Unblocking

On subtle charms, clogged sinks, and the power of secrets

I finally finished a plumbing project I’ve needed to work on for weeks. The day before that, I went for my first forest walk of the year, a day after returning to the gym for the first time in two months.

Why it’s been so long for all these things isn’t easy to explain. I want to tell you that it’s been a long winter, but this feels too much like an excuse, a wallowing. I also want to tell you it was by my own initiative that I’d broken this long spell of inaction, but that would be hardly true.

I get so stuck in winter, so tired, so certain I’m older than I am. It’s always like this, even though I always know it’s not nothing close to true. Imbolc though, or Anagantios as the Gallic Celts knew it, always reminds me how silly I’m being. So did, this time, my 79 year old mother-in-law.

“Aber warum gehst du nicht ins Fitnessstudio?”

We were sitting together in her kitchen. She was sipping her coffee, copying down ingredients from a recipe book, while I waited. She was about to drive us to the store, as it had been too cold for me to bike there and I needed some tools to fix the sink.

Her question was awkward, and I fumbled with my clumsy German to reply.

“Umm..es war zu kalt, mit Farhrad da zu gehen.”

She laughed. “Dann komm mit. Ich gehe jeden Donnerstag…”

For those of you who, like me, don’t really know German, she’d asked me why I hadn’t been going to the gym lately. I told her it had been too cold to bike there, and she offered to take me with her.

Yes. She, a woman of almost 80, has been going more frequently than I have. So, of course I took her up on the offer. I’d be endlessly ashamed of myself if I hadn’t.

Now, we’ve got a weekly gym date, so I’ve no excuse.

That blocked sink was another matter altogether. When my husband first had this kitchen built, the plumber was a bit of a hack. Some pipes are much too long, others just a bit too short, and no matter how you try adjust the joints and lengths, the central trap will always be crooked. This means the pipes clog with debris quite often, which means it’s more likely that grease will accumulate and harden in other parts. Thus, once every few months, our kitchen sink is plugged.

Being too long in my winter stupor, the effort of even the temporary fixes we usually find felt too much, so for the week before Imbolc, I was washing dishes in a plastic tub. But I’d finally had enough of all this, found a proper pipe augur (snake), bought a few gaskets to replace leaking ones, and then spent an entire day clumsily learning how to disassemble and re-assemble a kitchen sink.

Unless you’ve done this before and thus have right to laugh, I gotta tell you it’s an awful, frustrating process. I’d started it earlier in the week, and only half-completed it before my husband came home.

I finally finished it. And on Thursday, I finally went back to the gym.

And then, there was Friday. I’ve a new friend, a rather fascinating sort of person and a rare thing to find the older you get. It’s hard to make these sorts of friends when you’re older, and even harder when you’re an immigrant to the place you are. Worse, I moved here three months before the long plague confinements started, meaning for much of the first year, I rarely saw anyone’s smile, nor did they see mine.

Regardless, I’ve a new friend, and I’m quite thrilled with this. He suggested a walk since he was off of work, and because I really needed someone to drag me out of the house, I agreed. He’d not been in the forests near my village, and anyway I really needed to check on some places, so we set off from my house into the woods I love best of all.

I don’t talk much about the specific magic I do. You learn very quickly to keep silent about such things, not just to avoid sounding boastful or ridiculous, but also that most magic weakens quickly when you talk about it.

To understand how this is the case, consider the power a dark or embarassing secret can hold over you. For instance, let’s say you “cheated” on a lover, or otherwise did something you’re ashamed of or don’t wish to have known. So, you keep it a secret, but then it starts to gnaw at you. You become fearful of it ever being brought to light, worry what might happen if others found out. Or consider also the kinds of secrets an abuser creates. A molested child told by an adult, “this is just our little secret,” a beaten person told by their partner, “don't tell anyone, or I’ll kill you.”

Secrets like that become like traps, and the only way to break free of them is to admit to them and let their consequences play out.

But there are other secrets, powerful and liberating ones. The furtive glance across a room that speaks subtle invitation to flirt. The conspiratorial planning before a surprise party, or a gift, or a revolution. Or the unspoken thoughts of wonder and awe, too sublime for description, too beautiful to be sullied by fumbling words.

A secret seals a ritual, at least until it it finished. Those who boast of the magic workings they are doing have already failed, just like those who talk all the time about what they are about to write never even begin.

This is why I keep mostly quiet about the magic I work. But I failed in something, due to being blocked, so I’ll speak on it.

The first place to which I took my new friend was a fallen tree, a site into which I’d woven quite a bit of myself. Such workings are never permanent, and need regular return. But it’d been months since I’d been there, and though seeing what had happened filled me with great sadness, I understood what my absence had done:

If you’ve previously watched some of the druid journals I filmed in the first two years of living here, you’ll know what this place is and what it meant to me. The photo at the very beginning of this essay is what it once was.

It was a fallen tree in an uncultivated strip of grassland between a managed oak plantation and a wilder forest. Just to the left of this photo is a stream I’ve been tending since I’ve been here, and the site itself was where I’ve done quite a bit of what you might call “magic.”

Mostly, I’d think here, and also not think. I’ve prayed here more than any other place except my home, and also cried, and laughed, and dreamed.

To keep up such a place, and to keep others from molesting it, you need to keep up certain threads you might call “wards.” You can make a place unnoticed by others with very subtle workings, just as you can make a place more inviting with others.

But it had been too long since I was last there. I let work get in the way, too much of it in the past few months, and gave more of my attention there instead of to this place.

Farmers cut off many of its branches and much of its primary trunk for firewood, stacking its constituent parts neatly on either side of it. Staring at what had become of it, I sighed, and tried to explain to my friend how sad it made me.

Of course, better they use fallen trees for firewood than felling them. To them, no doubt, they saw only an unsightly obstacle on the edge of a slowly rewilding field. To me, I saw the beginnings of an expanding forest, a dead tree sheltering and feeding new ones.

On my walk, I saw that other parts of the forest have been stripped away or damaged. A section of a hillside was clearcut, and as we walked along the stream, we found multiple sandbag dams haphazardly slowing its flow. Only when we got closer to the streams source did I understand their purpose, an attempt to slow the poison spread of pollution. Someone, probably a farmer, had dumped a large amount of what appeared to be motor oil into the woods, just above the creek.

Before we’d gotten to that place, a boar mother and two of her farrow bolted past us, maybe 5 meters (15 feet) from where we stood. A little after their impressive and loud rush deeper in, several large deer regarded us haughtily before fleeing. Their boldness gave me some courage after the destruction I’d seen, which made what I saw next much more infuriating.

We came upon a hunting still, an arrogantly tall tower facing into the forest from the edge of a fallow field. There are many such stands here, but none that I’d seen rivaled its height. Its position suprised me, though: typically, these face onto the fields so that the hunter can catch clearer sight of the wild beasts who traverse them. This one, however, faced into the forest, and I got quite angry when I understood why.

A strip had been cut into the forest from the tower to a lone pillar, atop which the hunter had placed a white block of calcium and salt. Many herbivores, deer especially, tend to crave salt and calcium at the end of winter and beginning of spring. The sprouting plants and new leaves abundant at the turn of these seasons are very high in potassium, and so they seek out salt to balance this.

The hunter, quite cruelly, had put up the salt block to bait the deer. Its height was such that his quarry would need to stretch its head up to lick it, putting it in a vulnerable position where it could not look around itself. The hunter would have a clear line to its neck, and had felled quite a few trees to make sure nothing got in his way.

It’s no more, now. My new friend kindly kept watch as I covered my bootprints, arranging everything so that the hunter would think the rains—rather than a devotee of Diana and Arduinna—had caused the block to fall. I’ve no interest yet in starting a direct war with the land owners here, poor stewards though they are.

There are more subtle, magical ways to hinder them, but those ways—as with that tree—require frequent presence and regular effort to keep up. These other methods are secret, and must be, but the secret I’ve kept for a little too long, one that had too much power over me, must no longer be.

For months, I’d become depressed. Lazy. Wallowing in my own inaction, passive, unable to act. Too much time worrying over things which matter little rather than the things which matter most to me. I don’t know how this started, or really when, but for at least the last four months I’ve let myself become deeply discouraged, frozen like the earth.

As with that pipe, it was first some large thing which got stuck. That, I think, was some swallowed anger I chose unwisely to keep silent. Letting it stay wordless let other things catch, such as my failure to set a strong boundary with someone not close to me demanding far too much in exchange for far too little. Then, other things refused to move, and still more, and then suddenly only a trickle of me could pass out into the world.

I needed a friend to coax me out, and also an elderly woman to tell me my excuses were silly. That’s how it always works, though. We borrow fire from each other when we do not have enough of our own, and light fires for others for when they need them. So, all is unblocked now, just as that sink is unblocked. And now I’m finally being present in the places that matter to me again, and rebuilding muscles and charms that atrophied in my absence.