The whooper swans arrived this week with great honk and fanfare. I heard them first, a high-pitched trumpeting from the north west, like a bugle announcing royalty. I ran outside into a day of incessant rain, and close, bruised clouds, but did not see them until they were upon me: a perfect wedge.
Did you watch the footage of airplanes trying to land in Dublin during the recent Storm Ashley? The swans reminded me of them as they touched water on the lake. They came feet first at different speeds, some two feet at a time, others led with the left then tumbled sideways before righting themselves. A few circled before making their descent - it is important to be sure.
This lake is the end point of their 1,300km migration from Iceland. Twelve whooper swans crash landed into the water as the rain fell in huge sideways drifts and heron stalked the shallows.
Welcome back, I called out.
My neighbour, an ornithologist, brought his scope out. I narrowed my field of vision to a tiny circle of thin, yellow beak that tapered to black, like it had been dipped in ink and was ready to write. Then, a small, keen eye, the curve of neck and feathers ruffled from preening. There were four cygnets, soot-grey and starving on the shoreline, thrusting their beaks into the soft earth.
Suddenly, it seemed obscene that there wasn’t a welcoming party for these marvellous birds who only hatched six months ago, and the adults who led them here. Where were the fireworks? The fans? The medallions for bravery we could hang around their necks? Whooper swans are a wonder.
Yes, the world is falling apart. Yes, there are terrible, awful things from which we cannot look away. But, this too is worthy of our attention: it is October, and the whooper swans have returned. There are still beautiful things in which we can put our faith.
The Language of Light
The wheel of the year is turning. The 1st November is the first day of the Celtic new year and with each revolution of the wheel I am more convinced of its wisdom. Change is in the air - can you feel it? The wind is rising (Hello, Cailleach), the dark is encroaching, the swallows, swifts and martins have gone south and the wild, white swans are here. The hazel woodland I walk every day is aflame and the trees are shedding what no longer serves them. It is a tipping point between bright summer and dark winter - will you heed it?
I was churched in the language of light - light was good, holy, right; God was light. The darkness, therefore, was a place to be avoided. It was an absence, somewhere to hide, the cover for evil deeds.
And yet…
Some of us are more at home in the dark. It is quiet there and less populated. It is the place where seeds are buried and roots share nutrients via a vast mycelial network. Owls hunt it; toads brumate there and badgers slip into a state of torpor when the summer lights go out. It is a vital, nourishing underground of creativity, rot and potential.
I love the dark.
It makes sense to me that the year would begin here. There are certain seeds that require time in the freezer before they can be sown. This is the process of stratification that mimics the dormancy they would have endured in the cold hard ground over winter. Tell me, are we all that different from a seed? A bulb? A tree? The sly fox who buries herself beneath our feet?
The Crucible
I am forever grateful to Katherine May for her work on Wintering. She turned a season that we insist on commercialising with Halloween, then Christmas, into a permission slip to withdraw. She made winter a verb, a choice about how we spend our days when the light fails and the wind starts to howl.
“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”
So, let us stop pretending. Let us prepare. But how?
The Dearest Freshness
Samhain is a great place to start.
This is the first Celtic festival of the year, a time to light a fire, mark our place among the shadows, name the things we are letting go and welcome the good dark. In the Celtic calendar there is a festival every six weeks. They are rooted in the seasons, steeped in ancient wisdom and lore.
At Samhain, the veil is thin - what does this mean?
For me, it means a greater awareness of death, that essential part of the life cycle without which we cannot be transformed. It is also an opportunity to remember my ancestors, to clear a bit of space for them at the table and remind myself that I am a very small part of a much bigger story. These liminal times remind us that separation is an illusion. As GM Hopkins tells us: ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.’ Blood, sap, humus, lake bed, swan song, ash - we are all made of the same stuff.
Rilke writes:
‘When I lean over the chasm of myself…it seems my God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of.’
The Good Dark
My beautiful soul sister and I held a Samhain ceremony for our kids. We hiked up a hill in full costume with painted faces and all the materials for a fire. The sun had just set into the wild Atlantic and the sky was every colour of pink.
We weren’t sure if the children would engage, but when the circle was complete, and we read the part of the Dawn Treader when Aslan strips the dragon of his scales, they were hooked. We wrote the things we want to let go on white beach stones, then left them beneath the hawthorn as a gift. We shared stories of our ancestors: a family dog lost last year, a superstitious grandmother, a great uncle who always drank Fanta. Then, we held sparklers in the fire and went dancing across the hills shouting our welcome to the good dark.
We have other traditions too: trick or treating with friends, marshmallow making, the start of our yearly Star Wars extravaganza and a Feast of Souls on Samhain Eve. This last one borrows wisdom from the Mexican Dia de Muertos tradition. We set an extra place at our table. Throughout our meal we talk about those who are no longer with us, we normalise death and celebrate the memory of the people we miss. Then, we carry lanterns up the hill, read a few poems, and cross the threshold from light to dark by extinguishing our candles and navigating the path home under the cover of night.
Now, the real work of winter can begin.
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I spent a morning beneath the skeleton of a willow watching swans. It was raining (again) and the runoff from the mountains gushed from a hole at the base of the hill. It was as if a tap had been turned on to fill up the lake, and the water was full of birds in need of a bath.
Mary Oliver tells me that attention is the beginning of devotion; I am giving all of mine to the swans.
When they bottom up to feed, I, too, hold my breath: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. When they break ranks, I see that the cygnets are not allowed to stray far.
An hour passes beneath the dripping trees until two swans grow curious enough to investigate me. Throughout their patrol of the northern shore, a swan from the main group calls to them. What does it say? Is it warning them about humans? About their guns and their greed? Their unpredictability and foolishness? Or is it simply keeping them close? I’ll never know, but the moment of being beheld in the bright, clear eye of a whooper swan is as close to answered prayer as I get.
Enter the Silence
We can say a lamentation of swans and I wonder what they might teach us about the soft heart of winter and the sorrow it holds? These 12 will be wintering on my doorstep; I will listen and let you know. While we wait, the author of an ancient text on lamentation said this:
‘When life is heavy and hard to bear, go off by yourself. Enter the silence, bow in prayer. Don’t ask questions: wait for hope to appear. Don’t run from trouble. Take it full-face. The ‘worst’ is never the worst.’ (Lamentations 3)
Whoever we are and however we pray, whether we believe swans are the messengers of ancient Celtic goddesses or simply migratory marvels of nature, we can give them our attention, and perhaps that is enough.
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Whooper swan song rings out like the final notes of a deflated accordion. Tune in, slow down, feel your way home through the dark.
Gorgeous world Beth, I loved your moment of eye contact, it gave me goosebumps! A beautiful reminder of the importance of slowing right down now and appreciating the natural world. I read wintering last year and absolutely loved it x