A Candle for a Year

As the year turns all too quickly, the days in your life are growing, the light lengthens then fades, shadow takes over for a while and this miracle of twelve months is gone almost without us noticing. 

Peace appears as rays of light, candles kindled stand in for the sun rays and your smile captures the moment, of this a birthday, a solar return where the sun is once more as it was at the time you came here to us. The sun swung that night around to the frost hardened brightness of your first morning and you came skinside, crossing the threshold to be with us. I felt at that time as if I would burst with love, a full cup of it drunk and my voice brightened to a new timbre ~ I was now a mother. 

A year was filled with bells and voices, rattles and songs, footfalls and heartbeats. Carrying you close we gloried in the bright tree blessings of your first midwinter, and the snow that fell from a bright cloudless sky to make your first snowman of a day-star winter. As the year swung around and the twelve days gathered us into the waiting dark of new-year misrule; and with a solstice ember, we remembered the path that had brought us here, to the cusp of a new beginning as family, a couple no longer. We stood at the starless crossroads with new friends to receive the blessings of bread of the hearth, the waters of life, the spark of the dawn and the salt of the earth. 

It struck me the time of your birth that no place was liminal any more, there were no transitions, and no in-betweens, I was and am your mother and I was a stage you knew well, so you trod the boards and wondered where we were going together. There is  just us, no ending and no beginning; what we do in each moment is enough, amidst the rush of ever changing lights and the whistling wind of a new year, your second one on the earth, breathing its way into our minds. We three are conspirators, bouncing off the winter stars and raising our expectations at this moment.

Earlier today you have wondered what I am up to in the heat-steaming kitchen. Here I am with cake, and peace appears as candles, standing in the centre of the sun-ray world, your smile forming as friends and grandparents arrive, faces and voices lighting up your world. I am holding a candle to your year; a miracle, almost gone without our noticing.