Revelation
Time . . . and time no longer
Welcome welcome . . . to 2026 and the very beginning of a new year. This is the January 2026 Newsletter - which follows on, somewhat, from the December 2025 Newsletter “A melding of spirit and matter” which you can read here if you feel the need for some background.
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News of happenings is still restricted to the Shamanic Sundays group which is this Sunday 4th January 10am to 12.30pm - you can find out more and book a place here.
Revelation
I begin this newsletter referencing the day before the last newsletter was sent out - 3rd December - because it is the significance of that event that sets the tone of the ‘revelation’ which is the theme of this newsletter.
I am out walking on my way to collect my local eggs. As I wander up the lane there is a cacophony of magpies darting back and forth and rattling their shrieks at one another. This stops me in my tracks, not least because there are more than a few . . . more like ten of them. I make a mental note to look up what ‘ten magpies’ signifies in the well known rhyme - One for sorrow, two for joy etc.
Within seconds there is a cyclist bearing down on me. Said cyclist stops and I realise that it is the woman who cares for the chickens who lay the eggs. She is late for a meeting in the village and has left the eggs inside her house so offers me her house keys, which doesn’t feel right, so I tell her I will mooch about in the wood for a while (thinking I will revisit the oak leaf being burnt into the bracket fungus of the last newsletter) and catch up with her (and the eggs) after that.
The lamb
Off she rides and onwards I go with a slightly altered course of perambulation. As soon as I step into the woods I’m alerted to a flurry of feathers from a very large black bird (a raven I think) and a magpie (one for sorrow) off to my right. There is a sheep on its side with it’s legs stuck out looking a bit dead and I assume that that is the case. I stand still for a moment because I’m not sure what to do and it’s a bit shocking . . . thinking the birds may have been scavenging. So I drop my ‘thinking’ brain and open my ‘conscious’ mind and ask, of the sheep, what it would like me to do. At which point one of it’s legs crooks at the knee and I’m aware that the deadness is actually aliveness.
I approach the sheep and she struggles to get up. She is lying backwards on an incline and so cannot any purchase to get up . . . and is under a low branch . . . so to help her is tricky. To cut to the chase I realise, as I circle the problem, that she has had a lamb, which is definitely dead, and this is what the birds were scavenging. So I get on with it and push the sheep up from the back, she gets up and runs off through the woods, as is the way with sheep. I contemplate the lamb, offer a little heartfelt compassion to it and its demise and then leave. The body of the lamb is food for other creatures after all.
After collecting the eggs, I make my way home and I’m drawn to the new hazel catkins in the hedge (initial photo at the top of the newsletter) and at this point I’m nowhere near connecting the dots . . . catkins are also known as ‘lamb’s tails’.
When I get home I look up what ten magpies signify and the rhyme goes as follows:
ten magpies is a surprise you should be careful not to miss.
I have no idea what ‘surprise’ it is that I should be careful not to miss and, as is the human way of things, I leave the whole episode to stew in the background because I have the December newsletter to prepare for delivery the next day.
Philip and Philippa
Through the rest of December up until Christmas Eve I am occupied with three books. The first is the penultimate Book of Dust - “The Secret Commonwealth” by Philip Pullman with the William Blake epigraph
"Everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth.”
which I wrote of in the last newsletter. The second is the final Book of Dust - “The Rose Field” by the same author, which I tried to read slowly, but in the doing of, failed spectacularly. The third book is “Tom’s Midnight Garden” by Philippa Pearce, a book that is well known but I hadn’t ever read. To summarise, this book is about a boy who time travels via a grandfather clock that strikes 13 times after midnight - it has an angel on it’s face which refers to a passage in the Book of Revelations in the Bible - the passage being Rev. X. 1-6. And its pendulum is engraved with the words “time no longer” which are the last words of the passage. Essentially the book is about how time ‘doesn’t exist’, or that we are simply living one aspect of a life that we orchestrate for the purposes of our existence as eternal beings in the image of God, or consciousness. We are simply an expression of an existence . . . that resides everywhere and at all time . . . or in ‘time no longer’. The Philip Pullman books have a similar trajectory . . . in my humble opinion.
The Twelve Holy Nights
I finished “Tom’s Midnight Garden” on the evening of Christmas Eve, this being the beginning of the Twelve Holy Nights of Christmas as expounded by Rudolf Steiner. I had decided to follow this alternative system of ritual practice as well as my usual omen walks and dreaming which, for those of you who don’t know, is a practice whereby an omen walk and a dream are taken for each respective day and night of the twelve days and nights of Christmas to foresee the coming months and year ahead - the first day and night represent January, the second February and so on. In Steiner’s practice the holy nights mirror the constellations of the zodiac, beginning with Capricorn which covers the 24th/25 Holy Night. This period of time, in all practices, is known as a ‘time out of time’ or . . . as a ‘time no longer’.
As Steiner’s system starts on Christmas Eve I was very alert to possible insights at this time . . . one in particular involved a spine tingling rendition of the carol called “The Lamb” by John Tavener whilst listening to Carols at Kings on the BBC. It has a haunting yet beautiful melody - it uses dissonance within the harmony which creates the ‘haunting’ effect. You can listen to it here performed by Voces8.
As I am still immersed in this practice it is a little early to start to ‘see the bigger picture’ of the ‘revelations’ involved. However, on Boxing Day, which happens to be my birthday, I don't appear to have a significant or apparent omen walk or a dream for that night so I decide to draw a Tarot card. And it is significant - The Hanged Man - the meaning of which is to ‘sacrifice’ or ‘surrender’ or ‘gaining spiritual insight by stepping outside normal reality’. In my book that is the equivalent of being in ‘time no longer’ . . . it is also number twelve in the Tarot major arcana.
The following day I have a palpable sense that my perception has shifted in some way. I can feel and sense this shift but I don’t have anything concrete to show for it. Then my ‘known’ world crumbles after two dreams on the night of 27th/28th which, in essence, turn me round and upside down, a little like The Hanged Man. One involves me returning a ‘book of power’ to the shelves in a school library, unwillingly, as if it is a sacrifice.
On the day of 28th, I have “The Lamb” carol as an ear worm in my head so I look up its origins and find that the lyrics are from “The Lamb” in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & of Experience. Returning once again to William Blake after last months newsletter . . . you could have knocked me down with a feather, as the saying goes.
Then I realise that the Little Lamb, which is what the carol and poem/song are all about, is the sacrifice for the sake of eventual victory, as in the crucifixion of Jesus, who is considered the Lamb of God, which happens in Aries, at Easter, which is the Holy Night of 27th/28th.
Next I decide it is time to look at the astrology in my birth chart. Again I am blown away as that night there is the beginning of an exact conjunction, to the exact degree and minute, of my progressed Sun (my homeopathic birthday) on my natal Jupiter in Pisces (the age in which Christian religion arose and is now ending as we move into the age of Aquarius). This very simply means that my birth day Sun placement has progressed over 63° (years) to where Jupiter was when I was born. Its underlying meaning is being expanded (Jupiter) in the area of spirituality or theos or wisdom (Pisces). This exact conjunction lasts for one week, from Sunday to Sunday . . . it is a time out of time (Sunday to Sunday), within a time out of time (the Twelve Holy Nights), in a ‘time no longer’. As near to a rebirth as I think I’ve ever undergone.
I decide, on that momentous day, that I will walk with intent, not to seek an omen but to celebrate a rebirth and to ‘sacrifice’ my spirit to something earthly, fluid and eternal - unstoppable, irrepressible, ever moving, timeless water, where Pisces reigns supreme. Pisces is a water sign, ruled by Jupiter and Neptune, god of the sea.
I go to the local well / spring and collect a bottle of water from the source, follow the springs effulgent course (as a stream) back down the hill to a small labyrinth that sits on it’s banks, and walk the water into the centre with the simple intention of ‘sacrifice’ in my heart. When in the centre I take a sip of the water and touch some to my third eye - a sort of self-baptism.
I walk back out from the labyrinth to the stream on it’s edge and on the other side and see, to my great surprise and wonderment, a statue of Mary (I assume) holding out her hands as if in supplication to the flowing waters at her feet (another reference to Pisces, which represent the feet of the human body). I’ve been here before but hadn’t really clocked the statue.
As I write this I am only on the Tuesday of the Sunday to Sunday week within The Twelve Holy Nights. I’m in a place of stillness which feels as if it is underpinned by the churning of a great spiritual engine. The ongoing references to William Blake, the astrological markers, the books, the dreams, the primrose, the lamb’s (tails and tales), the sacrifice, the water, the time outside time, the time no longer, the time within time . . . all of which began with ten magpies which told me to look for
“a surprise you should be careful not to miss”.
I don’t think I’ve missed the surprise although there is more within this whole episode that I don’t have space to include here. It must be a revelation . . . and there’s more to come as the practice doesn’t finish until Epiphany on 6th January. More anon, no doubt.
Thank you for reading and happy new year . . . Mandy.