epona's grove

 Equinox/Equilux

 My Ground of Being days take place on the Sundays closest to the equinoxes and solstices throughout the year; these solar turning-points, waymarkers, or stations, which we can use to pause and reflect on the meeting-places and relationships between light and dark, masculine and feminine, sowing intentions and harvesting manifestations. It's useful to look back from the autumn equinox to the quarter just gone, between the zenith of fecund summer and the harvests, inner and outer, that have resulted, as it is also useful to look back over the whole cycle of the four seasons, as we now turn back inwards, towards the Dreamtime on the Wheel of the Year.

This year though I miss the equinox GoB day, as this vertigo virus still has me and is shaking me around like a rag-doll (or perhaps corn-doll – the traditional icon made from the last of the golden straw to celebrate the harvest, and remind us in dark times of the returning cycle of the sun).

So Sunday comes and I can't even get out of bed without falling against the walls, knocking over chairs, and generally feeling out of it. I have to try and get hold of people, outdoors in the rain as there's no mobile signal indoors where I'm staying, propping myself against the wall and hoping I won't throw up. Three people, I know, have come from over 100 miles to do this day – but there is nothing I can do – and I'm not good at feeling helpless, let alone at resting. So I'm interested that I have no option but to be still, when I am so longing to be out there on Dartmoor leading some quiet and some writing time. (I remember too being ill at the vernal equinox, though it didn't stop me doing the day.)

The space was marked though – one of our members did the day alone, as he did when I was iced-in at the December solstice – so the trail has been met with footsteps.



This morning, I managed to walk out towards the heart of the moor and the morning. Here are some photos, and a poem sequence from last autumn equinox.

















Deer track
There are times when love seems a rare beast –
pangolin, or griffin – mythic at the edges
of vision, visitor from a world unvisited

the glimpse a benison for all that might yet be
and whose knowing might undo us completely
if we could but let it in.

*

Leaves, falling
Later, in the mist, rowanberries glimmer like fireflies;
up here at Four Winds I am unstrung,
the beads of me scattered to all directions.

The equinox, my birthday and a full moon
bringing, at last, a closure to the turbulence
of this solar cycle. In this high rush of air

the ancient beech shivers off her leaves,
and, heedless of motorbikes, trucks on the road,
the yellow house, the currency of thought,

the moon lifts her owl-bone-white rim
over the moor’s horizon where we sip
at the autumn dusk, let it all remake us.


*

Equinox
The full moon hangs in the pale sky like a revelation
awaiting its time. There are times when I know that
love might mean beginning over and over

and again. And how I’ll do that.

*

Near Merrivale
Once, in the future, I knew my way back.

*

The light beyond the forest
On the hill, dusk is the colour of violets.


© Roselle Angwin 2010

PS 'Epona' – blog title – is the horse goddess