Written by Kit Christina Keawwantha for our 2023 annual symposium.

As we hurtle towards another festive season and another new year, I ask you all to pause for a moment.

To take some time to stop. And to be still.

To reflect.

To feel.

To connect.

To your neighbours, your family and your friends. To the ground beneath your feet and the sky above your head. 

To yourself.

Earlier this month, on the 7^th of November around half four in the afternoon, we in the northern hemisphere entered the winter season.

Did any of you celebrate? Did you even notice?

Our ancestors would have marked the occasion with the fire festival, Samhain, which has morphed to reflect our current times into our modern day Halloween – a festival of cheap tricks, masks and an over-load of plastic-wrapped sweets for sugar-high kids.

Our ancestors viewed this time differently. They saw Samhain, the start of winter, as a time for deep reflection and new beginnings. It marked the start of the Celtic New Year, born (unlike the 1^st of January) from a deep understanding of the natural rythyms of life and the seasons. 

The promise of new life, locked within the seeds of summer and autumn, are lying buried deep within the dark womb of the earth. Waiting. Ready. Just as life for us begins with time spent growing and becoming in the dark waters of the womb, our ancestors recognized that the darkness of winter, when life lies hidden from view, is the real beginning of the new cycle of life.

When we live closely to the Earth, as we once did, our lives naturally follow this cycle too. After the busy seasons of growing and harvesting, winter was a time to slow down and reflect. A time to rest and relax and rejuvenate. A time to repair and mend and make new our clothes and our tools. A time to nourish our relationships through gatherings, music, storytelling and chats by the fireside. A time to take some quiet moments to listen to the Earth, the spirits, the ancestors and our own inner voice of intuition, inspiration and wisdom.

Our busy lives rarely allow this time nowadays. Winter has lost its sense of magic and potential. It has become, at best a time to splurge, spend and over-indulge; at worst, a time of inconvenience and hardship. The technology and convenience of the modern life has created the illusion of independence and freedom from the cycle of seasons – our brightly lit streets and centrally heated homes, our on-demand entertainment streams and supermarket shelves full of an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables from all over the globe.  We believe that this independence from the seasons and the freedom gained from the chaos and inconstancy of nature brings us greater comfort and security. Greater health and peace of mind. And we blast on through winter without as much as a pause to personally or collectively reflect on what we really want in life. What really matters to us.

Our progression from past to present has brought many changes to Irish society – language, land use, diet, and community values to name a few. However, all of these changes could arguably be traced back to a much more fundamental change in our relationship to the Earth and our perception of the place we hold within Earth’s story.

Our ancestors understood the world to be imbued with spirit – every mountain, valley, river, rock and hill was a living, conscious part of an interconnected whole. The ground beneath their feet and the landscapes which held them were recognized as being filled with spirit, emanating energies and as alive as you or me. The trees and plants, the animals and forests that they shared their world with were akin to siblings or partners with which they maintained a valuable and reciprocal relationship.

How differently we have been taught to view the world we live in today. Since the Descartian shift towards a mechanistic worldview, we have been taught that the Earth is simply inanimate matter beneath our feet, something to be molded, controlled and extracted as we see fit, for our own profit, convenience, or survival. Mother Earth was banished to the realms of superstition and myth, along with every God, Goddess and spirit associated with nature. The adopted world view, which sees the Earth as an inanimate machine, goes so far as to tell us that you too are nothing more than a collection of selfish, competitive genes, running through pre-determined patterns of behavior within a fight for survival. The basic shift in worldview from past to present has taken us from being spiritual beings of relevance and value, living in harmony within a divine landscape, to being selfish, competitive machines running blindly through our pre-programmed patterns of behavior within a clockwork universe devoid of any meaning.

How easy it has been under this mechanistic banner to treat the world’s natural resources and human labour as an expendable commodity – nothing more than a resource to extract as efficiently as possible in our own competitive race towards a better, more independent future.

This is made even easier when our perception of time has also changed. Even before our adoption of the mechanistic worldview, we were taught to view time as linear – a one-way march from a fallen past towards a better, more perfected future, where the past stays dead and buried, nothing more than a means to an end. Our ancestors more probably saw time as cyclical, with past and future continuously spiraling around the present, ever inter-connected and interdependent upon each other. For some, the past is never gone but is written within the energy and memories of a place. And as new science now suggests, all matter has a memory of its past held within its energy. 

So perhaps those whose feet walked across the ancient landscapes of Ireland have something ever so subtle but deeply relevant to teach us as we walk forwards towards the future – a future that we share with them as they walk, spiraling, besides us.

If only we take the time to pause, and to listen to what they are saying.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson we can learn from our ancestors at this time of year and at this moment in time, is to slow down and reconnect. To genuinely reach out to our communities and find ways to foster deeper, more authentic relationships with each other. To re-assess the importance we place on our independence, and recognize that community and compromise also have a valuable role to play in our personal and collective wellbeing. Perhaps we can find ways to honour the season and the cycle of nature, and rather than over-indulging and over-consuming this Christmas, we can choose instead to put value on time spent together, listening and sharing, mending and repairing. Perhaps we can stop seeing the Earth as fragile and flawed, something broken that we need to fix, and instead recognize the power, strength, divinity and perfection which she embodies right here in the present moment. Instead of shouting about who is right, who is wrong and what needs to be done to make things better on Earth, maybe we should sit with her quietly, and simply listen, allowing her wisdom to guide us once again. And rather than seeing ourselves in a competitive fight for survival, we can slow down and recognize that the real organizing force of life and evolution is based on greater co-operation, not competition – co-operation within our own communities and global population, and also between our own species and every other living being with which we share space on this Earth.

I will leave you with a quote from Wendell Berry: “There are no sacred and unsacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.”

Let our ancestors remind us how to see our island, and our place within it, as sacred once again.