A Year and a Day

A year and a day – A Celtic phrase that marks the passage of one cycle into the next. Not a wheel spinning round and round, but a spiral. The completion of seasons and repeated annual dates have memories attached. Birthdays, holidays, anniversaries but also passages of loss like death or tragedy are snapshots in the river of time.

With the death of a loved one, or end of a relationship this can help the grieving process. You reach the anniversary following a year of memories where specific dates, or times or practices are re-lived through the changing seasons where the loved one is present only in memory. You might remember conversations sitting in armchairs by the fire in the evening, or going to a special restaurant for a birthday, or Sunday walks along the river that you might continue to do, but the person is not physically there.

Moving through this is a necessary, yet often painful experience that can gently lift the shroud of grief and help you let go of the hurt, yet keep the essential.

And curious to the notion of time, when you come to the date of the event, lets say February 1st, in the Western calendar year it is 366 days. But the passage of one calendar year of 365 days actually occurs the day before on January 31st. Hence the year and a day. You are marking the date of significance, but on that date you have already moved through the cycle of a year.

This concept fascinates me. It has a magical quality to it that is similar to light changes during dawn and dusk, or standing on the shoreline that is not of land and not of sea. It is a place where time or should I say the concept of time bends and becomes numinous, slipping away from attempts at linear definition.

Someone pointed out to me that there are no straight lines in nature.

Nor are there straight lines in lineage I have discovered.

May 17th, 2013 was the day I set off on my Alban Pilgrimage and visited Paris, Chartres, many locales in Scotland, Derry and Oxfordshire which lasted ten weeks and was documented in this blog.

Yesterday was the year and a day anniversary. After a season of digesting that experience and listening for new impulses I now feel ready to move again in this format.

On the Move again.