SNOW FULL MOON: Pembrokeshire stone, raw + reformed
pilgrimage, patron saint + pagan proclivities
Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy loving eye
On all poor creatures born to die.
And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.
We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.
O let us see another day!
Bless us all this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye - but just for now!Dylan Thomas
Sunset Poem from Under Milk Wood
This February’s full moon rising to its peak on the 24th is often referred to as the SNOW MOON, HUNGER MOON, or STORM MOON. This month is a “micromoon” meaning that it can be found at the furthest point away from the earth as it travels on its elliptical orbit. The large “supermoon” is the opposite of this.
The various names of this moon need little explanation. There have been storms raging here on the coast this last day or so with hail showers rolling through in lower temperatures. The Welsh peaks are dusted in snow.
For those who sustain their lives through growing and rearing their food, these early year months are often times of scarce sustenance. There is hunger and slow movement as energy is still low, even with the odd blazing day of sunshine and emerging new life in the hedgerows.
There is much brewing in the literal and metaphorical pot over here, and I do not have an abundance of words to share. Slow and low. Working out what pace is needed. This I welcome, and I present you with a gift of spaciousness and a simple offering.
What I would like to share with you are images from a recent pilgrimage (admittedly not made fully on foot) to St Davids Cathedral here in Pembrokeshire. St David is the patron saint of Wales, who lived in the area now named after him in the sixth century. With St Davids Day being next Friday March 1st this is a good time to share a little of my continued place/land-based curiosity and research. Traditionally worn on March 1st are sunny yellow daffodils, which we can now see emerging on the verges are a warm buttery reminder that light and warmth are to come. I have a stash of died-back daffs drying for the ink pot.
After a short ritual of asking permission (inwardly rather than to the folks on guard), I gathered a little fallen stone from the Cathedral walls on my visit, and they are currently ground and in the process of being levigated to refine the pigment for paint.
I was lucky to visit the cathedral on the day that the small library was open to the public. I spent a short while talking with one of the librarians and found out some interesting things:
The stone used to build the cathedral comes from a local quarry that only provides stone for the building and maintenance of the cathedral itself.
St David is reported to have experienced and shared moments of godly connection while cold sea swimming off the nearby coast, which struck the more straight-laced of the clergy and followers as a bit leftfield.
What struck me about these two things is how grounded in raw, elemental connection they are. For all of the religious reforming and powerful building of a seat of religious signficance and pilgrimage, the landscape itself in its depth, age, timelessness and magnificence, holds something else entirely to the man-made pursuits of organised religion and prestige. I am not stating that one is right and one wrong, or good or bad, but that something touched me here. Perhaps the hand of St David himself, with his pagan sensibilities.
I was also reminded of the colour palette I would return to again and again when studying for my art GCSE and A-Level. Imbued with the colours or sunrise and sunset over the West Wales coast and the pebbles picked up on beach walks. Over 20 years later this sense of home in the landscape is still marinading.
To wrap up, I am sharing the evocation that is the generous writing of Dr. Bayo Akomolafe on where we find ourselves in this decade. In reading his words something emerges for me in between the lines and the direct understanding of one word following another. There is poetry and invitation.
Something wordless being allowed to slip around and in between the fingers, dancing away from grasp. In looking directly at the state of things as they are, and yet without a tunnel vision response from a rationale fix-it mentality, something else is welcomed in. An unknown. An abundance of unfurling questions.
I am curious about the curiousity and the cracks. The formless and formed and the slippage inbetween. I am grateful for these words and for everything they prompt and provoke that feels wordless and vast like the stone carns and the colours of the setting sun.
I pause here on this full moon.
I am quite confident that even as the oceans boil, and the hurricanes beat violently against our once safe shores, and the air sweats with the heat of impending doom, and our fists protest the denial of climate justice, that there is a path to take that has nothing to do with victory or defeat: a place we do not yet know the coordinates to; a question we do not yet know how to ask. The point of the departed arrow is not merely to pierce the bullseye and carry the trophy: the point of the arrow is to sing the wind and remake the world in the brevity of flight. There are things we must do, sayings we must say, thoughts we must think, that look nothing like the images of success that have so thoroughly possessed our visions of justice. May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary, of the traversal disruption, the kairotic moment, the posthuman movement for emancipation, the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power, and of slow limbs.
May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.
⋒OFFERING⋒
⋒ Root + Write: An online 3-week community course for Spring soaked writing, with out-of-class support, resources and recording.
Wednesdays 6pm-8pm GMT. March 6th, 13th and 20th.
£42.50 -£125. Payment options are copiously available.
With full permission to write utter crap. Come and unfurl on the page and connect with words, longings, stories and the seasonal shifts.
Week 1: Beginning: rituals and rooting.
Week 2: Getting into the flow and exploring what we want to write about.
Week 3: Revisiting our words, without being stifled by the inner critic.
Warmly,
-KJ
✺g i v i n g a t t e n t i o n✺
✺ Octavia Butler via Giselle Buchanan.
✺ M Jay Smith free print downloads to be shared. Any donations made to LGBTQIA+ youth emergency shelter in San Antonio, Texas. In memory of Nex Benedict, a 16 year old non-binary student in Oklahoma who recently died after being badly beaten in the female school restroom.
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