Windbreak House

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Brigid’s cross is known as the sun cross or the circle cross: a combination of Christian symbolism with the older images of light and heat. In this country, we anticipate the coming of light and warmth with the ritual of Ground Hog Day.

When considering how I might improve my life in the coming year, I’m more inclined to look to Brigid than the ground hog. The rodent known to some as a whistle pig can be a garden pest, eating tree bark, grasses, lettuce, carrots, apples, corn and other vegetables with an occasional bug appetizer, I find Brigid’s rich symbolism more likely to suggest ways I might enhance my life.


Brigid the Light-Bringer, the Maiden, the Bride

“She shall arise like a shining sun,” says the Lives of the Saints, The Book of Lismore. The pagan Brigid was known as the goddess of hearthcraft (which I call good housekeeping), of healing and of poetry. Instead of being condemned by clerics, she was probably among the figures and ideas borrowed as Christian priests attempted to shift public support from paganism to Christianity. (For more background on how paganism and Christianity interacted, see Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman; The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler and dozens of related works.)

For me, then, Brigid has become a symbol of change, of shifting possibilities, of adaptation and learning to move smoothly between the demands of life.

Celebrations of Brigid’s ancient feast day also offer guidance for creating practical observances of the season. It’s traditional, for example, to burn Christmas greenery on February 2. What better signal of your belief that the season of cold will end in warmth? (I know one woman who has made use of this month’s warm temperatures to mulch trees and to do garden cleanup she was too busy to do in autumn; Brigid would appreciate the gesture, though in this climate we can’t count on the weather to allow it every year.)


Hearthcraft: just another name for Housekeeping?

Considerable differences exists as to what constitutes hearthcraft or smithcraft. I like this definition from walkingthehedge.net:

Hearthcraft is grounded in commonsense and practicality; it is using what is available to you. A healing spell is a bowl of chicken soup; a purification ritual is sweeping the floor; a ritual to honor the gods is cleaning the fireplace.

Hearthcraft is finding the sacred, the spiritual and the magickal in everyday things. It is bringing that “special something” into a house that makes it a home.

Picture a Brigid of Celtic times sweeping her earthen floor while chicken soup simmers in a black iron pot over an open fire. During this season my practical rituals of celebration often involve cooking, cleaning and sorting. I winnow the freezer, setting aside frost-burned vegetables for Tam’s chickens, collecting bits of stock and meat that will make tasty soups to scent the house as they simmer on a snowy day. And because the Brigid festival calls for purification, I make sure my house-cleaning involves dusting picture frames, for example, and doing other cleaning chores I’ve ignored since before Christmas. Since the weather confines us inside much of the time anyway, I find it easier to cleanse and declutter the house now, before warm air lures me outside to the garden.

Dressing in front of the closet, I pile shirts or skirts I haven’t worn in a long time into a box for the second hand store. Any cluttered drawer or shelf is in danger of reorganization. After boxing Christmas decorations, I look at cards one more time and write notes in response to fresh news. Then I cut up the cards to use as postcards or gift cards next year.

From my Jobs file, I match the work I did to the payment I got, sometimes finding discrepancies when someone failed to pay me. Accounting is another February job: collecting 1099s, bank statements, receipts and other financial data, printing out information on where my money went this year so I can consider changes.


Healing: Adjusting to change?

Brigid made the difficult transition from Celtic goddess to Catholic saint because her congregation, the people who revered her, needed her in their lives. I like to think of her as a reminder of my own need to accept change more gracefully. I have not been patient or understanding as grasslands are divided into ranchettes, for example. When I see a strange car driving through what was my uncle’s pasture, I am still startled; for years, unfamiliar vehicles in our pastures required immediate investigation. And it’s impossible to enjoy walking the hillside at midnight to listen to the great-horned owl when I can see lights in all directions.

However, the owls still court here in January, and those houses disrupting the skyline I’ve loved for sixty years are the homes of people who may live here after my body and ideas are dust. They may come to love this land as fiercely as I do and protect it as strongly. And the developed parcels aren’t going to go away. Rather than rage against them, I need to help educate the new residents about how to live here wisely and comfortably, and persuade them to appreciate local culture rather than trying to change it to fit their standards.

Accepting the changes brought by death is not easy for me either. This year I found two deaths particularly painful. My friend Trudy Z., who wrote humorously and lived with zest during most of her difficult life chose to leave it. I keep her memory alive with the Z scholarship, so my memories of her remind me of its positive effects. During the past year, one woman was the recipient of that scholarship: hours of my time commenting on her manuscript without charge.

And we poets of the nation’s heartland also lost our father figure, Bill Kloefkorn, one of my early inspirations to writing poetry who became a steadfast friend. He set a good example by delivering a fine rant when he was angry, often turning those rants into poetry instead of mere hot air. I honor him by reminding myself to write, dammit, and quit getting sidetracked.

Trudy and Bill aren’t coming back but their memories and writings inspire me. Sometimes change should be resisted, but when it is inevitable, it still requires adjustment. As Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his “Serenity Prayer,”

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

February, with its dark chill and bright cold is good time to consider that difference. When I’m no longer distracted by the conflicting demands of the “holidays,” and not yet lured outside by warm weather, I can focus on what needs to be done to make the year memorable and worthwhile.


Healing: What does not change?

Since we moved back to the ranch in 2008, I’ve walked the few acres of this hillside around our house nearly every day, usually twice, while the dogs hunt rabbits under the juniper bushes. Let’s say, conservatively, that I walked here once daily for three years, for a total of 1095 little jaunts. During the ten years I lived here with George, we walked the hillside at least once a day as well: add another 3650 walks. (In the interests of truth, i.e., nonfiction, please note that I am adjusting for the days I have missed while traveling.)

So I’ve strolled around this hillside almost five thousand times. If I look up and away, I see changes that make me grit my teeth and grumble: a four-lane highway that traffic studies showed was not needed; jumbles of outbuildings and abandoned vehicles; so-called “security” lights that glare all night.

Instead I try to enhance my benefit from the walk by studying the ground that has changed little in my lifetime or in a dozen lifetimes.

When the first Westy, Cuchulain, was killed, we buried him on the spot where he waited for us if we left him home. To mark the spot, we began piling white quartz rocks over him; the white quartz caught our eye just as his sturdy body did. When I began having retreats here, the writers noticed how I placed white quartz stones on his grave and did the same, collecting pieces ranging from the size of a Westie to the size of my little fingernail. Frodo and Duggan died in Cheyenne; we had them cremated and brought their ashes back to this spot, tucking their collars under the whitened skulls of a couple of elderly horses and a cow or two. When Mac died, his ashes joined theirs.

Some days, walking with the current Westies Toby and Cosmo, I see no quartz but on others I might pick up five pieces, tucking them into crevices in the pile of white stones. In spring and summer, when the grasses are tall, finding the stones becomes more difficult, but winter winds flatten the grass and exposes a fresh new supply. The stones crop up most often where the soil is only an inch thick over a limestone underlayer. We’ve rarely dug out a piece, just chosen those on the surface.

Dozens of us have combed this ten-acre spot for years. Surely we’ve found every nugget of white quartz.

Yet almost every day, I find more. Perhaps I’m out a little later, so the setting sun is lower and glints from a facet I’ve never noticed before. Or I realize that the patch of moss beside that hunk of limestone is covering a tiny gem.

You know this lesson; it is not brilliantly new, but like most useful precepts it deserves repetition. Finding the treasure in the familiar may be a matter of looking at it a little differently, a little more closely. Finding the prize in the ordinary requires patience, time, solitude, quiet. Look, breathe deeply, look again. And again. And again.


Brigid: Goddess of Poetry

Looking, solitude and patience lead inevitably and directly to creativity, another of Brigid’s domains. Most people don’t hesitate to drive in any winter weather, trusting in their automotive behemoths (Ram! Explorer! Escape! Volt!) to go anywhere, anytime.

Traffic accident reports proclaim that no matter how fancy your ride, fickle February weather may throw you into the ditch.

So stay home! Listen to the weather report. Seize any excuse to stay in the home you have made comfortable and inviting. Instead of getting angry or frustrated, wrap up in a warm shawl and read or write.

Rather than disappointing people who hire me, I sometimes simply decline invitations to speak during winter, when weather is likely to make travel miserable and dangerous.

And holing up to write helps me to partake in all Brigid’s aspects. Starting with her housekeeping persona, I inspect the poetry binder, where I collect everything I’ve been working on for the past year. I search through the drafts, finding some that have been published but that I failed to remove from the drafts section. I may find others so nearly done that I can give myself considerable positive reinforcement by putting them on my desk and finishing them within a few days. I never throw away drafts but in shuffling them around-- from “draft” to “finished but unpublished”-- I sometimes see a new element to explore. I take time to make myself a cup of tea. I read a poem draft and think about it for a half hour, looking out the window. If I had a TV on these days, I’d turn it off.

For the Healing aspect of my personal Brigid celebration, I tackle the toughest poems I’ve worked on during the year: the dark poems about divorce, fear, betrayal, anger.

Here’s an example, still a draft with two possible titles; I rarely title a poem until it’s finished.


Poem/Drafts/Holding My Breath
She Didn’t Sweep Up the Broken Glass

She found more whiskey. That’s
how it started every time.
When he came home
she screamed and
he yelled. I was three. I sat
under the table
holding my breath
counting in my head
as she smashed bottles
in the kitchen sink.
I could see his trousers,
shoes set wide apart facing
her hose and high heels.
Smash. One. Scream. Two.
The sour whiskey smell
sloshed to the floor. Glass
shards clattered. Three.
Crash. Four. Shriek. I held
my breath. I counted.
His drinking, her spending.
He left me alone while he went
to bed with the woman upstairs
and now she’s having a baby. If I
held my breath they’d stop.
He slammed the door. She packed
and carried me up the loud metal steps
of a train chugging in the dark.
I held my breath and counted
lighted cars uncoiling
behind us in the dark. I lived
with my grandmother while
mother divorced father. When she slapped
me, I held my breath and counted. She
married a good man. When the drunk
died forty years ago, a coroner called
to tell me about the whiskey bottle
and the pills. Her good man died;
she moved to the nursing home,
dwindled away. For sixty-five years
I’ve held my breath.
Counted screams, glass pieces
falling. It’s working. I can
hardly hear them anymore.

* * *


Setting a relaxed pace in late January and February helps me calmly consider this personal writing without letting it dominate my mind or depress me too much. In the silence of gray February afternoons I can study the changes I need to create poetry-- or not-- from old memories.

Whatever form your creativity takes, consider getting acquainted with Brigid, drawing her healing fire into your life as you settle into the solitary thoughtfulness that can lead so sweetly to creation. Blessed be.


Linda M. Haselstrom
February 2, 2012
Windbreak House
Hermosa, South Dakota

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These Home Page Essays Are Archived --- Linda posts a new message on her Home Page a number of times each year. We've archived the essays so you can read the ones you missed and re-read the ones you enjoyed. Some of them include recipes or poems or writing suggestions. All of them have photos.

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