to extend our Samhain practice of offering up limitations and setbacks by writing them down and burning them in a cauldron, releasing them, but this time with an Imbolc twist of inviting a positive replacement to take birth for what we were giving up. The god’s candle burnt very low, fitting for the still-young god, while the goddess candle flared up. In keeping with the lunar aspect that Imbolc also shares (it’s traditionally celebrated four full moons after Samhain–hence the only approximate February date), many of the decorations and foods for the feast which club members ended up purchasing or making were white or yellow–white chrysanthemums, popcorn, drinks, cookies, chips, bananas. It’s a tradition in parts of Italy: mangiare in bianco — literally, to “eat in white” during the full moon.
There is a gentleness in our group, in spite of several very forceful personalities; we unite because ritual matters to us, and though the group often is a social club more than anything else, when we come together in ritual, a different — and I would assert, an equally true — face appears. In our ongoing quest for connection and meaning, a festival celebrated on the edge of spring, honoring the earth and the power for growth within us all, makes a good place to start.
