Today is Imbolc, Candlemas, the midway point between the winter solstice and the fall equinox and it is light until 5 o’clock and that means that my days of creek deprivation are over. It is light early enough that I can go after dropping Forest off at school. It is light late enough that twilight falls as my day is over. I can see what feeds me again: the delicate snowberry branches covered in white globes, the budding osoberry.
It is hard to get through the dark time of year. There are always dark times. By “dark,” I mean times when I cannot see; I do not use dark as a racist synonym for bad, though it is a habit I am still sometimes trying to break. There are always times when I can’t see, sometimes can’t even see whose house I’m living in.
There’s a point like that in the myth, after she has married him, before she has found the bodies, when a part of her doesn’t want to know. I have had so many times like that in my life. My marriage to my ex-husband was like that. I didn’t want to see his constant and unceasing anger. I didn’t want to see how child-like I was in my hope that he would be the male provider and I could be the female, pleased and surrounded with treasure and his house. I am sorry for it now. I made him a villain, as did he. I made me a victim as did he… and the opposites are also true.
I am thinking of this today because I went to see a money coach, my first session. This is good magic for Imbolc, which is a holiday for committing to a seed.
The session was hard. I went to see her for two hours and she asked me questions about my relationship with money now, (a monster who I have to control) and ten years ago (a lie that I tell myself about endless abundance) and ten years before that (a flapper in a beaded red dress who goes out dancing with me.)
Twenty years ago, I was living in San Francisco and bartending. It was a different city then: my hourly wage covered my rent and I walked around spending my tips on food, fashion and … fetishes? Not really, but I do like alliteration. Ten years ago I was tormenting my ex husband with my spending. And now I have just come out of a period of remaking my work and risking everything to do it.
I think part of the work of this myth is be to be very, very clear about what building my own house looks like, to come out of what she calls “the money fog.” I haven’t written much of this, of money, or my marriage, for fear of saying something that would be upsetting to someone or present me as less professional. At the workshop last week, one of the women said that we don’t talk about money because we know that all that we have in this country is built on slavery. We don’t’ talk about the money because then we would have to talk about the bodies. But that is a kind of dark I don’t want to live with anymore. The willful not looking and not speaking. A gag instead of a voice, a blindfold instead of a December night that turns slowly toward spring.