Three offerings for Leap Year
a portal invitation | Cleave & Stone by David Whyte | The Kiss
Let us stop the seasons from drifting. This, my spell for the twenty ninth day of February, our rough corrective to Earth’s imprecise orbit. A day forced into the normal schedule so that our summers do not become Novembers, and our decades do not slip away before we are ready. A day to notice what could so easily be lost. A day to seek magic in the cracks.
Portal Invitation
I like to think of the Leap Year day as a portal through which we have a chance to cross the threshold however briefly into all that is rare, magical and extraordinary about being wide-eyed and awake in this living-dying world. Every day we walk the tension between all that is fear-inducing and depressing to our souls, and an equal abundance of richness that is ensouled, enchanted and always within reach. From this threshold we can touch either place. We can inhabit both positions. Which will we choose? Today offers us an opening to dwell in all that is somehow miraculous despite the difficulties. There are many ways to step into the leap year portal - just taking a break to reflect might be enough - but today I am starting a new list; a list of extraordinary things. An I can’t believe it list. A list of all the improbable things manifest in an average life. A list of things that yesterday I could only dream of. A list that speaks courage to fear and levity to heft. A list that names with joy all that is unlikely but true, from unexpected gifts in the post, to the most delightful animal living in my home. A list of what glitters when wet. The portal is open today, let us step in.
Cleave & Stone by David Whyte
Cleave
To hold together and to split apart
at one and the same time,
like the shock of being born,
breathing in this world
while lamenting for the one we’ve left.No one needs to tell us
we are already on our onward way,
no one has to remind us
of our everyday and intimate
embrace
with disappearance.We were born saying goodbye
to what we love,
we were born
in a beautiful reluctance
to be here,
not quite ready
to breathe in this new world,
we are here and we are almost not,
we are present while still not
wanting to admit we have arrived.Not quite arrived in our minds
yet always arriving in the body,
always growing older
while trying to grow younger,
always in the act
of catching up,
of saying hello
or saying goodbye
finding strangely
in each new and imagined future
the still-lived memory
of our previous life.
&
Stone
The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.
You have gazed into the moving waters,
you have seen the slow light, in the sky
above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,
and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,
but you have never looked into the immovability
of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you
not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches
your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere,
something that wants you to stay here and look back,
be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too
have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant
and now as solid and as here and as willing
to be touched as everything you have found.
The Kiss
I offer you this photo from my mimetolith-archive because it brings me so much simple joy and never fails to connect me with the magic inherent in all things. If the portal of leap year can offer us anything I hope it is to become alive to the possibility of animacy even in the abiotic foundations of the world. Leap year is often associated with romance and marriage so this pair feel like they belong to the day. May we marry ourselves whole-heartedly to this world that already knows how to love us.
Flipping glorious! Never considered a Leap Year day like that before but I am all in 🥰
Love that photo. What a beauty.