In Celtic spirituality, February is associated with the rowan tree. Its red berries were thought to guard against all sorts of bad things.

They’d put rowan branches on their cattle sheds and dairy barns to keep the meat and milk fresh and free of disease, and across Celtic lands crosses of rowan twigs were tied with red thread and carried in pockets or sewn into the linings of coats for traveling mercies.

Since the saint of the month, Saint Brigid, was associated with flame and fire, the blazing red berries were thought to be little glimpses of her favor.

I found a modern Celtic prayer to say under the Rowan Moon (February’s moon). And since it’s the almost the last day one can say it, I thought I’d throw it out there.

What I love about this prayer is that, while images of Christ/love and the sun are really common, we don’t get many images of Christ/love being seen in the moon. But in the month where the moon still outshines the sun, it makes sense to have a prayer that highlights this truth, right?

Bright glory, bright moon,
the moon that shines on Brigid,
lamp of the poor,
love, light,
illumined by God.
Bright moon of glory,
teach me good purpose
toward all creation.
Bright moon of grace,
teach me good prayer
in accord with Christ’s heart.

Fiery moon of great light,
be in my heart
be in my deeds
be in my wishes.
Teach me your grace.
Bright moon over Brigid,
your light my hope,
your light on my purpose here,
in accord with God’s satisfaction.

Bright fire, bright moon,
point my heart to God’s repose.
Point me to my rest,
with the Son of Tranquility.

Here’s the beautiful thing about the Celts: they understood the rhythms of both nature and humanity. This is why they instituted a marker, a point of note, every six weeks. Every six weeks nature changes and, whether we like it or not, every six weeks humanity needs a re-connecting point to nature, and their true selves, to come back to center.

Imagine, Beloved, if you knew that, in the midst of your depression, a new season was just around the corner and you’d be gathered again with your fellow world travelers to mark it?

The rhythm was not just to keep time, but it was intended to help humans be kept whole by time.

Which is why, on the eve of February, the Celts would note that we are indeed “Imbolc,” or “in the belly” of winter. For us in the USA this means we look toward Groundhog’s Day, a secular throwback to when our ancient ancestor’s looked to the animals to see where they were in the seasonal clock. We find this in all cultures, by the way. Different groups looked to bears, birds, and, yes, groundhogs to tell the story of nature.

The festival of St. Brigid and Imbolc, for the Celts, was a festival of remembrance. It embraced two truths: that winter must happen, and we must deal with it (both literally and metaphorically, Beloved), and also that it doesn’t last forever.

For all my friends who have fallen into depression, for all of us regardless of how we take this season, this wisdom is transformative!

Winters in our lives, happen. We must deal with them.

But, Beloved, they do not last forever.

My Celtic ancestors remind me of this today.

The ancient Celts had a thing for travelers.

Perhaps it was because there were so many who wandered the old roads, usually long past nightfall, trying to make the most of their feet and miles, looking for a pint and stew at the end of the day.

Traveling at dusk was not unusual.

Tonight, on the eve of St. Brigid’s Day (Feb 1st), they’d leave a scarf out on their outside bushes or porch, knowing that the yin to St. Patrick’s yang might be passing by.

They’d bank that she’d bless the scarf, and thereby bless those who donned it over the next year.

But we’re too scientific and sophisticated for such nonsense.

Still…a blessing might be needed.

Maybe leave the scarf just in case, right?

In January the ancient Celts (and us modern Celts, too) find themselves under the Birch Moon.

When a forested area burns, the birch is the first tree to be reborn in the ashes, and so this is the tree that hovers over the first month of a new year.

In January the Celts felt that it was important, particularly in the early part of the month, to resolve all arguments that lingered from the previous year, and forgive or pay or negotiate all debts still loitering in the ledgers of the hearts and notebooks of neighbors and kin.

January was to be welcomed without any old ties to the past. Like the birch tree, January would be a season of new growth out of the old ashes of yesteryear.

As January comes to a close, Beloved, what things in your heart need forgiving? What debts need settling?

What newness is coming to life?

-Painting by Jon Holmes

Tonight my Celtic ancestors will honor a more recent addition to the feast day lists: Burns Night.

Burns Night is a nod to poet Robert Burns (b. 1759), a Scottish dear, and tonight they’ll light fires, make traditional Scottish food, and recite the poems of the dearly departed.

Curiously, though Burns Night is meant to honor the birth of the great poet of Auld Lang Syne, it was first celebrated on January 29th in 1802…though they’d soon find he was born four days earlier!

Tonight they’ll eat haggis, a curious mix of organs and grains made into a kind of pudding and eaten with both great pride and great disgust (for those not accustomed to it), along with a recitation of his most wonderful poems.

Burns Night is a night to wave your tartans and give thanks for the poets who came before us.

So, should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, I’m grateful for the family shoulders I stand on, and the days of auld lang syne.

Van Gogh, Can You Tell Me

By David Lerner

van Gogh, can you tell me
how many martyrs does it take to open up a
blood bank

van Gogh, can you tell me
where does beauty go when it dies?

van Gogh, can you tell me
why saints live on car exhaust
and are lonely as crushed acorns

while enormous suppurating blisters of men
sleep on beds made of dollars, their pillows
the breasts of fantastic women

van Gogh, can you tell me
you who made paint scream
who drew the expressions of the wind

and portrayed leaves and stars
writhing in agony
as though they were human

tell me which of the satellites
circling the earth
is mine

how many pairs of shoes does it take to
walk to infinity

do you believe the world will ever learn how to
cry in unison

van Gogh, with your skin like scorched leather
from too much time spent in the wheatfields
on your knees, shooting dice with God
over who gets to color sunset

didn’t you ever feel like an asshole

incapable of self-preservation
always crossing at the end

van Gogh, can you tell me
as the sun comes down around my ears in
chunks today

as hummingbirds hover at my window
cursing me in tiny voices

why roads drag you down them
how you are finding light in Paradise
and if you have your own easel
of if God allows you to paint on the sky

By Alex Dimitrov

Love

I love you early in the morning and it’s difficult to love you.

I love the January sky and knowing it will change although unlike us.

I love watching people read.

I love photo booths.

I love midnight.

I love writing letters and this is my letter. To the world that never wrote to me.

I love snow and briefly.

I love the first minutes in a warm room after stepping out of the cold.

I love my twenties and want them back every day.

I love time.

I love people.

I love people and my time away from them the most.

I love the part of my desk that’s darkened by my elbows.

I love feeling nothing but relief during the chorus of a song.

I love space.

I love every planet.

I love the big unknowns but need to know who called or wrote, who’s coming—if they want the same things I do, if they want much less.

I love not loving Valentine’s Day.

I love how February is the shortest month.

I love that Barack Obama was president.

I love the quick, charged time between two people smoking a cigarette outside a bar.

I love everyone on Friday night.

I love New York City.

I love New York City a lot.

I love that day in childhood when I thought I was someone else.

I love wondering how animals perceive our daily failures.

I love the lines in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof when Brick’s father says “Life is important. There’s nothing else to hold onto.”

I love Brick.

I love that we can fail at love and continue to live.

I love writing this and not knowing what I’ll love next.

I love looking at paintings and being reminded I am alive.

I love Turner’s paintings and the sublime.

I love the coming of spring even in the most withholding March.

I love skipping anything casual—“hi, how are you, it’s been forever”—and getting straight to the center of pain. Or happiness.

I love opening a window in a room.

I love the feeling of possibility by the end of the first cup of coffee.

I love hearing anyone listen to Nina Simone.

I love Nina Simone.

I love how we can choose our own families.

I love when no one knows where I am but feel terrified to be forgotten.

I love Saturdays.

I love that despite our mistakes this will end.

I love how people get on planes to New York and California.

I love the hour after rain and the beginning of the cruelest month.

I love imagining Weldon Kees on a secret island.

I love the beach on a cloudy day.

I love never being disappointed by chocolate.

I love that morning when I was twenty and had just met someone very important (though I didn’t know it) and I walked down an almost empty State Street because it was still early and not at all late—and of course I could change everything (though I also didn’t know it)—I could find anyone, go anywhere, I wasn’t sorry for who I was.

I love the impulse to change.

I love seeing what we do with what we can’t change.

I love the moon’s independent indifference.

I love walking the same streets as Warhol.

I love what losing something does but I don’t love losing it.

I love how the past shifts when there’s more.

I love kissing.

I love hailing a cab and going home alone.

I love being surprised by May although it happens every year.

I love closing down anything—a bar, restaurant, party—and that time between late night and dawn when one lamp goes on wherever you are and you know. You know what you know even if it’s hard to know it.

I love being a poet.

I love all poets.

I love Jim Morrison for saying, “I’d like to do a song or a piece of music that’s just a pure expression of joy, like a celebration of existence, like the coming of spring or the sun rising, just pure unbounded joy. I don’t think we’ve really done that yet.”

I love everything I haven’t done.

I love looking at someone without need or panic.

I love the quiet of the trees in a new city.

I love how the sky is connected to a part of us that understands something big and knows nothing about it too.

I love the minutes before you’re about to see someone you love.

I love any film that delays resolution.

I love being in a cemetery because judgment can’t live there.

I love being on a highway in June or anytime at all.

I love magic.

I love the zodiac.

I love all of my past lives.

I love that hour of the party when everyone’s settled into their discomfort and someone tells you something really important—in passing—because it’s too painful any other way.

I love the last moments before sleep.

I love the promise of summer.

I love going to the theater and seeing who we are.

I love glamour—shamelessly—and all glamour. Which is not needed to live but shows people love life. What else is it there for? Why not ask for more?

I love red shoes.

I love black leather.

I love the grotesque ways in which people eat ice cream—on sidewalks, alone—however they need it, whenever they feel free enough.

I love being in the middle of a novel.

I love how mostly everyone in Jane Austen is looking for love.

I love July and its slowness.

I love the idea of liberation and think about it all the time.

I love imagining a world without money.

I love imagining a life with enough money to write when I want.

I love standing in front of the ocean.

I love that sooner or later we forget even “the important things.”

I love how people write in the sand, on buildings, on paper. Their own bodies. Fogged mirrors. Texts they’ll draft but never send.

I love silence.

I love owning a velvet cape and not knowing how to cook.

I love that instant when an arc of light passes through a room and I’m reminded that everything really is moving.

I love August and its sadness.

I love Sunday for that too.

I love jumping in a pool and how somewhere on the way up your body relaxes and accepts the shock of the water.

I love Paris for being Paris.

I love Godard’s films.

I love anyplace that makes room for loneliness.

I love how the Universe is 95% dark matter and energy and somewhere in the rest of it there is us.

I love bookstores and the autonomy when I’m in one.

I love that despite my distrust in politics I am able to vote.

I love wherever my friends are.

I love voting though know art and not power is what changes human character.

I love what seems to me the discerning indifference of cats.

I love the often uncomplicated joy of dogs.

I love Robert Lax for living alone.

I love the extra glass of wine happening somewhere, right now.

I love schools and teachers.

I love September and how we see it as a way to begin.

I love knowledge. Even the fatal kind. Even the one without “use value.”

I love getting dressed more than getting undressed.

I love mystery.

I love lighting candles.

I love religious spaces though I’m sometimes lost there.

I love the sun for worshipping no one.

I love the sun for showing up every day.

I love the felt order after a morning of errands.

I love walking toward nowhere in particular and the short-lived chance of finding something new.

I love people who smile only when moved to.

I love that a day on Venus lasts longer than a year.

I love Whitman for writing, “the fever of doubtful news, the fitful events; / These come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are not the Me myself.”

I love October when the veil between worlds is thinnest.

I love how at any moment I could forgive someone from the past.

I love the wind and how we never see it.

I love the performed sincerity in pornography and wonder if its embarrassing transparency is worth adopting in other parts of life.

I love how magnified emotions are at airports.

I love dreams. Conscious and unconscious. Lived and not yet.

I love anyone who risks their life for their ideal one.

I love Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

I love how people make art even in times of impossible pain.

I love all animals.

I love ghosts.

I love that we continue to invent meaning.

I love the blue hours between three and five when Plath wrote Ariel.

I love that despite having one body there are many ways to live.

I love November because I was born there.

I love people who teach children that most holidays are a product of capitalism and have little to do with love—which would never celebrate massacre—which would never care about money or greed.

I love people who’ve quit their jobs to be artists.

I love you for reading this as opposed to anything else.

I love the nostalgia of the future.

I love that the tallest mountain in our solar system is safe and on Mars.

I love dancing.

I love being in love with the wrong people.

I love that on November 23, 1920, Virginia Woolf wrote, “We have bitten off a large piece of life—but why not? Did I not make out a philosophy some time ago which comes to this—that one must always be on the move?”

I love how athletes believe in the body and know it will fail them.

I love dessert for breakfast.

I love all of the dead.

I love gardens.

I love holding my breath under water.

I love whoever it is untying our shoes.

I love that December is summer in Australia.

I love statues in a downpour.

I love how no matter where on the island, at any hour, there’s at least one lit square at the top or bottom of a building in Manhattan.

I love diners.

I love that the stars can’t be touched.

I love getting in a car and turning the keys just to hear music.

I love ritual.

I love chance too.

I love people who have quietly survived being misunderstood yet remain kids.

And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will say au revoir.”

I love the different ways we have of saying the same thing.

I love anyone who cannot say goodbye.

The ancient Celts called the first full moon of January the “Wolf Moon.” It was traditional to give a good howl at it, thanking it for its beauty as it kept the night watch.

A few nights ago was that night for 2025. And with all going on, it felt like it was keeping vigil with us all.

In reading about my ancestors, the ancient Celts, I recently came across the god Manannan mac lir, the Irish god of the sea. They called him, “Ruler of the Land Under Wave” (which I think is a pretty bad-ass title).

For the Celts the sea they spoke of consisted mostly of the Irish Sea and the islands between Ireland and Britain.

It was thought that the Ruler of the Land Under Wave traveled over the water in his chariot called Ocean Sweeper, led by his favorite horse Enbarr (which roughly translates to “Waterfoam”).

Manannan held one of the ancient magical pieces of the world, a great shining cloak that could change color as the sea changed, making him largely invisible for those not paying attention.

On the Isle of Man the ancients would climb a mountain with a bundle of green rushes and pay tribute to him on Midsummer Eve, as they regarded the Ruler of the Land Under Wave as their great protector.

Even now some Irish and Scottish fisherman who hold on to the old ways say a blessing to Manannan before heading out to sea:

“Manannan mac lir (Son of the Sea),
who blessed our Island,
Bless us and our boat, going out well.
Coming in better, with living and dead (fish) in our boat.”

A statue to Manannan mac lir still stands in Gortmore, Magilligan, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland.