The Wheel of Interlacement

and what it means to have our ideologies woven from place.

This image is what I have come to call the Wheel of Interlacement. It is a map that marks the passing of time, and how our planet spins and circles round the sun. Weather is variable; the position of the earth in relationship to the sun is steady. Each symbol marks a cardinal point on the wheel, and each in between point. These 8 points are known across cultures, even in modernity, though we often confuse them with strange rituals of consumption. Winter solstice is marked by various religious holidays, but on this map, it simply rests at the bottom, centered, and is a moment of deep bow across the hemisphere. Of course, while we might be bowing with the evergreen bows into the center of winter in the northern hemisphere, our kin in the southern hemisphere are opening into ‘create’, represented at the top with a leafy, oak-type symbol. The symbols themselves are Baltic - my closest indigenous ancestors who avoided conquering for several hundred years after the christian crusades - and who are often referred to as “the stubborn pagans”. The words are mine though, found after spending years practicing the seasons as my compass. Your map, should you make one, would likely look completely different. In this practice, time is a landscape that we are constantly remembering ourselves to, and our ideologies are born out of our place, not an idea.

Last week we entered the season of winter, and the moment on the wheel of time that I call “integrate”.  These six weeks leading up to solstice, to me, are often centered on integration.  In the ground, soil is integrating the new information from all the roots, nuzzling in for the long cold dark.  The insects are finding homes among the leaves, working to stay warm.  Dawn is not impossible to witness with the late rise of the sun, getting later (and is good integration medicine).  To weave with what was gathered in autumn, to welcome the abundance of a harvest and hope it lasts the season.  Even those of us who live completely inside modernity, with screens telling us where to go and who to meet and what to buy, we notice the change in light, the shift of what’s abundant in the produce isle.  We notice because we were made to do so.  We humans are some of the most expert trackers and navigators, when we practice and integrate what we notice. Integration is a digestive practice, and done well, ends in transformation.

Last month, another war broke out, and one landscape’s story slid to the background while another’s came forward.  The early bombardment of war, fueled by outrage and politics, reeks it’s havoc across lives, rivers, olive groves.  I don’t know how to integrate this knowing, this warring.  It doesn’t make sense – only overwhelming grief comes, but perhaps that is something worth integrating, for living an overwhelmed life is to exhaust the energy we have to live our lives well.  The thing that stays with me, won’t integrate, is how we humans can love our place so dearly, but then blow it up anyway.  This happens in all wars, all fighting of one side to another, despite the love of a place.  Maybe it’s the naïve trust that a landscape will always grow back, will always become what we most remember.  Maybe it’s because we do not take our task of loving the world seriously enough, and I do think this is why we humans are here: to task the task of loving the world seriously. 

Why am I writing this?  What is important to say here?  I want to know: how can we stop destroying this place if we do not make it sacred somehow in our hearts?  Not the sanctuary we built, but the trees and dirt and rivers surrounding it - the places that imagined us before we came. How can we understand ourselves if we do not acknowledge what we are literally made out of?  And not just our ancestors, but everyones, from worm to leaf to fish to stone. This kind of placing ourselves is not about gods or gurus,  nor is it about what we planted or built.  It’s not about learning ancestral skills that ‘connect’ us to the land. It’s simply not a consumptive event, it’s a listening one, an acknowledging one, a bowing one. 

Yesterday, the tree held 10,000 golden glowing leaves, made brighter by the sudden first snow.  Today the tree is bare, surrounded by a skirt of gold.