The wonderful Wood Sisters gathered just before the Winter Solstice for their second seasonal celebration.

The Old Mother Yew in the graveyard that we visited at Samhain

This time we started with a meditative journey to the Scottish Highlands to meet the Cailleach (literally Old Woman) who is also known as Nic Neven, Daughter of the Bones. Those who know their "Women who run with the Wolves' by Clarissa Pinkola Estes will recognise the Cailleach as a form of the Wild Woman, who calls us back to our deep, intuitive and creative soul selves. It seems this is so often not an easy process, but one of dipping down into the dark, neglected parts of ourselves to find the inner wellspring. In our story the young soul, represented by Brigid, has to work hard for the Cailleach and pass through a number of tests including a near death experience, before freeing the spring waters in a way that brings healing to both herself and the land....

The first (very small) snowman of winter

I found this a hard story to enter into, feeling that I'd had my fill of darknesses and difficulties...and yet when I finally stopped resisting the Daughter of the Bones, I found a restfulness in her darkness, in being able to become like a dormant seed in the deep, cool earth. All the tinsel brightness that has become Christmas, all the business and the relentless pressure to make others happy could fall away in the face of a grumpy old hag who doesn't need things to be nice.

Putting the dark back into midwinter and Christmas became a theme for me for the day. We were free to acknowledge death before new life, free to weep over people and things lost over this last year, free to feel low and sad and uncertain...

As the sun was going down we walked out to the river. Behind us were all the glowing warm colours of the sunset over the fields and the houses with their soft lights lit....ahead was the darkness of the longest night in the wild woods with the moon bright and cold and clear on the snow and the icy water. Who wouldn't want to leave home for all that wild beauty? Who wouldn't go looking for the wild, old hag of their soul down by the dark moonlit water? It was so painfully cold and beautiful as we lit our little beeswax candles in their walnut shell boats and floated them on the river. It was hard to turn for home and stop watching those tiny lights in the huge darkness. It seemed impossible they could survive (don't we all know how it feels to be a very tiny flame in a walnut boat on a huge river in the freezing air of the longest night?) and yet those little lights floated steadily on, each both moving slowly in its own dance and making shifting constellations of light with its companions. I can't really express how powerfully that very simple ritual affected me and how the picture of it remains in my mind, as if I had seen something deeply true.

Midwinter sunrise at the Vicarage

We came home to a shared feast, to lighting candles on the Christmas tree and singing songs and carols together (and to the inspiration of Abigail's magical harp playing). The evening concluded with our final story, as we travelled this time to Russia to meet another awe-full wild woman of the woods, Baba Yaga. Like the Cailleach she is a hard task mistress but the rewards are to be able to carry one's own sacred fire home to defeat evil and light the hearth. How wonderful it was to have a day with the dark mother. The virgin Mary, meek and mild, had taken on an older face and reminded us of the real labour of bringing new life to birth. I feel so strengthened and inspired by these 'tough as old bones' mythic women. They've given me a new sense of the fierce light of the new born sun and the creative power of all those darknesses and difficulties that are the birth place of all truly creative and soulful new beginnings. It's going to be a wild new year!