Imbolc is coming up, in the northern hemisphere; a time of thinking about spring...getting ready for spring...looking for hints of spring...wishing really hard for an early spring...not spring itself!  It's a sabbat sacred to Brigid:  smith, healer, and poet; pregnant maiden bearing the sun.

Nowabouts I find myself thinking of birch trees, long associated with new beginnings, healing, and purification.  Birch, or Beith, is the first letter of the ogham alphabet.  Depending on the tradition you follow, the time of year that birch corresponds to is the month of November, coming right after Samhain, the Celtic new year; or it can be the time of the sun in Capricorn, following winter solstice, and representing the beginning of a new solar year; or it can be spring equinox, when the earth seems to be waking up.  With so many acceptable rationales, I feel justified in offering my own, assigning birch to the sabbat of Imbolc and the goddess Brigid.  Here's why.

Right now, a few days before Imbolc, the birch trees are scattering nutlets from their catkins onto the snow, like bran flakes.  They have confidence in the season!  The new bark glows a coppery buff in the increasing light of the sun.  Birch colonizes moist, sun-facing slopes, so it is a tree of renewal:  forest renewal.  The wood, our hottest-burning local hardwood, capable of warping cast iron stovetops with its heat, would be suitable to fire Brigid's forge.  The sap of the inner bark of various species is used in remedies for skin complaints and in recipes for tonics, bespeaking healing and purifying proeprties.  (The twigs are used as scourges and besoms, too, for a different kind of purification.)  The resin is reputed to give a mild buzz, due to terpenes:  I hesitate to say that this quality relates to poetic inspiration, but the pale bark, that peels off easily, is reminiscent of paper and therefore of the written word.  Brigid is the protector and preserver of all memory and knowledge.  Being a goddess from a strongly oral culture, she probably doesn't need paper to help her remember anything, but her followers often do!