A winter song for you

Tana and I made a song for our friends' new quarterly publication, Moonfat. Check it out!

Hey everyone,

Our friends Pete and Kelly McLean out in Sandpoint, Idaho have started a printed, community-sourced quarterly journal called Moonfat. I contributed a piece to their Samhain 2023 issue (reposted here in the Courtyard), and for this upcoming Imbolc issue, Tana and I submitted a song we wrote and recorded together.

They’re shipping copies on January 29, so if you want to order a copy best do it now!

Here’s a note from them on the upcoming issue:

Imbolc, one of the four Gaelic festivals, is coming up this early February.

To honor this time between Winter Solstice and Vernal Equinox, we invited our essayists, poets, visual artists, singers, song-writers, and dream-seed sowers to contribute to this printed quarterly called Moonfat.

Moonfat is a quarterly publication falling on the cross-quarter times of the year: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain, and aims to spark our love and our relationship with the Earth and her magic.

$15 total. $13 for the quarterly and $2 for shipping.

Imbolc has a few translations from the Gaelic but its most commonly understood as “in the belly.” And referred to the lambs growing in the bellies of their sheep-mamas. An unseen promise of life, of growth, of creation amidst the still snowy, cold landscape where growth stalls as the sun and earth’s northern hemisphere begin to find each other again.

This particular Moonfat holds that sleeping seed, that little womb-side lamb with tender, grateful, hopeful hands. Hands of poetry, essay, song, collage, acrylic paint, and all the life and love and grief and joy that moves and muses through the contributors.

Here we are and the days are already feeling longer and yet there is much ahead until crocus and swamp cabbage and maple-blossom break.

This is our prayer of thanksgiving for the dark and the cold and the abiding change that wheels us back into the sun’s growth again.

We hold all these moments lightly. Knowing they are here to come and here to go.

That’s why it feels so important, so precious, so urgent, even, to express our gifts and our thanksgiving.

No next moment is guaranteed.

So, let’s make sure to feast on this one. Grieve on this one. Feel on this one. And pen a poem on this one.

With love and awe,

Pete and Kelly

Gonna be good. So grateful to these two for spurring Tana and me to the mic. The song came through last winter, has been gestating all this time, and now comes to blossom, a winter flower for you. A song to honor the women.

It’s snowing here in Maine. The highway wasn’t wet yet on my way down to work, and the light dusty snow swirled like a river of smoke before me, serpentine. Look for the beauty and you’ll find it. Can’t find it, look again. Looking now, in my little office, I can see it in the tidy trash and recycling bins that the custodians emptied for us last night sometime after we all left, hear it in the clacking keys of my officemates whose hearts are all beating, feel it beating in my chest. It’s here, we’re here, I’m always, always here.

Stay cozy, people,

Andrew