On the Eve of St. John

Dancing over flames, bringing the ashes home....

Photo by Hans Isaacson on Unsplash

Looks like we beat those demons in the sky and their feathery white streaks, their grey lids over us that make our hearts heavy with the dread of winter. But we beat them. The skies are blazing blue on the Eve of St. John, Our weather gods, our trickeries, outwit them.

It’s a night of bonfires and dancing through the fires and shrieking and merriment.

June 23rd, St. John’s Eve, Bonfire Night. Fires lit at sundown. People gathering to dance and sing, young men leaping through the flames looking over them to catch the eye of the girl they fancy. Prayers, rhymes, stories around the fires bring good harvest. The fires dance through the night and with if there is a good, clear night a good summer would bless the land. The ashes of the fire are scattered to make the land fertile. We would dance with lighted branches from the bonfire, red glowing in our hands, protecting crops from creeping blight and pestilence. We would bring the ashes home to the hearth. We would repel evil spirits.

And so we must keep repelling them. If it is a clear Eve of St. John, it will be a good summer. We must call on the fires, the sun, the light to banish the demons who poison our skies.

If all you can do is light a candle in the garden under the sky, do it. If you can’t dance over the flames, just do that. Make the sun shine. All summer long.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

“What I came about was my daughter Caitilin. Sight or light of her I haven’t had for three days My wife said first, that it was the faireis that had taken her, and then she said it wa a travelling man that had a musical instrument she went away with, and after that she said, that maybe the girl was lying dead in the but of a ditch with her eyes wide open, and she staring broadly at the moon in the night time and the sun in the day until the crows would be finding her out.”

The Philosopher drew his chair closer to Meehawl.

“Daughters,” said he, “have been a cause of anxiety to their parents ever since they were instituted. the flightiness of the female temperament is very evident in those hwo have not arrived at the years which teach how to hide faults and frailties and, therefore, indiscretions bristle from a young girl the way branches do from a brush.”

- James Stephens, A Crock of Gold

Be strong like a tree. Be rooted.