Happy Imbolc!

Tomorrow is groundhog day.

It's also the canonical date for the neopagan celebration of Imbolc, the first festival of the waxing year. Imbolc celebrates the awakening of the Goddess in her aspect of Maiden.

On this day, we honor the return of the light to the world. Since the winter solstice, the days have been getting longer, but very slowly. And the world itself has been getting colder. Now, the increase in the length of the day is noticeable, and we'll find that the sun is rising earlier. Some of us will no longer be getting up and leaving for work before sunrise.

This is also as cold as the year gets. After this, the growing sunlight overcomes the thermal mass of the soil beneath us, and things begin to warm up.

The trees begin awaken and grow new buds. (This is about the same time of the year as Tu B'Shevat, the fifteenth day of Shevat. In the Jewish calendar, this is the new year of the trees. It made sense to wait until you were sure a tree had survived the winter before paying taxes on it, so taxes were collected on this date.)

I find it interesting that President Bush is giving the State of the Union address on this date, and three days after a world-shaking election in Iraq. If he were Wiccan, I could say he was tapping into the symbolism of the light arriving. It's far from the end of the story – it's barely into the beginning.

But the light is a promise, and the promise grows over the coming months and years, if it receives proper care.

The seed hasn't really been planted yet, but the order we placed in the seed catalog has arrived, and we hold the seed in our hand.

Plants, once in the soil, will do everything they can to grow and spread. But if they don't get proper care – water, food, weeding as necessary – they will die, and the promise of the light will be lost.

There are those who are clamoring for an "exit strategy". We may leave Iraq someday, but we can't pull out now, any more than the farmer can go off on a cruise as soon as he's scattered his seed in the field. If he does, he'll return to a field of weeds. If we leave, we won't have to return – the weeds will come looking for us.