Sunday, December 31, 2017

Living in liminal time.

Happy almost 2018! We're a few hours short of midnight here as I write this. Hoping to get it online before the world goes mad...

Alert hearth/myth readers know that I talk a lot about liminal spaces. This time at the holidays is such a space -- perhaps the only one that still gets a nod of recognition from modern society. I don't know about you guys, but I've had the sense multiple times over the past week that this time between Christmas and New Year's is sort of a throwaway week, that we're in a sort of holding pattern while we wait for life to start up again. Admittedly, my sense of "what's the point of this week?" might have been exacerbated by the fact that I went in to work at the day job every day -- one of the few at my workplace who did.

But these weeks between the solstice and the turn of the year have long been considered a time out of time. Early calendar calculations left a short stretch of days that didn't fit evenly into a month. The Romans used these days for their Saturnalia celebration -- which included the appointment of a mock king who ruled over the drinking and debauchery.

Christmas celebrations in medieval England included a similar figure, popularly known as the Lord of Misrule -- often a peasant who was elevated to the lofty position to oversee the drunken mayhem. There's some evidence that the idea of a Lord of Misrule began as a pagan custom and was later tolerated by the church to varying degrees.

In any case, nowadays the holidays pretty much end with New Year's Day. It's the last hurrah for the season of big parties (unless you count the Super Bowl, which used to be in January, but I digress), and the last chance, too, to take a breath and think about how things went for us in the past year and where we'd like for them to go in the year to come.

I read a blog post earlier today that suggests spending part of this evening meditating, envisioning how you'd like for the next year to look and what you'd like to see happen, both personally and in the world around you. The idea is that imagining a thing in detail is the first step in making it manifest. Personally, I think dreams require some work on the part of the dreamer before they are made manifest. The Universe sometimes operates on chance, it's true, but typically your overnight success has toiled in obscurity for years.

On the other hand, it can't hurt to have a vision of where you want to go. So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit in a quiet spot for a few minutes, just as soon as I post this.

Happy 2018, everyone. May you manifest everything you desire, and may the new year be better to you and yours than the old year was.

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These moments of manifest blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

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