Imbolc 2012 - a reading
Every year is full of endings and beginnings. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, memorials. Days, months and years marking events of real or imagined importance. Earth Day, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the Year of the Woman, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius. Like a long spiral staircase ascending and descending or an intricate double helix twisting and untwisting, the pattern of our lives repeats.
Nine days ago, we entered the Chinese Year of the Dragon, the Black Water Dragon to be precise. The Chinese consider the Dragon an auspicious year. For some, perhaps it will be. Certainly not for all. For a few, it may seem that they’re accursed.
I was born in the Year of the Green Wood Dragon. For many years, I used that sobriquet as a pseudonym on a Daoist discussion board. I loved the juxtaposition contained within that name. I mean, who would carve a fearsome dragon out of green wood? These days, that’s what I feel like, an unseasoned beast ready to crack and split as I age and continue to be tested.
I’ve always been fascinated by dragons. Dungeons and, Uther and Arthur Pen-, the red of Wales. Chinese dragons are powerful and noble. By contrast, European ones are greedy and fierce. The last battle of Beowulf. Fafnir of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The Legend of St. George. These are the dragons of my people.
Five years ago, I stood rearguard as my wife slew such a dragon. The landscape of that quest resembled Cymru, a native land of dragons, cloudy and craggy, shrouded in mist and mystery. The road through those mountains was hard, the siege against her fortress treacherous, the final battle in its lair fierce. Fortunately, she was victorious at every stage and that particular wyrm breathes no more. Though some nights, its long shadow haunts our dreams still. So, at Candlemas, we light votives to aid in our forgetting. Day by day, those memories are dispelled like ripples fading from the surface of a pond.
Since then, for me, each passing year has become a goal to attain, a quest to fulfill, a series of obstacles to overcome on the path to a glittering treasure I likely will never possess. As humans, we long to take comfort in the future. In auguries and names, we search for stability, an understanding of this life. Eons ago, someone categorized and compiled the names of these years based on a perceived pattern of events. Good years or bad, like a face on the surface of a distant planet, we are predisposed to see patterns even where none exist. But their beauty or ugliness is firmly rooted in the eye of the beholder, not the beheld.
Like a lamb stirring in its mother’s womb at Imbolc, the life of this black water dragon has only just begun. Whether it grows in the Chinese or European tradition has yet to be woven by the Norns. I suspect it will bring a bit of both: joy and sadness, wealth and poverty, misery and health. Ours is but to receive its gifts with patience and with grace, knowing that next year it will not visit us again, at least wearing the same scaly guise.
© 2012 Edward P. Morgan III
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ReplyDeleteNotes and asides:
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For me, the year has started sad. Karen and I had hoped to be celebrating the fifth anniversary of her successful treatment for breast cancer. But with my father in chemo, this just doesn’t seem like right time. Since November, writing has become very difficult and is only happening in fits and spurts. It is very frustrating to want to write so desperately but to be unable to due to circumstances beyond my control.
Chinese years have more than just one of the twelve well-known animals associated with them. Secondarily, they rotate through the five Chinese elements of fire, earth, metal, water and wood. Each of these has one of two colors associated with them, one male (yang), one female (yin) based on the year. In the case of water, black is the male color. This sets up a 60-year cycle, interestingly a decent life span in the time they were created.
Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales.
Imbolc, the cross-quarter Celtic festival celebrating the lactating of the ewes, falls the day before or the day of Christian Candlemas, depending on the year.
Picture notes:
ReplyDeleteThis is a dragon that Karen found at a geology conference many years ago. She since brought it live in her office. The neat thing about it, other than it’s a dragon and it’s wood, is that it has both Chinese and European features. Most Chinese dragons don’t have bat-like wings. She took the picture using her work jacket as a table cover in the morning sun by the window of her office.