THE BEST DAY OF THE YEAR: I HAIL THE WOOD PILE!

The Wood arrived yesterday. Wood Day is the best day of the year and I am always excited beyond reason. Here it is in its raw form, before being stacked and the ritual made for it. The Wood comes each year to warm us and light us. I love the Wood very much. It smells of boreal forests, of ancestry. Stacking it makes the holy Wood Pile. We approach the Wood Pile with offerings of Wood, giving itself to itself. Each Wood has made so many journeys just to get to the Pile. When I handle the Wood, I trace it back from tree to seed to water. It is all there in my hands, so that stacking is an act of reverence and memorial.

The arrival of the Wood is an early hint that Summer will be over soon. Along with bottling and preserving and Winter planting. Thus the world turns, and sometimes even we notice.

It is also a chance to consider the concept of enough. Having enough for Winter was surely a preoccupation for many of my ancestors. Enough warmth, enough food, enough company. All the Winter festivals are doubly precious because they affirm that there is enough. Now our preoccupation with enough-ness is way out of whack. There is never enough for the world in this stage of terminal capitalism. Planning for scarcity, real scarcity, is something we may have to learn again.

 Here is the Wood Pile half stacked. Gentle sparks of light filter through the tarp, its dappled irregularities a complex wonder. Holy the light! Holy as it speaks of its source! Holy as it enters the cave of my skull! All is holy today. 

Here is the ritual to welcome the Wood into the Wood Pile. And to bless the Wood Pile. This is a Cernunnos ritual of sorts, for himself is of the northern forest and also is for prosperity.I hail and thank Cernunnos. I hail the Wood Pile, its mites and wights, and the Clan of Pholcidae who are welcome to come and live in it. I ask the Wood Pile to last all Winter and keep us warm and bright. The little drum, not the big one I use for journeying, sounds flat like step step step step step. There are grains and fruits and consecrated water. All is poured over the Pile and I leave. Salve!

This kind of ritual is close to prayer. Because I am asking the Wood Pile to do what it is going to do anyway, what it is there to do. We pray to God, if we pray to God,  to do what God is bound to do by God's nature. God is bound in this way to God's attributes in a way that we are not. I think there is some theology around this, and perhaps someone with some theological sophistication can tell me more. If there is some sort of Aristotelian grain, of right meaning or the right way to be, the Wood Pile knows it. It is the sentient guardian of our Winter, and it settles nicely into its destiny.