Photo by Zhi Kang Chua for Beltane Fire Society

The Winter Queen arrives in summer’s world and knows he is the end of it. He fights the forward action of the Wheel like a dog tethered behind a moving cart. He is not the spirit of past Winters, givers of harsh frosts and blanketing snow, but a much younger thing. Fearing the leaves falling and flowers withering, he brings us a season of suffocation; the tumbling disorientation of tepid grey days, in which instead of resting, the land stagnates. His existence raises the question – how do we cope when we define ourselves entirely by loss? 

Personal grief is an earthquake of infinite momentum. We lose our community, friends and family to deaths both physical and emotional. We do not lose them not once, but a thousand times, as we stumble on in the world and ricochet off the pieces of themselves they left behind. Yet since the advent of the digital age, we have borne this weight alongside a newer and more insidious type of grief – a global grief. 

All past generations have at some point believed their world was ending. But now, with unceasing access to an unprecedented volume of information that details the people, animals and plants lost forever, the end of everything no longer feels like a possibility, but an undeniable reality. Accepting instantaneous answers and forgetting to ground ourselves in connection with our Crones and the endurance of community elders, we become paralysed by the scope of global grief and our individual helplessness to prevent it. 

My Winter Queen’s journey is not about defeating this grief. It is about acknowledging its presence and learning how to keep moving forward alongside it. 

In parallel to our Summer King, I’m a small animal veterinarian. In my life, I’ve had the privilege to help sick and dying people and animals, and this work has shown me death’s many faces. I know death as a thief better than I ever wished to. I’ve also seen its hands work kindly. For those lucky enough to live full lives, death can alleviate suffering, preserve peace and retain dignity. Whether forseen or not, every goodbye should remind us that the rude beauty of life is in its impermanence. We can’t stop our Wheels turning, but we can remind ourselves to appreciate the joy of waking up every morning. 

We can remind ourselves that by viewing our time as finite, we are cheating ourselves of the perspective to see the elements in our lives – unjust systems, festering emotional wounds, the blockades we put in the way of our dreams – that must come to an end. Our rage against the dying of the light has driven the worldwide increase in life expectancy, literacy and access to nutritious food, paired by reductions in child mortality, global extreme poverty, and biodiversity loss. 

This Samhuinn, the Winter Queen invites you to explore death and grief in their contradictions. How do they teach us both to hold on and let go? How do we come to terms with the fact that the death of an individual may be meaningless and unfair, or a final relief? How do we accept that grief in any form is crushingly painful, but not something to ignore or avoid? How can we use our community’s memory to honour the names of every life that has passed, and wield this against society’s treatment of people, animals and objects as disposable? 

My name is Izzy Adams and this is my eighth BFS festival. Each festival I’ve been a part of has filled me with reasons to hope for our future, even in tumultuous personal and global times. It is my honour to embody your Winter Queen this year. Please feel free to reach out to me – I’m so excited to hear your stories and create something beautiful together.