Lencten
The spiritual spring season and the lengthening of days - a new group . . . in the offing.
Welcome to the February 2026 newsletter where I am offering something new this month . . . hoorah hoorah . . . which begins in the thick of a cosmic meltdown. And a continuation of the last newsletter - Revelations. Thank you to the three friends mentioned in this newsletter - you know who you are . . .
My thanks, as always, to those of you who continue to send me cups of tea via the Ko-fi site, which you can do by clicking on the cup below, and to those who are paid subscribers.
Thank you for the ‘likes’ on the last post - it was drawn to my attention that the comments were turned off. So I will endeavour to tick all the right boxes and get that working again - I like the ‘likes’ and the comments!
Happenings - The new Lencten Group
Lencten - I have set up a new weekly online group which will run for the period covering Lent from Ash Wednesday 18th February (6-8pm) to Wednesday 1st April. Its purpose is to give us the opportunity to welcome in the lengthening days of the spiritual spring season. There is more below as to how this ‘arrived’ and more details on the website where you can also book a place.
The reliable Shamanic Sundays group continues this Sunday 1st February which is not only the traditional day to celebrate Imbolc but also a Full Moon in Leo. Times are 10am to 12.30pm - you can find out more and book a place here.
Lencten
Continuing . . . the 12 Holy Nights
Before I get ahead of myself with the NEW, I wanted to continue the 12 Holy Nights experience featured in the last newsletter which was sent out midway through the practice on 1st January. As a reminder, the last newsletter featured ‘The Lamb’ as a sign during the preceding month, how William Blake showed up again and time had slipped out of itself - most noticeably at the beginning of the 12 Holy Nights which started on Christmas Eve whilst reading Tom’s Midnight Garden and the appearance of an angel on the grandfather clock face, with one foot in water and one on earth.
The 12 Holy Nights continued with more synchronicities but to keep this newsletter succinct I will only mention the final events of January 6th, which is Epiphany and January 7th - Distaff Day.
On January 6th I return to the labyrinth which I had visited on 28th December as a ceremony of sacrifice (referencing The Hanged Man tarot card). This time I am with a friend and we are marking the turning of Venus from a morning to an evening star. It is dusk, 4.36pm being the exact time when the turning happens, and we process, with the stress on the last syllable, the sacred spring water and a lantern into the labyrinth to mark the occasion. When we get to the centre, or still point of the labyrinth, we drink some of the sacred water - pouring the water from one vessel, the bottle, into another, the body. This is a ritual or ceremony that is an attempt to honour that which is taking place in the heavens - as above so below.
Later, in the evening, I decide to pull a tarot card because I hadn’t had a dream the previous night. I cannot believe it - the card I pull is Temperance which, as you can see below, is an angel pouring sacred water from one cup into another and having one foot in water and one on earth. This mirrors the angel on the grandfather clock face in the book I read on Christmas Eve who also has one foot in water and the other on earth - so the 12 Holy Nights were topped and tailed with the same image.
As if to confirm this synchronicity, the following day is Distaff Day (the traditional day when women start spinning again after Christmas) and I go and see another friend to whom I relate the above tale. She doubts my information about the tarot card so goes and gets her own pack which she doesn’t even need to open because the tuck box of the pack has Temperance on it. Need I say more?
Ritual
Following these events I feel that I don’t want the 12 Holy Nights to end, not least because during the whole experience I felt like I had been held within a deep spiritual net, that it was very much a prophesy, for me, of what lay ahead. So I create a ‘continuing’ ritual whereby every evening I would listen to ‘A Ceremony of Carols’, of which there are 12, by Benjamin Britten. Simply until I emerge from the ‘spiritual net.’
Slowly, I begin to ascend, as if in tandem with the growing light of the year, which by now is palpable. About a week later I decide to take a walk with the intention of ‘processing’ with intent. To ‘process’, again with the stress on the second syllable, moving through the event as if it were a procession or ceremony. My intention is to ask for an ‘insight’ into the future. As I’m walking I completely forget that this is what I am doing and near the end of the walk I have my ‘oh I’m nearly home’ feeling and am not paying much attention. Then I catch a gleam of light between two buildings, but continue anyway until my ‘conscious mind’ kicks in and I retrace my steps, walking backwards to see this -
It has such a William Blake feel to it - the golden sun set with a vertical beam of orange light above it and a line of cloud strung across the sky between the two roofs.
Then I remember that my intention was to ‘process’ in order to gain ‘insight’ and this action replicated the Temperance tarot card experience above. It is as if someone has said to me, by way of instruction ‘Look back at all that you received in the 12 Holy Nights and the future will become clear’ - after all, the whole process, with the stress on the first syllable, was to foretell the coming year, month by month, or zodiac sign by zodiac sign.
So I go back to the notes I took again, I see the correspondences of the books I read, the music I heard, William Blake, the tarot cards, the dreams, the ceremonies and processions. I sit with them each evening, again accompanied by Benjamin Britten’s ‘A Ceremony of Carols’. Another week passes after which I happen to come across a Choral Evensong programme, on Radio 3, which was broadcast at Epiphany on January 6th - there is a reading on Epiphany from the practical mystic, Evelyn Underhill, who was writing about a century or so ago, which is sandwiched between two sublime choral works. I drift into a meditative state and a memory from two years past where yet another friend and I crossed our foreheads with ash at a sacred well on Ash Wednesday floods back into my minds eye - I wrote a newsletter then called ‘Ekstasis’ which elaborates on that ritual.
Lencten arrives
At this point it occurs to me that the ‘ritual and ceremony’ need not end. I had decided to continue the ritual following Epiphany until Imbolc, which is this weekend . . . but I want more ritual and ceremony after that, because that is what keeps me spiritually lubricated. And so the Ash Wednesday memory gave me that option - I could follow the weeks through Lent from Ash Wednesday to Easter and it would be good to do it with others too. So the ‘Lencten’ offering arrived - Lencten which is an old word with links to the lengthening days and the season of spring. I hope to ‘temper’ (as in Temperance) the offering with a modern approach to Lent - for example, using meditation, journeying or walking in nature as an act of prayer, rather than actually praying in the usual sense - although I don’t want to preclude that either. And, of course, Temperance is the sort of thing you do, or try to achieve, during Lent . . .
Cosmic Meltdown . . . a sign of the emergence of the NEW
Of course all this is also tied in with a collection of cosmological events bunched together. As I write this, Neptune has moved into Aries. Saturn will follow on 14th February and they will conjoin at 0° Aries on 20th February. Meanwhile, there is a New Moon solar eclipse in Aquarius on 17th (we can’t see it in the UK), Ash Wednesday is on 18th together with the Sun entering Pisces and the Moon moves into Aries on 19th. If you don’t know anything about astrology all the above is simply a combination of ‘new’ cosmological events happening very close to each other - this usually signals something momentous down here on our Earth - we simply have to wait to see how things will pan out. But in my own personal earthly existence it signifies the beginning of a new chapter which I hope to fill with ritual and ceremony in the form of practical mysticism or, as my December 2025 Newsletter title suggests, ‘A melding of spirit and matter’. The Lencten group will be based around ritual and ceremony, practised to honour spirit in matter and matter in spirit, or spirit matters. More on that in future newsletters . . .
A final note on Temperance . . . the word. It is most often related to abstinence, self restraint, moderation and balance, coupled with a lot of patience. All these words feature as themes within Lenten practises and the origins of the word temperance are linked to time, measurement, and stretching. Temp as in tempo, which is ‘timing’ in music nomenclature and stretching or measuring as in the drawing out of time of a period such as Lent . . . and the lengthening of the spring days. And so we come full circle to ‘time’, ‘time within time’, ‘time out of time’, ‘the stretching of time’ and ‘time no longer’ which the the angel in the clock face and the Temperance tarot card were hinting at all along . . .
Thank you for reading . . . Mandy
I find it heart warming that at the end of your walk you turned back to then view the heavenly sunset. The colours! They shine out in the darkness -offering so much courage. Thank you Mandy for your soulful richness.