Imbolc: The Season of What Ought to Be
Before spring comes, something has to break.
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) lived through the tumult of the Stalinist period, a time in Russia that rhymes uncomfortably with the political disruption of our own, minus of course the advent of AI and the omnipresent drumbeat of climate change. It was an age that left people exhausted, trapped in systems they lacked the individual power to change, and unable to envision what a future might look like beyond the present moment.
Even in the blackest despair of that era, Mandelstam never stopped working toward a bright future he could not see. He was asked “what tense would you choose to live in?” He replied:
In grammar, this tense conveys necessity or obligation, what must be done or what needs to ideally happen. Mandelstam chose a moral future, not what will be, but what should be. Living in what ought to be was his way of resisting the oppressive “what is” of his time. We, too, must refuse to accept the brutal cruelty of our own era.
Imbolc is the season that lives in Mandelstam’s tense.
Imbolc, the midpoint between the long dark of Yule and the flowering of the spring equinox, is a season of transition and change. Life has turned inward. Animals and plants lie dormant beneath the soil, lightless and dreaming spring into being. The lush growth to come is nowhere visible in the landscape. It exists only as a bright vision held in the darkness.
At Imbolc we most often turn to Brigid, tending hearth fires, lighting candles, and blessing the quiet arts of healing, creativity, and care. It is a season of gentleness, of warmth held close against the cold. And yet Imbolc also carries a more subversive current.
The Celts had another Imbolc myth for that.
In the time before time, King Nechtan possessed a magical well, the Well of Segais, the source of Great Knowledge. Around it grew nine hazel trees of wisdom, whose nuts fell into the water, imbuing it with divine illumination sought by poets and kings alike. Nechtan allowed only himself and his three cup-bearers to approach the well. When he desired its waters, they circled it three times sunwise, and the waters would rise enough to be drawn.
His wife, Boann was ever a curious and courageous soul. Nechtan’s equal in nearly every aspect of his rule. Except one.
She dreamed of tasting the waters and carrying their gifts to the people. One night, after Nechtan and his attendants withdrew, Boann slipped through the forest to the sacred place. Three times she walked around the rim, but she went counter-sunwise.
The well erupted in three great waves. The spray struck her face and blinded her, yet she fled. Feet pounding the earth, she raced across the land as the waters surged behind her. Boann was swift, but no match for the river she had unleashed. She was killed in the deluge, and in her flight the River Boyne was born. Its waters spread across the land into streams, watersheds, and lakes, and the people flourished after.
And like Prometheus, she paid a terrible bodily price for her moral defiance.
When we look at the systems around us today, systems that damage the planet, keep millions in poverty, and tilt increasingly toward authoritarian abuse, they can seem unassailable, frozen in place with the chill certainty of winter.
Imbolc is about thawing the ice. The first waters of impending spring destabilize what winter made rigid. Boann is not gathering flowers or seeking union with a Summer King. She is breaking containment. She does so not because she was given permission, but because she held a clear sense of what ought to be. Wisdom, she believed, should be shared for the flourishing of all, not only the king.
Boann’s story is not a call to heroics, but to responsibility. Once the waters of wisdom are loose, no one gets to pretend innocence. The river that nourishes the land also asks something in return: restraint, stewardship, right relation. This is the deeper meaning of sovereignty in the old stories, not the right to take what we can, but the obligation to live as if the future is already here.
Often our Imbolc celebrations focus on clearing away what no longer serves, making room for new growth. This year, perhaps we go a step further. Perhaps we ask what has been frozen into structures that prevent us from living in right relation with the world, and what part we might play in growing a better one.
It asks only that we choose, again, to live in the tense of what ought to be, and tend the world as if it might yet flourish because we did.
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