Eliza Daley ~ Wordcraft & Musing on Home & Hope
If Candlemas be bright and clear there'll be two winters in the year. — traditional adage from Scotland There are many weather marking days throughout the year. Candlemas, falling on 2 February, was the day that our ancestors began to get nervous about the spring. A fine Candlemas portends a bad harvest and winter dearth;… Continue reading Candlemas: Spring Forecast
February 1st is Imbolg or St Brigid’s Feast Day. Imbolg is an ancient and somewhat forgotten holiday that falls midway between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox. Hence it is the first of the four cross quarter days, the days marking the half way points between the solar quarter days (solstices and equinoctes). The… Continue reading Imbolg: Beginning of Beginning
Nor'easters Explained: We interrupt your spring-leaning inclinations to bring you this winter weather warning.
Home is where and how you meet your needs. It is both a place and the work done in that place, be it actual housework or all the varieties of care that are given without productive physical output. Home is the support and refuge in life. Home is people as much as a locus. The… Continue reading Wednesday Word: 19 January
The third moon in my lunar year is the Wolf Moon. It is new between 28 December and 25 January and full between 11 January and 8 February. This is the coldest time of year in the North. It is when stores of food are running low and hunger is stalking every home. This inhospitable… Continue reading The Full Wolf Moon
It’s been exactly one year since I started this online writing endeavor. I have written somewhere north of 300,000 words in over 220 posts. I have hundreds of regular readers between this blog and the several newsletters and aggregators who repost these essays and stories, a fact that just boggles. These are people who are… Continue reading Old and New
Green Man in the cold morning light Today, 20 December 2021, the sun appears to stand still at its most southern point. We call this period of slow change, where day length changes incrementally and then not at all, the solstice, the “sun pause”. In the Northern Hemisphere, this is the winter solstice, the time… Continue reading Sun Stands Still
The predicted snow arrived last night. It is mostly over now. First snow doesn't linger, though the cold still steals into the gaps around these old windows. I'm looking out on a damp grey world, more than halfway to winter sleep. But lilacs and oaks seem caught unawares, with green and yellow leaves hanging limp.… Continue reading Wednesday Word: 17 November
In which there are beavers... The first moon of the lunar year begins in the wee hours of 5 November. This is my Winter Sleep Moon. The Old Farmer’s Almanac, which roughly uses Backwoods traditional names for lunations, calls the moon that is full in November the Beaver Moon. The beaver lodge in a pond… Continue reading Winter Sleep Moon
Long an irksome pull at the Math Lady lodged in my left brain, I decided I’d had enough with moon dis-logic. It is time for an intervention. Moon 101 for writers of all shades. Here is the imagery that pushed Math Lady over the edge: Facing south in the evening, she “looked over her shoulder… Continue reading A Moon Intervention
