As the sunlight begins to dim on the last day of the calendar year, I go out to the Blackthorns growing in the field outside my yurt, and make offerings of whiskey to each tree.
Some of the whiskey I pour onto the roots – remembering how Stephen Buhner told me that trees get drunk on their own fermentation in autumn, slipping into the dreaming that they do in the dark half of the year. These Blackthorns had no sloes this year, and a strange warming has been waking trees, so it seems right to offer them libations to invite them back into dreaming.
Right before the Solstice here we had massive flooding. On a foggy day last week, just before the cold and snow returned, I looked out at the Blackthorns, wreathed in mist, and for a brief moment saw the ghost of their white blossoms. They reminded me that when we had flooding last Bealtaine, it watered the land, and soon after the Blackthorn flowers filled the air with their intoxicating scent and the little grove was alive with the buzzing of bees at twilight. The music of the bees returned to me – and with it the memory of infusing the flowers into mead. I understood that blessing would return.
But the return of that blessing depends on reciprocity. So I begin the year with visiting the Blackthorns. After I have offered libations to their roots, I trace the Ogham letter “straif,” in each place on the each tree where branches had been brought down by storm or pruning saw. (Some of the trees had been pruned to rescue them from an infestation in late summer.)
As I traced the lines of the letter I repeated the ancient phrase connected with the letter, which is also my resolution for the year to come: “mórad rún.”
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Irish is a language in which words have many layers of meaning. (Just as the world the language describes has many layers or reality.)
“Mórad” is an archaic word, an echo of which still exists in the kindred word “móraid” which is used today to refer to a prominent hill – the kind of high place where offerings were once made. In early times, “mórad” was a verb and “móraid” was an adjective describing that which accomplished the action the verb refers to.
Both stem from “mór” which means both “big” and “great.”
So “mórad” can mean to increase, to magnify, to gather, and to exalt.
And “rún” – ah, “rún,” . . . a rún, a rún, mo rún.
Rún is a word of many meanings and many mysteries. Mystery is, in fact, one of the word’s many meanings. And in the confluence of those meanings lies the resolution to my problems with New Year’s resolutions.
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My problem with New Year’s resolutions lies not in the practice of making a vow or a commitment for the coming year – but with the ethos that tends to underlie them. Usually New Year’s resolutions are framed either in terms of achieving a set goal – a set of terms largely defined by capitalist notions of productivity and extrinsic worth – or in terms of cultivating a virtue or abandoning a vice – terms that have been reshaped by the Calvinist Christian theology that co-arose with capitalism.
(We will save the digression into the anti-Black and anti-Irish roots of “clean eating” and “clean living” culture for another day – if you are curious, though, Blindboy did a great deep dive into this history a while back -- https://play.acast.com/s/blindboy/victoriansexcommunesandbreakfastcereal)
From a magical perspective, this is a shallow way of trying to achieve change – it utilizes only the “willpower” of the rational mind, and even that it engages mainly through operant conditioning. If we want true transformation, we need to reach for something deeper – something connected to the parts of us that have not been so deeply conditioned and indoctrinated by civilization, the parts of us that understand that our own existence is on the one hand but a brief movement in a great and complex music of the world singing itself into being, and at the same time an integral part of that music in such a way that even a change in a single note of the melody, a single beat of the rhythm, can shift everything around it.
Interestingly, this level of understanding is implicit in the modern Irish phrase used to refer to a New Year’s Resolution – “rún na hAthbhliana.”
“Bliana” means year. “Ath” is a prefix similar to the English prefix “re-.”
The Gregorian calendar and the practice of beginning the year in January are relatively late arrivals in Irish culture – and even after they were adopted to govern civil affairs, a syncretic combination of the liturgical calendar, the feast days of both official and unofficial saints, the agricultural year, and the echoes of older festivals and an older calendar governed the rhythms by which rural Irish people actually lived. It is not a mere accident that the Irish language speaks not of “Bliana nua” but of “Athbhliana” – retaining a sense of the circular nature of time, and the existence of crucial points in that cycle where deep intentions and deep prayers grow more powerful.
As for “rún” – well, a modern English-Irish dictionary such as focloir.ie will give you the word “rún” if you ask for the word for “resolution” in the sense of “a decision to take action.”
But working in the other direction, if you go to even a very modern and conventional dictionary seeking a translation of the word “rún” it will tell you it means “secret” and “mystery.” Further exploration will quickly reveal that it also refers to occult or esoteric knowledge, the hidden nature of things, and a person’s deepest desires, deepest intentions, and deepest purpose. Older usages include using the word to describe “full consciousness.”
The presence of the word in the modern word for “secretary” – “runái” – also suggests old connections with the use of language and writing for sacred purposes. While there is no way to prove the connection, it is almost certainly related to the Old Norse word that we now write in English as “rune” – referring to the letters used to inscribe the great mystery that Odin learned while hanging from Yggdrasil, sacrificing himself to himself to attain knowledge and wisdom.
So all of this points to a level of intention that goes beyond mere words or ideas – it suggests a choice and intention made from the core of one’s being.
And hence, “rún” is also a way of saying “beloved” – suggesting that your love for someone comes from the depths of your being.
This places the seat of our secret intention in the heart – so to take the words “rún na hAthbhliana” seriously is to engage in a re-setting of your heart at the turning of the year.
Which is precisely what I was doing in bringing offerings to the Blackthorns -- and precisely why “mórad rún” was the one vow I could make.
Image from Wikimedia Commons. The copyright on this image is owned by Rob Farrow and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
I thank you, Seán. These thoughts on resolutions give me much to ponder💕🐉