The Second Light

Poipín

‘The second light of Advent is the light of plants.

Plants that reach up to the sun

And in the breezes dance.’

[Steiner Advent Verse]

In the first Summer of the Pandemic, I stood in my first garden, surrounded by poppies I had grown from seed, at first light the morning after I found out I was pregnant with my first child. The creature inside me was — on that very day (according to an online calculator) — the very size of a poppy seed. I’m not quite sure why but this odd, dancing little coincidence did something quite funny to my insides; to how I came to experience the plant world both throughout that wild, lonely, locked down pregnancy and right through my postpartum experience so far.

I hope that wherever you are right now, whatever it is that you doing (or not) — that you feel safe & warm & welcome. If this is so, I ask you to sit— in these the hours before the year’s final full moon — and really consider this truth. . . There was a stage, for every single one of his, when we were the size of a poppy seed. When all of the creature — the person — we would become , would be lost beneath the nail of most people you now know. A seed. Life as we know it began in the dark. In the quietude. In smallness & in the briefest, most untraceable millisecond. It is born of the wild, overgrown garden that we are — each & every one of us — and it’s blood & bone & sinew that makes the garden ready for growth.

So, yes, somehow I’ve never quite lost the sense of my baby as a poppy seed; a thing that held the whole bright world inside it’s tiny, rounded being. Back in those foggy (foggier…),confused (more confused) early days of motherhood I would lie in the pinky light of raw dawn — nursing him almost constantly— and try to imagine at what stage he would become aware of the world around him. That may sound silly— of course he had been made achingly, chaotically, terrifyingly aware of the world the moment he had properly left the first home he knew— thrust into the brightness of a world that now I can never imagine existing before he came along. But what I am trying to say is that I was wondering at what stage he might begin to understand that he and I were separate beings from each other. When the day would come on which he would grasp that there were places outwith our small, stone cottage; that there was a vast, burning, turning, beautiful world all around him — from which I could not— someday — keep him away.

It began — this process of him joining our world — with the garden. With a small, untamed parcel of land my lover and I had been tending for only one season when we found out that he had begun to grow — seed sized — inside of me. We were locked down when he arrived, and remained so for some time. Once restrictions began to lift, we were under our own form of lockdown anyhow. The only place , aside from doctor’s surgeries, that we carried our small, moth like creature — was into our garden.

The seeds I’d sown into the earth just days before he arrived began to grow, to bloom. Light & rain worked together to create a space in which I could, for the briefest of moments, remember who I had been before he arrived, the life I had lived, the things I had done. It was not easy at the beginning of motherhood, still it isn’t easy but back then I didn’t yet understand that I was learning— like those seeds— to find my way towards the light. No matter what happened in those earth days, no matter how dark & scary the late Spring & early Summer left me feeling — I’d carry him, that wee creature of light—into the garden. Fennel—yellow & tall — will make me think of him always. Soft pink roses & cabbage whites; lavender & things that were left to bolt because there was simply no time left anymore (because time waits for no new mother); sweet peas & kale — when I think back on his harrowing, haunting, banshee like witching hours I see myself pacing the path towards the sycamore tree like a vixen.

You see I didn’t know back then that gardens are the places that hold us when we cannot even hold ourselves. That these gardens do not, by any stretch,need to ‘belong’ to us ( if anyone can ever really own any stretch of this glorious, shared earth..) That sowing is a way to heal, that seeds are a way to mend, that plants are the deepest, brightest promise we will ever know.

The first winter my son spent in this world, we took him away from that garden,to another one — beside an old converted barn— on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. I couldn’t find the support I needed for my Postpartum depression in Ireland and I needed to find a way to get better. Leaving the garden nearly broke me into small pieces. Rather, leaving the place I became the only thing I will always be nearly broke me. You see I became a mother in that garden, the first I have ever really known.

The night before we conceived

‘..the light in our garden was absolutely exquisite. It fell on the oaks & roses, on poppies blooming redder than blood. It fell on me, and on the poppies & cornflowers I have grown from seed. What about those poppies, though? And the fresh shoots on the lavender . . . what about a world that is more miraculous than anything I have ever before imagined.’

I write cacophony of bone mostly in that Cornish garden, all about that garden I spent perhaps the most important year of my life in. I’m back in that Irish midland garden just now, for another short while, and I’m moved beyond words by the ways we find to survive. To burrow down deep when we need, to winter, to seek the light ; to reach for it — even as we ache & worry & struggle.

On the second Sunday of Advent my wee one and I attended a Steiner Advent Fair. It felt like winter’s first new day; still & cold & miraculous. This beautiful blackboard illustration sang out to me as I queued up to buy rocky road wrapped in red ribbon — the root children from Sibylle von Olfers’ classic story. I reread it this afternoon — many moons after I read it to Class one children I’m the first school I taught — and was taken by how new it all felt; although I just have read it handfuls of times. I had forgotten , most of all, the fact that Mother Earth, when she wakes the sleeping children at winter’s end, gets them to make new clothes.

‘Each of the root children chose her own colour to make a dress. The snowdrop chose a snow-white cloth, the forget-me-not a sky blue piece, the buttercup bright yellow, the daisy white with yellow and a bit of red, and the poppy a bright red. Then they sat down in a cosy circle and began to work…and as they worked, they sang all the spring songs that they knew.’

You see growth isn’t simple, or linear, or the same shape and colour for each of us . We all know, I think, what it is we need to help us get through the darkest times; who & what & where will best support as we reach towards the light. We are in the midst of a hard, heavy time globally — we are all experiencing things we might never have imagined we could manage to survive. I look at my child every day that passes and wonder how I can best support them as they walk, run & climb — deeper & deeper into an ever changing world. And I think once more of those wee flower children — sewing their beautiful petals — working hard to grow into what the seed they once were always held in store for them—together and with song. We can grow in so many ways, but maybe the most important kind of growth is the kind that happens alongside others; in community, and singing; always singing. Songs about a world that is miraculous; more miraculous than anything we could ever before have imagined.

Reading — Easkey Britton’s illuminating, important new book on the sea, the divine feminine and how we might love the earth better : Ebb and Flow - preorder here.

Listening—everything on artist Ruth Le Gear’s soundcloud but particularly Trace in these days of such flux.

Moved by — the way frost paints a fairytale world of a normal Wednesday.

Grateful for — candlelight , children’s books & a small person who shows me the moon above the field as we puddle jump at sunset.