🕯️ Celebrating Imbolc 🕯️
I love January.
The rush and excitement of December has wrapped up, and it’s just… peaceful. It reminds me of the time of day when the birds start to sing. It’s dark, quiet, and sleepy, yet there is an energy that suggests the opportunity to have a good day has arrived. Or, at the very least, it is time to get up and enjoy your favorite cup of whatever-you-drink.
The rhythms of January days feel slower. The gardens are still sleeping, and while we do have lovely, sunny days, there is a chill in the air and the desire I feel starting in March to get outside and clean up, plant, tend, and weed, hasn’t kicked in yet. In short, it still feels like hibernation time, but the promise of spring is creeping closer. With the same gentle optimism of the morning’s birdsong, January offers a clean slate, and the suggestion that this new cycle is a good time to restart intentions that perhaps were forgotten in our busier months past.
Ring out the old; dance in the new!
I don’t set yearly resolutions, but I do sharpen my focus toward goals. They seem to have fallen into a pattern:
Drink more water.
Follow through on ideas.
And always, DANCE.
Healdsburg Dance Collective is helping this goal by offering a series of free classes. Sign up here.
I registered for a few of these classes, started a tap class up in Cloverdale, and have already gone swing dancing! Off to a good start.
Get witchy with me!
A fourth intention I’m adding this year is to celebrate the seasons, on my own and in community with others. Attuning to the Wheel of the Year helps us notice, observe, and appreciate nature and the cycles that teach us to move gracefully from January through December.
In the Wheel of the Year, each season holds a solstice or an equinox, and the mid-points, which are fire festivals, celebrated with candles and bonfires. We are coming up on Imbolc, celebrated on February 1, and focusing on the rebirth of nature and the joy of spring. Fire’s role represents the returning of the sun’s presence in our lengthening days.
There is a lovely energy here in which to focus on our intentions for the coming year. We consider the seeds we want to plant, both physically and energetically. It’s a great time to revamp the self-care habits we want, and need, to embrace for a nourished experience through the changing of the seasons. Traditionally, this is a more introspective, personal celebration where we might light a candle on our altar and journal about the coming year as opposed to the higher energy Beltane, or May Day, where we gather our people together and dance around a maypole.
An Imbolc ritual can be as simple as lighting a candle and making a cup of tea, truly paying attention to it as you sip. This time of year, after all the feasting of the holidays, a cup of mint or chamomile tea is a grounding and soothing way to take a moment.
Imbolc Candle-Dipping & Seasonal Centering Workshop
Sunday, January 28, 2:00–4:00pm
Yoga On Center
1043 Felta Road
We’ll hand-dip beeswax candles, anointing them with herbs and oils for Imbolc and your year to come.
We’ll create our own essential oil Ritual Rollers to have an aromatic reminder of how we want to travel through 2024.
And there will be snacks. As Imbolc is a celebration in part of all that is good and dairy-filled, I’ll make a pastry full of milk and egg yolks, and a tea based in coconut milk.
$45 Sign up here.
Green blessings on a year full of vitality, mirth, and movement!
