The Fecundity of Ash: Sitting with the Year-End Fires
I’ve sat down to write you this Letter from the Wild on November 23rd. It was this day last year that I went to visit my mother, not knowing that day would begin the harrowing and tender, final 12 days of her (embodied) life.
I couldn’t have imagined that, just a few months later, I’d be very grateful for the timing of her passing, just a hair ahead of an isolating, divisive pandemic. And I couldn’t yet see that my husband and I would decide to begin a new chapter earlier than planned by selling our home and moving cross-county to a magical island for a year.
Such changes speak of starting completely over.
Like— everything has changed and there’s a line in the sand and that’s it! Imagine my surprise to find out, in fact, that I don’t feel like I’m starting over. The truth deep in my bones is that I’m more so carrying on. And a strange sadness and maturity move through me in admitting that.
A sharp corner turned, a hard break— that feels easier. Carrying on speaks truth to the unstoppable current of our lives. To keep going is to leave much behind. Still, there’s a very old magic here— which is that, if awake to our experience, we carry on as The One Who Has Been Changed By All She’s Seen.
There’s no turning back, true. But neither is there a precise “new beginning.” Maybe it’s the pandemic’s influence, but what’s present for me is more intimacy with the exquisite, circular continuation of life— one which is always changing us. Even my mother’s moment of death, which I witnessed, was not the only part of her leaving us. Indeed, even that moment was the beginning of her being with us in a new way, as Ancestor. But that, too, is taking time.
The passing of any being— whether a loved one, a year, a wave, a way-of-being, a youthful dream— it’s a long process without clear beginning or tidy end. Like a well-fashioned fire, the magic of experience is enjoying lighting it, its crackling peak of warmth, the beguiling embers of its dying-out and the pure white ash of new potential left in its wake.
The cold night air rushes in around us, always. But we’re warmed having sat with the fire; changed as we snuggle into our beds bathed in smoke-scent.
Discovering how we’ve been changed and to what effect is our great, inherited human privilege. And a great reaping it is. A slow-burning, Autumnal fire to sit by, if we’re willing.
There is no real arriving, no firm departures. Just transformation. As such, there is no season of living or dying or rebirth that we can be exiled from unless we choose self-exile. To be willing to sit with the through-lines of the Great Life Cycle is to choose belonging. Our longing is that through-line.
It’s easier, in a way, to attempt to start over “fresh” than it is to sit with all that’s happened, in all willing honesty, and watch our timbers of experience burn slowly down to ash.
Especially in Western culture, we rush into the celebratory aspects of year’s end, complaining the whole time of how dark it is outside. We surge towards the new year where we can breath again, having left the unpleasantness behind us. We’re far too eager to wipe the proverbial slate clean— as if heart break, failure and even death itself can be passed over or erased.
This has been no ordinary year, and the big work ahead of us has only just begun. We cannot simply turn the page on December 31st (or 21st—the old, sacred Winter Solstice) and begin again. There will be no wiping the slate clean. Even the idea of "new year’s resolutions” seem quaint here in the last act of 2020. We can’t simply check off all we accomplished in 2020 (ha!) and pretend to chart our most ambitious year yet!
We’re still very much in a time of collapse and chaos. And so, neither can we afford to slog ourselves into the new year dragging the great heaping mess of 2020 unconsciously behind us.
Too much has happened and too much is happening. Whether we’ve had a devastating year, an unexpectedly generous year, or (like me) quite a big dose of both, the fact of the matter is: nothing went as planned, and planning ahead feels different.
We need these quiet, dark days more than ever. To take pause and rest, re-source, revive ourselves. The medicine of year’s end is to lean in to the darkness, to trust it.
To be with what’s gone all the way through to its ashen state— it’s a kind of wisdom-extracting.
It’s open grieving. It’s quiet contemplation. It’s a soft gaze, free from “doing.” To be with is to listen, slow down, take stock, love up. It’s making rich fertilizer for new seeds.
Such present-centeredness can bring on surprising and revelatory new life for us. Rather than use our minds to tick off what went right and wrong in a given year— beating ourselves up and self-congratulating by turn— we can pull up a chair to the sacred fires of our lives and use all our senses and faculties to simply be with.
What does this past year smell, taste, look, feel and sound like?
What are we trying too quickly to burn away or banish and at what risk?
What happened this year (personally, relationally and collectively) that we could sit with more generously, more deeply?
What does our body want us to remember? What do we know that we know, having survived this year? What remains an utter mystery?
Sometimes, just warming our weary hands by the fires of the year for a while, without trying to make anything happen, is enough. Just knowing that we are and will continue to be warmed and nourished by all that’s happened is to plant a strong future garden.
The fecundity of ash awaits us all.
Sitting by the fires of experience at year’s end is sowing seeds in the dark for a more verdant Spring. Ashes contain the promise of robust hope, inner knowing, and the soul-rooted nutrition that can carry us onward into this new cycle that stretches her mysterious, demanding limbs out before us.
It’s not always about “we will get through this,” and “this too shall pass.” Sometimes it’s more about, “I will be with this, and I am safe in my here-ness.”
May the affection of the year-end fires be yours in these dark days. May you carry on as the One Who Is Changed and Knows It…even if you’re not yet sure how.
Sitting with the 3 sacred fires
A Story & Practice
If you would like to hear a story and experiment with a practice in finding the fecundity of your own year’s ashes, I offer you The Story of The 3 Sacred Fires. This teaching was shared with me by Miach, revered Celtic healer— old as dust, lively as wind— during a shamanic journey. There is a corresponding invitation for deepening into this teaching included as well. CLICK HERE.