Two Solitudes

We are coming upon the feast of St. Brigid and Imbolc.  To the Irish in me, this is the beginning of the new year.  The time when the seeds awaken beneath the soil as the blessing of Brigid passes over the hills and dales.  We are into a January thaw here at FoxHaven and it does seem as if something in the wintry woods is yielding as birdsong begins to fill the branches. The teaching is that it all starts slowly and proceeds exponentially. 

Brigid’s breezes stir the seeds.  The seeds begin to waken and in the rhythm of their vibrations, the sap in the maple trees begins to flow.  This sweet tree blood reaches the tips of the branches and the buds begin to hope themselves into bloom.  Life begins, again.  The birds sing the chorus of new growth and all the creepy crawling life slumbering beneath the decay of the old year, begin to rise, again.  A riot of green is not far away.  All this, all this life, all this hope and promise, begins with a fairy story of the blessing of the Goddess.  And over time, the Innis goddess is canonized, St. Brigid.  Imbolc lives in the flames of Candlemas. 

There is much slumbering in my soul soil.  There is still winter and frozen lakes and biting winds.  We are not across the threshold just yet.  Like at all thresholds, there will be a threshing.  The wheat must be separated from the chaff.  The trolls and hobgoblins that cling to old ways and old attitudes must be tricked into allowing the emergence that yearns for manifestation.  Life lives in the advancement, the cycle, the surrender and the welcome.

My neighbour came by yesterday with a bulging packet of poppy seeds.  I have been trying to grow wildflowers on this beloved acreage, in the monarch meadow and across the weeping bed.  This is our 6th year as stewards of this land and I have been marginally successful in turning these swaths into colour and pollinator chorus.  Lots of labour, prayer, sweat.  Maybe this year will be the charm.  My neighbour has had success where I have registered disappointment.  Perhaps the seeds this land will opens herself to receive must be propagated locally, not shipped across borders like expats whispering alien songs.  Diversity without unity is not our strength.    

Borders and boundaries define identity.  Without a threshold there is no other.  Without a threshold there is no Other.  Who I am and what I am is defined and refined by you.  This is not a confrontation, or at least it need not be.  This can be a conversation.  A meeting.  In the words of Rilke, later immortalized in my imagination by Canadian author Hugh MacLennan, “Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.”  This is the line made famous.  But there is another line that is noteworthy on the threshold of Imbolc, on the threshold of a new year, a new spring, a new possibility.  The poet writes to a young poet, “For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”

I am not convinced that we have been adequately taught how to receive the new.  How to stand in the perplexity and allow the stillness.  Maybe my neigbour is so schooled in her offer of the native heritage seeds.  From her garden, across a concession rather than across the 49th parallel or across provincial borders.  These seeds come from relationship.  Hers with her land and now, an offer grown out of our 5 years of neighbourly relationship.  The seeds of relationship have been cultivated, curated, commissioned.  Never before, no matter where we have lived, have we experienced such neighbourliness.  Maybe that is how it is done outside of the cities.  Maybe the need for community is greater in remote areas and survival depends on cultivating community.

My seed toting neighbour suggests that I sow these seeds on the decaying snows of this January thaw.  Could it be that simple?  This counsel would give the seeds a chance to meet the stillness of the soil and the soil could slowly open to the guest seeds. Two solitudes.  Old soil and new seeds.  Oh, but how my imagination dances with the promised vision of poppy fields.  Check back.  I will report on how the meeting of seed and soil fared.  The last words belong yet again, to the seasoned poet and his emergent protégée. “Even between the closest people infinite distances exist, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other.”