Las Posadas - Notes from The Hill of the Poets

During the nine days before Christmas, many South American communities re-enact the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, pausing each day at designated ‘inns’ to pray. Some of the base communities founded during the development of Liberation theology also use the time to reflect on some of the big questions of life on earth - why is there poverty and homelessness? What does it mean to be a refugee? What causes war? What is happening to the earth we live in? The dark nights around the solstice are a good time do something similar.

It is the quiet, stripped down time of the year. The leaves are off the trees now and you can see the structure of the woodland and the garden. The recent frosts have killed off the last marigolds and flattened most of the garden foliage, yet the cold has also jolted the violets and primroses into thinking it might be spring, and we do have a few flowers, with a deep colour and a very powerful scent. The intensity of the dark purple of my violets has an odd water-like gleam against the green leaves - it reminds me of the ancient Greek simile for a quiet sea - ‘violet-like’, implying not so much a hue, but the sensation of hidden depths under a surface glitter. There has been a lot of rain and a lot of wind. The birds have hunkered down apart from the magpies and wood pigeons and the sparrows are staying close to home. We have even had a little - a very little snow.

Winter chops us down to the roots and asks us all the hard questions. How do we survive cold, hardship, adversity? What are we worth, ephemeral, vulnerable, ineffectual creatures that we are? We have gone from preparing for an imminent apocalypse to weathering it, dealing with fears for the future by remembering the past, substituting the specifics of place and history for speculation and ambition, drawing on fuel for the past to warm us in the present. I am lucky here on the Hill of the Poets - I live in a haunted place, where memories are alive, and shape the present.
Although the estate is so new and doesn’t have much history of its own yet, there are many groups locally and on social media which are dedicated to remembering and conserving the places and buildings and memories of what was here before. From sources like this I have discovered two healing wells, a place where there was a neolithic cairn and another where Druids are said to have had a grove, seven historical poets, several memorials of various kinds of industries that once flourished here and have now gone, some conservation areas, including a marsh, (so there may well be some more boggy poems), and burns and rivers aplenty. I know in the past this area thought nothing of demolishing an ancient long barrow to make a golf course, but nowadays if there’s a patch of green someone will designate it as a park and do some rewilding, or put a community orchard on it. There is a lot of fuel for me to live from over the coming dark months.
But what happens when you return to your roots, to your foundations, is that you find new beginnings, a spark of light. It’s the time for planting bare-rooted trees and laying hedges. In our first year we planted four trees and three bushes. This year I’ve moved wild seedlings of dog rose, honeysuckle and cotoneaster to better places, to provide winter berries for birds. And the houses are lit up to the max. Many of our neighbours have gone in for the lights along the roofline, outdoor trees strung with fairy lights or doors wrapped in ribbons like parcels. The one I like best is where two neighbours in a semi-detached have joined together to put up a continuous garland of greenery and scarlet baubles, and matching Santa hats on their outside lamps. We are planning stars and bells in every window, twinkling leds round all the doors, a tree decked out like a May Horse (my father’s phrase!) and a doorbell that chimes We Wish You a Merry Christmas - at least until we’re sick of it. We may be going into the dark, but we are shining a light into the future.
In the kitchen I am baking cakes, making big pans of soup, and planning the Christmas dinner like a military operation, because everyone will be here - which makes this the biggest Christmas we’ve had for several years. It’s not a time to hold back!
In the poetry, I’ve reached a similar point. I have reviewed Helen Ivory’s Constructing a Witch, and you can read it here
and I’m now reading Niall Campbell’s new poetry collection The Island in the Sound both of which I really recommend. I’ve had a very difficult year, learning to handle both mental health issues and Rheumatoid Arthritis, but those lessons have also taken me back to my roots, and I have had a spurt of recent poems. They have gone a little bit feral, including ghosts and bats and druids, and they are full of dark folklore as well as the plants and creatures of this territory. I think I am exploring the uprootedness of living here, and the shadowy, shape-shifting, half-seen things that haunt us, wild things - not only animals, but memories, strangers or people we simply designate as strangers for our own reasons.
Which brings me back to the posadas. Who belongs? Who is a refugee? Why are there wars, poverty, homelessness, loneliness? I am doing a study project with Pax Christi Scotland about non-violence and it is the most powerful study I have ever undertaken. And I’ve also come across Herbalists Without Borders Bristol, via the magazine Wort Journal. I love their person-centred and decolonising ethos. They published The Herbal Year Book full of detailed information and lovely illustrations, (though it sorely needs a good editor!) and you can pay forward some herbal teas and balms to comfort people who have limited access to medical treatment, or who are used to herbal rather than allopathic remedies.
I haven’t had time to write a new Christmas poem this year, but few of this group will have seen this one, from 2009.

Christmas
The alchemy of myth -
the stars and angels, the earth's
return to light, green ivy,
the quickening sap in the tree's
deep heart, the cattle
kneeling in frosty fields,
the robin's song at midnight -
all refined to the bare particular
fact of a birth -
that night, that inn, that boy.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas, whichever holiday you keep, and a very Happy New Year!