As we begin to fit the Wheel of the Year rituals into our Circle of Eight, everything strengthens and deepens. The rituals take on a textured, 3-D aspect when they embody the landscape of our directional places, and those places dance into life at the time of their festival, luminescent with the attention not just we but the whole year is focusing on them. Imbolc gathers to itself those fresh winds of our small South-East beach; the Spring Equinox points out into the world like the cape; Beltaine rushes in and out like the river meeting the sea. Even though we are conducting the Summer Solstice ritual in my garden in the hills, the whole energy and feel of the lookout is with us, and the ritual rises to that height and scope of vision. Lammas settles deep within the mountain, the Autumn Equinox spills onto the stilled surface of the lake, Samhain stretches out to the bora ring, and Winter Solstice drops into the pool at the base of the waterfall.
The Winter Solstice is a pivot in the Wheel of the Year, bringing the birth of light and renewing the whole turn of the wheel. The rounded aspect of our place for this direction creates the impression of being held, womblike. It’s dramatic and nurturing all at once; the pool and rock walls receive the huge force of the waterfall and then send forth a stream winding seawards. For this particular Winter Solstice we call to all eight directions. Each calling references birth, each invocation comes sliding over the edge like water spilling out of the beginnings of the Winter Solstice. In the ritual we decorate candles, inscribing them with spells for the new year: love and peace and happiness. Then we go out into the darkness of the cold night and stand in a circle around our unlit fire.
Into that pool of night we pour our fears. We speak our private nightmares—the death of loved ones, loss, heartbreak, despair—and our fears for the world: disaster, war, and famine. We keep speaking until we run out of words. There is stillness. Into the dark new sounds drop—the voice of the Goddess interlaced with that of the Sun Lord. Two voices weaving and dancing together in darkness, speaking the words down line by line of stars and mysteries, the secrets of flame and bodies and souls. They speak of the life of the earth, of worship and sacrifice, song and awe and reverence, freedom and love. They offer us the bounty of the earth, to be lived with our own lives.
One candle is lit; the first light struck. Another is lit from it, and then another, until all of us hold lights; then we step forward and light the bonfire with them. We begin our songs, singing to the earth and the Lord of the Dance. We are strong and fierce on this long night; the bonfire burns bright, and we dance until we are out of breath. When we complete our ritual, we feel it still: the sheltering of the wheel, the turn and change that marks this night, and the sparks we take forward into the new cycle the same way the water flows on into the world.
The next ritual in the year is Imbolc. For us it’s twinned with the little beach with the sudden tides and the wind blowing in from the South-East. It’s a simple place with no amenities; not exactly hard to get to, but most people wouldn’t bother. It’s a direction weather arrives from; it’s the scent of the new and sudden shifts into growth and difference. Imbolc can be like that: deceptively simple, easily neglected, but actually carrying the winds of change and worth the effort to seek it out.
We ask everyone to bring a seedling to give away—a native, an herb, or a bulb—in a pot. We call to the eight directions not by place names but by aspect and feeling: breezes and the sudden tide; cliffs, dolphins, and breaking surf; river meeting sea; height and vision all around; looming, fertile depth; peace and the stretch of sacred waters; mystery and the other worlds; pool and waterfall, cave and snake. Imbolc feels young and expansive, back in the time of sensation and immediacy and prior to concepts of naming or definition.
We hand out colored paper in the shape of leaves; we write wishes for the future on them and tie these to the seedlings. Then, imagining that we inhabited the environment of Imbolc, of our small beach looking out to nowhere, we build a collective vision of the time one hundred years in the future: the environment is healthy and thriving; war is forgotten; the world operates on a gift economy; food, water, and shelter are rights, not commodities. We begin singing our song, breathing life and air into our vision as if we ourselves are the winds bringing a change in the world’s weather.
We move closer to our current time, drawing our vision of one hundred years with us to a time ten years in the future. Again we vision together for a time ten years ahead: the environment is starting to heal; there are no more wars anywhere on the planet; third world debt is forgiven; we become self-responsible. We sing and drum and dance the next line of our song, giving our seedlings to the altar and grounding our vision into the earth, growing ourselves along with them into this future.
We draw the vision back closer again, one year in the future. Now we water the seedlings, singing to them of the journey water makes from land to sea and back again; we draw the vision to us like the incoming tide. Finally we speak of the present, this turn of the wheel, and each person makes a commitment towards the visioning—what they will do to bring it to life. I will bring environmental issues into my workplace; I will make an indigenous harvesting trail for the community; I will take up political letter writing; I will be happy; I will investigate recycling. We light the candle on the altar and sing the whole song, igniting our vision and intent, and we each pick out one of the seedlings to plant as a symbol of our promise. We are the tides that turn and turn, we are the change of weather sweeping in, we are the fresh breeze into the new year.
The Spring Equinox is always aligned with the East; wherever you are in the world, that’s where the sun rises. And our particular East is so definite: the cape and the easternmost point of Australia. We hold the sunrise position here at the pointed edge of land; we hold this balance of light and dark as the pendulum of the year swings upwards into the light. To represent this certainty, we cast our Spring Equinox circle into just four directions: East, North, West, and South.
We write wishes on pieces of colored ribbon, then we begin singing our song. We separate, still singing, and go into the garden to tie our ribbons to a tree. They flutter in the breeze as we regroup on the lawn. We’ve also brought decorated eggs, and now we set about the egg hunt: spying them hidden among the rocks and plants, wedged high in a tree or balanced on a windowsill. After the hunt, we gather and show off our treasures: the spiraled eggs and the ones with glitter and hearts, the universe eggs with stars or a moon, and spring eggs with flowers and ribbons. We encourage people to interpret them. If you found your egg nested in the grasses at your feet, it could mean you need to look more closely at what’s right in front of you. If you had to climb into a tree to get it, then maybe the egg is telling you to reach out, stretch for what you want.
The symbols and ritual are simple like the East is simple: ribbons, wishes, eggs. Nothing that you don’t see or can’t find with a bit of looking, the way our East place offers itself to us every time we go there. It’s simple and strong: cliffs, sea and dolphins, wind and air, water and earth.
Beltaine we see symbolized in the to and fro at the river mouth, the tidal river where salt meets fresh water. The river mouth draws in and then sends out waters; the sea advances and retreats. It’s an orderly process, timed to the tides, but standing there watching it—that pull and suck and smash where they actually meet—it looks churning, chaotic, as if the balance has to be fought and found every moment and quarter moment. So it is with Beltaine, when we meet our lovers in the twisting dance of the Maypole, weaving our ribbons and creating what looks like tangled chaos only to have it emerge as beautiful patterns. We jump the fire, daring the flames not to eat us, and we throw the role of the God up into the air and watch it settle on first one, then another and another until finally it comes to rest on someone who, perhaps, we knew all along had the will and desire to draw it to themselves and hold it.
This particular Beltaine we come dressed to honor a god or goddess. We are outside and have set bamboo poles in the lawn in the cross-quarters to mark the circle. A mix of people arrive—people who’ve been coming to these rituals for years, some who dip in and out, and a large number who’ve never been before. Between the Circle of Eight and the Phoenix Circle we call into all eight directions, and the ritual feels both tightly held and also expansive; on the crest of a little hill, overlooking the house but overlooked, in turn, by the rock and tree bluff high and abrupt behind us. Everything is in between at Beltaine, the merging and push-and-pulling back and forth.
Last year’s God is set free and chased by a mix of children and adults until he’s run down. Then the tide turns as he’s brought back to face the challenges. There are eight challenges written on colored cards, and the role of God is tossed back and forward, sometimes held for the length of a few challenges, sometimes lost immediately. Our challenges are as mixed as the season; chanting, arm wrestling, spear throwing, invocation. When the final challenge is completed, a young man has won. He’s never been to our rituals before, and his wife and small children look on, bemused, as he strives for this role.
We dance around him as the Maypole; we are giving ourselves to the chaos elements of this ritual and this time of year, and our ribbons are as chaotic as anything else. There’s narrow ribbons: dark green, peach, dark gold, yellow, and red bordered with gold. There’s a red, mid-width ribbon that looks as if it’s been cut from fabric; it’s uneven and frays all along the length, but its color stands out in the weaving and another that is metallic, a sparkly gold. There are wide ribbons, too; a transparent one with solid white hearts all down its center, a deep blue ribbon bordered with gold, a multicolored cotton ribbon that looks like it’s from India with a gold embossed pattern stamped on one side. After the dance, we give away some precious things: a lace dress, a book, a wall hanging, a jeweled ring. Then we feast and light the Beltaine fire.
Our Summer Solstice place is that little, busy peak in the North where most of the circle can be seen. At the solstice we’re just entering the hottest time of year, with bushfires and droughts as ever-present possibilities, so we don’t emphasize the fire aspects of this festival but focus on the meeting of opposites, celebration, and offerings. Just as the lookout itself isn’t very grand, our Summer Solstice rituals are humble, occurring just a few days before Christmas and the end of the year when everyone is rushed with finishing school and getting ready for family celebrations and holidays.
In the garden we invoke the God as the beneficent Sun King and the Goddess as fertile Earth Mother, pouring forth flowers and fruit and greenery. Then we separate into groups to devise our ritual. When we come back together, the men present the God as a many-aspected deity, each of them contributing a part of him and each one receiving his touch. They plant themselves on the earth as if they were trees and offer us gifts from their branches. The women bring out mangos, that yellow-golden fruit of summer that blushes red. We dance with each other, then slice the fruit and offer it round, letting juice drip down our arms and feeding people with our fingers.
Then the children come into the center. They’re old enough not to have needed an adult with them as they worked on their part of the ritual, so we don’t know what they’ve planned. They put on a little play, finishing with a song and dance to honor their mothers. Then they gather themselves into a small clump and approach the men. They say they have a request of their fathers that they’d like to ask on the Summer Solstice. They ask them for more time. They stand there, so serious—eleven years old, eight, five; friends and strangers, Phoenix Circle mixed with other children—and look at the men.
I feel like crying seeing them standing there, hearing them ask this favor. It seems incredible that they know what they want, what they’re missing; even in this community where fathers are around and spend lots of time with their children, it’s still that: more time. The men stumble in their answers, choke, hardly know how to deal with it; to look at their own child or address them as a group; to apologize, promise, justify. Watching, I feel immensely proud of them. I don’t ever discover whose idea that was or how they came to decide to do that as part of the ritual.
Afterwards we make a Summer Solstice mandala, laying out grains, fruits, and vegetables onto the dark green grass in orange, yellow, purple, blue, brown, and cream. It is all the richness of summer gathered together, like all the places and the richness of our circle gathered around our lookout. We sing and drum a disorganized chant, shouting out our desires as we circle around the mandala: love, peace, change, growth, truth, power, acceptance, fertility. It’s all there. Then we thank the God and Goddess, leave our mandala as a gift for the birds and animals, and lie around on the grass to feast outside in the sunny evening.
By Lammas we are entirely over the heat. It’s been very dry this summer, too dry, and everyone’s waiting for the rain. We need it to damp down the threat of bushfire, we need it to fill our water tanks, and we need it to bring relief from the burning heat. Our Lammas place is the mountain that’s sometimes known as Cloud Catcher, since it nearly always has clouds clinging to its peak. We decide this ritual is the perfect time to invoke the rains, to tempt them towards us; it’s the changeover season from summer to autumn and, we hope, from dry to wet. That mountain is always so present in our circle; we write the whole ritual to please it.
We cast into the cross-quarters, honoring and reflecting the power of the mountain. We gather ourselves in groups of two and three into each of the cross-quarters for the calling, the Phoenix Circle merged in with the Circle of Eight. We hear the power gathering in the grouped voices like that feeling before rain when the pressure lowers and the air quivers. Over twenty people are here, and when we talk about our relationship to the mountain we hear how it holds a corner of everyone’s map.
We’re calling for rain, and we’ve got an elemental ritual. We break into four groups to develop the sound and energy of the elements, then we come back together and start our ritual. Each element goes into the center in turn. We have air rushing about, whistling and sighing in high voices; fire crouched on the ground and growing in strength, power, and conviction until it consumes the whole circle; water trickling and singing and pattering around the edges, only slowly converging on the center, and, finally, earth, solid and standing stable like trees, humming low and steady.
Then we add them in one by one, layering them over each other—air with its breezes and song; fire’s flickering, scorching, devouring. Between them they start to dry out the land, to threaten and blow and expand and consume. Water comes in, a delicate sound we can hardly hear at first, but after a while it has an impact, raining at the edges and gradually expanding its territory, letting the wind blow it wide to damp down the fire, and it gets louder and louder; the water people drum their feet on the floor and slap their arms and legs for the sound of loud, loud rain on the roof, and the fire people huddle down in the center of the group on the floor, trying not to go out altogether, and then the earth people join in with a song about trees receiving the rain gratefully, stretching out their branches and sending moisture to their leaves; they stand in a line and welcome the rain.
We take our offerings outside to a rock altar and gift the energy we’ve raised to the turning of the year. The rock is embedded in the ground, one of the igneous rocks left here from the ancient volcano and now decorated with flowers, drawings, a poem, shells and fruit and vegetables. We sing our song out there, elemental and praying for rain; we hope we feel it coming into the air, pulling in some of that tide of the North-West. Perhaps it’s just the dusk, but we imagine those clouds we’ve called to are considering visiting us, leaving their safe holding space of the mountain to venture into the valleys and towards the coast, bringing the wet season with them. We imagine the mountain might send them our way, and we thank it in advance.
Just like the Autumn Equinox, our place for the West is made up of contrasts. The festival celebrates abundance at a time of descent into the darkness; our West place is the human-made dam that has settled so gracefully into the landscape. The Autumn Equinox is a harvest feast in the face of oncoming scarcity; the dam is brim full of water like a storehouse. For our ritual we call to the four cardinal directions, holding the circle steady as the year dips downwards. This ritual is one of balance: light balanced with dark for a moment; plenty balanced with scarcity.
We speak of the theme of balance in our own lives. We talk of choices: how they can run in patterns of fear and conditioning, and sometimes we resist changes we obviously should make. We have been taught to repeatedly choose light, ascension, and growth over dark, descent, and death. We know we are not in balance with these things, so we allow this time of year to teach us the value of the still, cold water far beneath as well as the brightness the swans glide across. We seek not just the beautiful flowers of the water lilies but also the depths where their roots grow—the unseen places.
We want our bodies, not just our minds, to learn this way of balance, and so we divide into two groups to create a dance of chaos; primordial darkness and the birth of the stars. The dark dances first—a swirling pit of nothingness, a black hole, dark energy exploding outwards—and then the light dances in: stars born and radiant, beckoning, sweeping out to the edges of the universe. The two dances join and mingle, endings and beginnings merging together; the enveloping darkness, the singing light, and neither dominant. We are one; as we whirl about we sing our song for unity and spirit rejoined, and we think of the cool lake nestled in the folds of land, its dark currents as much a part of it as its glistening surface.
One of the most distinctive things about our Samhain direction in the South-West is the way the bora ring is hidden in layers. It’s a long drive away, then through the cemetery, then around the outside of the bora ring, and even then one has to jam oneself between the fence and the open passage, which meet at an odd angle, to walk up to the sacred circle. And, once there, women don’t enter and the men only rarely. It’s circuitous, to say the least, and seems to fit with Samhain.
One year we devise a journeying ritual for Samhain. It’s dusk and we all wear masks, so there are elements of strangeness in vision, in knowing who’s there, in staying oriented. Almost from the beginning, when we put on the masks and cast only into the cross-quarters, it’s as if we’ve slipped through the veils. We double up for the calling, two voices into each place: South-East, North-East, North-West, South-West. I stand in the South-West, the direction I happen to be holding in the Circle of Eight; we are both wearing black crowlike masks, and we caw and echo out, imagining our cries reaching as far as the bora ring.
Two of the children lead us on a lengthy, traveling elemental journey. We start in the middle of the house with earth, naming and honoring our dead at a special altar and releasing them. Then we walk in a single file out of the house and across the property, down the driveway, back up and around the side of the house, where we are brought to a small pool that’s been constructed: the Well of Mortality. One by one we kneel down and remove our masks, gazing into the water and acknowledging our life, seeing our eventual death written on our faces.
Enjoying their role as psychopomps, the children lead us up the stairs, through a few rooms, out onto a veranda, back down into the garden, around the side of the house, and onto the main veranda, where we meet a Trial by Fire. We have to call out our worthiness to continue, waiting for the children to lower their flaming torches and let us through; we call out the names of the people we love, the work we do in the world, and our hopes for the future as one by one they allow us to pass. More circling through rooms, down stairs, outside again, and now we reach a piece of flat ground and begin the song and our spiral dance to celebrate the swirling of air.
Finally even the children are tired, and one of the adults leads us on a spirit journey to meet our guides and travel deep within, into ourselves or to the other world, wherever we are called to go. After this we finally ground and release back into the cross-quarters. Standing again in the South-West I feel it there, close and also receding: the bora ring, glimmering through the veils, ever present and also deeply held by spirit rather than the real world. All that circling and journeying, reaching inwards, traveling the elements backwards—an unwinding of sorts, and now finally we take off our masks and go to our feast.