So. How was your Easter?

One of the stranger things for me about Wicca in Canada is that Easter feels more like Ostara than Ostara does. March 21 is the vernal equinox (depending on the year) but it never feels like Spring until mid-April or later, when it is finally consistently above freezing and a few brave shrubs and trees start to bud out. I've thought of adapting the given holidays and dates (mostly developed in other, more temperate climates) for Canada by observing them when it seems most sensible to do so.

The unfortunate thing about spring in this part of Canada is that it's so damned short.

Winter lasts until mid-April; summer technically begins June 21 but it generally feels like summer by late May, hot and muggy and smoggy. So we have one blessed, glorious month of temperatures warm enough to be outside without a jacket, but not so warm that you feel like scurrying for air-conditioning. I try to take advantage, because once the smog hits my outdoor time will be severely curtailed.

Yesterday it was bright, cloudless, windless and 18 Celsius (fahrenheit translation up to you, Dear Readers). We went to the Zoo in the morning, and while F.E. napped I sat outside, listened to The Diamond Age on my iPod, and took some pictures of the shrubs in our backyard getting ready to leaf, the little buds swollen and just beginning to split. I finally can think about Wicca again.

Strange, isn't it? A faith that depends on nice weather to contemplate. But it's true, for me at least. Starhawk would be ashamed, but she lives in California and at a latitude where it seldom snows; I wonder how truly she can understand a Canadian's innate sense that Winter is the Enemy, and you court it at your peril. It is dark; sun sets by 4:00 or 4:30 in January. It is blisteringly cold, even packed to the gills in down and thermal fleece. And it lasts forever, November to April, even in a comparatively warm latitude such as mine. Winter is a time, for a wiccan like me, to sit safely behind the double-paned glass and admire the snow from a distance. No matter what my intentions, I cannot make myself go out into it. Maybe (probably?) it is a sign of a lack of commitment.

Regardless, it's warm again and I will soon be back out in the walking trails and local patches of wilderness, learning the local ecology, following the life cycles of the wildflowers and anything else I can observe, aided by my trusty camera, sketchbook and journal.

It's about time.

Posted by Andrea at April 19, 2006 10:03 AM under Witch

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