“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence
― John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom”
Yesterday was a Leap Day and here in the foothills of the Applachians we awoke to an unexpected blanket of snow.
We are in the time after Imbolc and approaching Spring Equinox and a day we only get to experience every four years. In Celtic culture although inheritances were passed through the motherline it was still a warring and patriachal culture and it was on a leap day (and sometimes the entire leap year) that women could ask men to marry them.
I have come to look upon leap days as a day of celebrating and practicing ways of resistance as it was a Goddess of social justice, Brighid, who originally gave this tradition and it was a leap year when i proposed to my husband and we had our handfasting on the banks of Loch Lomond.
This leap year leap day I was asked to hold a Keening Circle for some friends who have lost their Anam Cara, their soul friends. This was to be a circle in which we gently honored out grief and didn’t step into that void which grief can somehow shape-shift into.
Mama
We began by standing at the grave of a beloved knowing he was wrapped in layers of love, curled up as he was given back to the earth in curled up position in a ritual that honored his life. My Anam Cara, my little soul-friend with the big ears joined us in the circle.
We began with a gesture or ritual, as all meaningful things do in which the women brought a stone and they were invited to wrap the stone in layers of black silk ribbon or blood-red yarn.
As I wrapped my heart-shaped stone, bedrock from these lands in a heart shape peppered with garnet crystals I thought of how our individual grief was similar in that our grief built up steadily over the years as a love lived. Each strand of love in life is like a contour building upon the next, much like a landscape is created through all manner of geological processes. The life together creates a unique landscape and creates the map of your love and life with this beloved.
This love only turns to grief when you find yourself in this place you made together but this time alone. Here you're wrapped in a cloak of memories, perhaps the scent might be fading but the longing to reach out and touch, to comfort to just be together never leaves.
The women carried their stones as they tended to their grief, breathing into it, releasing it and breathing it in again in the same pattern that love is built, over and over. This wasn’t a circle to wail our grief but one to tend to it, to acknowledge how we live with it, how it changes and morphs for really grief is love.
After the songs and the singing, the women gathered together in circle again. They were invited to take their heart stones and to slowly unwrap them. The strands of wool and silk were complicated things, not in their technical wrappings but in the weave of their relationship. This unwrapping and unfurling wasn’t an easy gesture. It wasn’t a gesture of removing grief, it wasn’t stripping grief away as no one wanted to shed it or discard it, we were here to honor it. We were here together to honor the fact that it exists at all.
Our beloveds stayed for a while in those three sacred days after death perhaps making sure each woman was ok before the had to leave for whatever awaits them in their new life. But as is the way with ancestors be they blood or bone ancestors there will always be a part of them peering over our shoulders, for your ancestors aren’t somewhere far and distant they are wrapped around you as tightly as a winters cloak.
The next article on keening explores this ancient practice as Cultural Activism