Diminished stores, reawakening earth

It happens every so often that I burn myself out a bit, especially in winter. The telluric currents of the earth run sluggish in the colder times, the solar currents are distant. All that’s available is reserve—what you gathered before the winter, to last you through the short days and cold nights.

Sometimes I use too much of it; the hearth burns bright and hot, and then there’s nothing left to keep it going for a little while. I know this pattern, I know I do this, but I don’t yet have the wisdom to measure it all out better.

Imbolc is coming, though, and everything awakens again. Here on the continent, the same day is called some variation of Candlemass: La Chandeleur, Lostage, Lichtmis.

In Luxembourg, it’s called Liichtmëssdag, and it’s got a quite peculiar tradition attached to it, reminiscent of Halloween or Christmas caroling while also being a stark reminder of winter famine. Children gather in groups, holding candles, and march from house to house, banging on doors, singing a rather threatening song called Léiwer Härgottsblieschen. Part of the song is as follows:

The song’s apparent blessing of people to whom it is sung is actually much more menacing than it seems, which the next two lines show:

“Let the children live,” the children sing. “Let the old people die.”

Before industrialization, the food reserves of most people would have dwindled by the beginning of February. The peas the children are begging for are not the fresh sort, but rather the remaining stores of dried ones from the previous year. And the bacon is not what we think of now, but rather large strips of unchewable fat and gristle. Both would represent the final stores of food for households, the very end of their reserves.

It seems a dark reality that children would be begging old people to give up on life so they could live, but that’s not actually what’s happening. The old Irish Gaelic word for that day, Imbolc, means something like “in the belly,” and likely referred to the impending birth of lambs. The milk of sheep, goats, and cows that flows after their calving would have been—for most people in northern climates—the first new food source available after the winter.

All of that was coming, and just around the corner. The shakedown of the old people for their last food stores, then, happened just at the end of the winter when more food was about to arrive. Life was beginning again, and was just around the corner.

Regardless our modern, petroleum-fueled abundance, these cycles still continue in our bodies. They do in mine, anyway. I’m always at the end of my reserves by mid-January, scraping together what is left and finding that amount to be quite paltry. It’s okay, though, because the light’s returning, and soon enough the currents of earth and sun burn bright enough to warm me back to life.

Despite being quite at the end of my own stores, it’s been a good few dark months. Though I didn’t take much time off (I should have), my husband took three weeks off and we traveled for a few days. Getting to see him so much might have been the only thing that really got me through all this work.

We drove to Switzerland, then through the Jura to a friend’s domaine in Burgundy, with one day spent walking about Lyon. Lyon is everything Paris is, but without the Parisians, so it’s quite fantastic. Here are a few pictures from our trip: