Imbolc is the Celtic fire festival marking the first day of spring, falling between 31st January and 2nd February. Our ancestors here in Britain have been celebrating it for at least 3000 years and so I like to mark it too.

It is the celebration of the return of the light, and carries with it the energy of awakening, new growth, new life, excitement and possibility.

Normally, I would go to the woods or meadows surrounded by new life: swelling buds, spring birdsong, snowdrops. Or visiting a sacred site – our local spring or stone circle - or seeking out a labyrinth to walk, setting my intentions for the coming year.

But not this Imbolc. This Imbolc, instead of being surrounded by life, I was surrounded by death.

I had had a compulsion a few days before to visit Hunslet graveyard in a southern suburb of the city of Leeds.

This was the spookiest of graveyards. It was a cold February afternoon, and a light mist hung in the air, giving a dampness that seeped into my bones, almost to the point of a shiver.

The stonework of the chapel and gravestones was blackened from the soot of the factories, iron foundries and mills that had once been the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the gravestones in the top section of the graveyard had fallen over. There were no flowers on any of the graves. This felt like a forgotten place, where the mourners had long since left and was now just the domain of dog walkers, who kept to the single path circling the cemetery.

As I walked down the path towards the lower end, I noticed the gravestones on the right-hand side became wider and taller, and set so close together that it wasn’t possible to pass between them. Inscribed on each were twenty names, listed in two columns of ten with just their age next to their name. There was no reference to the relationships among the people who shared a grave, because there weren’t any. Other than that, they were the poorest of the working class who died in Hunslet in that year. I can’t imagine how such a small patch of ground could hold so many bodies.

These graves were dated to the early 1900’s. It wasn’t these that I was seeking out. It was a grave dated 1855, and I knew from a plan I had obtained from the Leeds Burial Archives that this was located on the left-hand side of the path. Only, when I arrived there, I saw there were no gravestones on the left-hand side. It would be easy to assume that there was no one buried here underneath the expanse of rough grass. But there were - thousands. This was the common grave of the mid-nineteenth century, where people were buried who were too poor to afford to have their names inscribed on a gravestone.

Why had I had such a strong compulsion to be here, of all places, to mark Imbolc, the festival of the return of the light? I had been asking myself this question all morning as I travelled across the north of England to come here.

It became clear over the hour or so that I was there.

Uncovering the old story

Since the Winter Solstice, I have been immersed in uncovering an old story to bring to the light. It is a story I have been aware of for over a decade, one I discovered when I first started building my family tree.

Stories about my family were passed down through the generations, reaching back to my great-great-grandparents. Beyond them, the family memory ends. Yet I have discovered that by looking back just one or two more generations, the lives of those long-forgotten people profoundly shaped the choices their descendants would make. Choices that ripple all the way forward to me, living in the early 21st century, two hundred years later.

A few days before Imbolc, I felt a strong compulsion to seek out the grave of my three-times-great-granduncle, James Henry. He was born into a working-class family that, in his generation, had moved from rural Yorkshire into the rapidly growing industrial town of Leeds.

I say moved, but in truth, his father’s family had been forced from the land they had farmed for at least seven generations by the Enclosures. Severed from their land and stripped of the right to grow their own food, what choice remained led away from the land and into industrial Leeds?

My ancestors were deeply entangled in the making of the New World. James Henry’s father, Thomas, who was my four times great-grandfather, worked as a horsekeeper, caring for horses that serviced the cotton and flax mills in the north end of Hunslet. Through surviving records, I have pieced together a story of his life. This is the story of a man belonging to the last generation born into the countryside, into an old way of living that stretched back to the Anglo-Saxons and Vikings: farming communities, close-knit, living off the land through cooperation.

The world he was plunged into by the Industrial Revolution was profoundly different to the one he had been born into. The distance between those two lives is hard to comprehend, but I have tried.

I won’t go further into his story for now. I stop here, at the place where the family would once have stood, on the grass where I laid my mandala that Imbolc afternoon.

Turning point

Thomas and Susanah were burying their youngest son, who had died in the most tragic of circumstances brought about by extreme poverty. James Henry’s death certificate had a single word in the box describing the cause of death: Burning. He was 7 years old.

In mid-February 1855, they were several weeks into the Great Frost, a month-long period of plunging temperatures that did not rise above freezing across Britain. Food prices had escalated, and there were bread riots on the streets. The usual rhythms of life had broken down.

Already living on the edge, this family were pushed beyond it, and an accident occurred in which James caught fire. Perhaps he had moved too close to the hearth in an effort to keep warm. Perhaps a pan of boiling water had spilt over him. I can only imagine the circumstances and the trauma that must have followed such a terrible event.

This incident that set the family on a course of desperation and destitution shows the very, very worst of civilisation: the workhouse, which was essentially a prison for the poor.

The shame, blame, separation, and severance this family endured tied my stomach in knots. And yet, I have stayed with the story, allowing it to surface and gather, layer by layer, so that I might bring it into the light.

Why? Why focus on the past in this way?

Because this is the old story. This story has been playing out in my family for generations, hiding as ghosts in the dark corners, secretly pulling the strings of decisions, actions, and beliefs. Now that it has been brought into the light, it can fall away.

Choice

Learning about the hardships of slum life in Victorian Britain and how radically different it was from the rural life they were born into has done several things for me.

It has made me deeply grateful for my life: real gratitude, felt in my body every day. As I fry my bacon and eggs each morning, I think about how lucky I am that I can do this – eat breakfast every day in my warm and comfortable home. I have worked with gratitude as a spiritual practice before, keeping a gratitude journal for several months at a time. This sense of gratitude is on a whole different level.

It has given me agency. Seeing how few choices my ancestors had, and how many I have, helps me find the courage to make the choices that let me do the things I really want to do, but have held back from. It has helped me step away from a career I was unhappy in and felt trapped by, knowing that the fear I held about ‘I must stay working in this job no matter what - I have no choice’ wasn’t mine and originated much further back in my ancestry.

It has helped me understand that the impulses I feel, so hard to overcome, aren’t my story. They originated from my ancestors who were living terribly difficult lives and experienced trauma they weren’t able to resolve. This got passed down the family line in the DNA I inherited, and has been playing out in my life in hidden ways.

Inside the chrysalis

This winter, here at The Way of the Buzzard, we’ve been working with the idea of being in a chrysalis.

When the caterpillar forms its chrysalis, it creates a container where alchemy can take place. In this space, its old form breaks down, creating a gloopy, soupy substance with no form. The old story of the caterpillar falls away, and this is necessary for the new form of the butterfly to begin to take shape.

The two processes are happening simultaneously in that goo. And this was exactly what was playing out within me when I was standing in that graveyard at Imbolc.

I lay out my mandala at the place where I approximated James Henry’s grave to be. Beneath the patch of grass where I stood and immediately around me, there were thousands of people. It felt uncomfortable standing on the burial place of so many; I was conscious of the hallowed nature of this patch of ground.

To set up for the ceremony, I called in the directions and elements: Earth in the north, Air in the east, Fire in the south and Water in the west, and my spirit guides in the Upperworld and Lowerworld. I lay snowdrops on the ground that I had picked from my garden earlier that morning. Then I spoke from my heart, of my grief, gratitude and acknowledgement of my ancestors’ hardship.

Often, when I hold ceremonies like this, I don’t feel any emotion. It is the action of the ceremony that is important, rather than trying to access the emotions I feel would be present in this moment if they weren’t.

But not this time. This time, I felt anger. No, I felt rage at the injustice of it all. How these generations of ancestors were pushed to their very limits, and how the trauma they experienced has been passed down the family line and is shaping us now.

I asked for the old story, the old patterns to be released. And, as I spoke, I noticed a bird fly from a tree over on the edge of the cemetery. It was a crow. Then I saw another. Then a third.

Crows in graveyards are symbols of my ancestors' souls, for me. It felt like a release.

After closing the directions, I packed up my mandala and began the walk back up the path towards the bus. In that moment, I felt an embodied sense of turning toward the light, which mirrors the energy of Imbolc, the return of the light. I felt I was stepping into the new story as I allowed the old patterns to fall away.

Toward freedom

I have been doing this work for many years: uncovering my old patterns to release, and choosing a different way. I have been releasing layer upon layer during this time, and today felt like another step towards it.

It is necessary for the old story to be uncovered, brought to the light, and released. The stories of our ancestors. The stories of our lives. This is part of the alchemical process, and by changing ourselves, we influence the world around us.

In this crazy world, it’s so easy to feel disempowered, as we are unable to shape the things we see that scare us. World events are unfolding that are terrifying and beyond our control. But we do have control of our inner world: absolute control.

Energetically, as we move into the spring, it is the perfect time to orient ourselves to the new story. The old story will continue to fall away, and we can do both simultaneously.

I stood back on the path and looked across to where the snowdrops lay. I imagined my great-great-great-great grandfather and grandmother, Thomas and Susanah, standing here, surrounded by their family. There would have been a lot of them, with their eight children, some now adults with children of their own. I expect their neighbours would have been there too, as would Thomas’s employer and others in their close-knit community. The ground would have been thick with snow.

The date was February 2nd, 2026. In just over two weeks’ time, at the new moon, it would be the 171st anniversary of the burial. It struck me afterwards, the synchronicity of this number, being the 170th year. The day before my visit to Hunslet Cemetery, Jason and I had run our At Home Retreat Ignite the Spark for our The Way of the Buzzard community, to work with the Imbolc energies and creating the new story. 170 people joined us for it live, as we held a process to envision the future, asking the question: ‘How good can it get?'

Synchronicity speaks to me, and I reflect on the meaning and significance of what we were doing, 170 years after this tragedy in my ancestral story. I spoke these reflections as I walked back up the path away from the burial place.

“I acknowledge the hardship and the grief, the injustice and unfairness of my ancestors' lives: the choices that they weren’t able to make are available to me now in my lifetime. Every choice that I have in front of me, I recognise that my ancestor didn’t have that choice, but I do.

I’m stepping into the freedom that they had taken from them. I can’t really imagine their lives, not really. I’ve done my best throughout the story I have written over the past few months, and I’ve been as accurate as I can. But the hard truth is that their lives are unrecognisable from my life. And the lives they lived here in Hunslet were unrecognisable from the lives they lived when they were children, before the Enclosures, when they grew up in their rural communities, on the land their ancestors had farmed for generations.
They were forced into the heart of the Industrial Revolution here in Hunslet. Much of the industrial past has been demolished now and rebuilt, but I can still see the poverty around me. There is a sadness here, a sadness for me at least. These people are right on the edge.

This is the legacy that so many of us are carrying within us: the poverty, the hardship, of the workhouse, of shame. But these are burdens we no longer need to carry. The ghosts of our ancestors, who are hiding in the deepest, darkest corners of our beings, steering our decisions and beliefs, are waiting for their stories to be uncovered. They are waiting to be seen, heard, witnessed, and for their trauma to be released through us. Once the story is up in the light, it is possible to fully step into the new story.

Here in the 21st century, we live in a world where the paradigm is shifting. Standing on that tiny patch of ground where my ancestor James Henry was buried represented exactly what is going on for me in the world, and in my world.

This graveyard, as it turned out, was the perfect place for me to spend Imbolc, as I am living in between two stories. The old story, the old world that my ancestors got caught up in creating, is falling away. We can see the structures buckle and crumble around us. It is scary watching these systems collapse. We are in a polycrisis, with ecological, financial, government, healthcare, and education systems all buckling under strain.

Within me, too, there has been a crisis, as the old story falls away.

Standing on that patch of ground, I embodied the old system, and what was so terribly difficult about it, and the impact this had on my ancestors. But this is the old story. There is a new one emerging, and I felt that as I walked back up the path out of the graveyard and made my way home. I felt a lightness as I passed the patch of snowdrops on the side of the path and watched a woodpigeon fly through the trees in front of me.

My ancestors helped build the old paradigm that is falling away. I am here building the new one.

The trauma these people experienced is still playing out today. It is time for it to be released.

I found myself here after over three decades of asking the question: what did our ancestors have when they lived so close to the earth, and what have we forgotten? This line of enquiry has taken me to learning about the lives of my ancestors before the Industrial Revolution, when people lived close to nature. And learning about the severance from their land and the forced migration to the mill towns of the north of England.

I am lucky to have been born into a century with limitless opportunities and possibilities. As I walk back up this graveyard now, I’m stepping into those.”