Imbolc as Spiritual Practice: Favorite Resources for a Journey through the Wheel of the Year

Celebrating the halfway point between a solstice and an equinox

Spring is coming! (In the hemisphere I write from.)

To begin the festivities, here are two pictures of cute kittens in fields of wildflowers.

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Today, I invite you into a journey through the Wheel of the Year—via resource recommendations—because tomorrow is Imbolc, the halfway point between the winter solstice and the vernal equinox (in the Northern hemisphere).

In the modern Wheel of the Year, the name Imbolc is derived from an ancient Celtic religious festival—also observed at the beginning of February—celebrating spring and later christianized as the feast day of St. Brigit.

I personally celebrate this holiday as a form of resistance to religious colonization, as an opportunity to break up the intensely dark days of winter, and as a way to connect to the rhythms of the earth and the cosmos. With that in mind, here are some of my favorite Imbolc resources (besides the historical ones linked throughout the previous paragraph):

• The Goddess Obscured by Pamela Berger: an academic and historical deep-dive on the christianization of the goddess Brigid as the Catholic St. Brigit

• Juliet Diaz and Lorraine Anderson’s Seasons of the Witch Imbolc Oracle: a lovely deck about the associations, traditions, and themes of this season, created by BIPOC voices

• Both Adelina St. Clair’s The Path of a Christian Witch and Friday Gladheart’s The Practical Witch’s Almanac include interesting discussions about this day.

No matter how you go about this almost-spring time, may you know your utter belovedness and find life-giving ways of being—for this season and always.

In Wonder,

Kandi Zeller (she/her)

KandiZeller.com

P. S. Here is my Imbolc altar for this year. My altar is a visual prayer for myself and the whole cosmos. This one includes artwork by Wendy Andrews, And Her Saints, and Juliet Diaz/Lorraine Anderson/Tijana Lukovic. As expressed in this previous post, my understanding of the divine is expansive, but I typically center my understanding of the divine on Father, Son, Holy Spirit—Mother of Us All.