In the green wick.

There is a place within the self that can emerge through the shadow. It comes after many quiet nights, when the memory of family and friends, now absent, is a silence following the tumult. It's the movement of perseverance, the drawing of happenstances unsought but embraced, the acceptance and the desire to take another step forward.

When everything valuable and loved and desired and dreamt-for is lost, when the laughter of kith and kin echoes in the pained yearnings for yesterday, what remains? The click of boots on pavement beside the melting snow, the pounding of the heart superceding inner voices that summon the self into despair and pathetic, unrequited redemption.

The Green shoots through the cracks. It bespeaks of the promise unspoken, the hint of possibility and creation, the living wick remaining within the tired self. The Green is present in spite of winter's folly and anguish. Brighid is alive and pumping the billows. Demeter holds the seed. From within the core of being, feral life and resonant wonder can yet be nurtured into presence. From within the core of being, the chance for redemption of the self, neither pathetic nor unrequited, can be embraced into a fullness. There can yet be renewal.

It's a journey. It's a path. It's a step into and beyond personal initiation. Its scars are runes of melodious wisdom, and the answers from its oracle are woven in the Green. Hope remains after blemishes are seen as the blemishes that they have been. Life is.