Omen Days As Embodied Divination

Starting mine with a confrontation at the recycling bin

Are you feeling that discontent or deflation that comes after Christmas? A sense of “What now?”

There is, in fact, a Celtic practice that meets us in this liminal space to answer the question in signs and symbols.

Omen Days are the 12 days (also known as the 12 Days of Christmas or of Solstice), beginning today (the day after Christmas) and extending to January 6.

In a nutshell, we look for signs and symbols that cross our paths each between today and January 6. We take note of them and jot them down in our journal. Each day’s sign is an omen for the corresponding month of the year (ie, 12/26 = January; 12/27 = February, etc.). It is a living divination practices that comes from your own embodied experience.

Traditionally these are signs from nature, but I believe that anyone or anything that crosses your path and catches your attention on these magical days can be an omen.

And sometimes the omens can be excruciatingly ordinary—unpleasant even.

On this first omen day of the season, I had a confrontation with a woman at the recycling station in town. She was putting a plastic bag full of foul used toilet paper and assorted rubbish in the bin. When I tried to stop her, she indignantly protested that it was the day after Jesus’ birth and I should be nice to her.

I told her that I wasn’t religious in that way but that I deeply cared about the earth and that by her putting that in the bin, the entire contents would likely end up in the landfill. She put it in anyway.

After she left, I took her mess out of the bin and loaded it in my car so I could put it in the trash at home. I had this nagging feeling as I drove off that there was something more I could do about the way people who, theoretically, want to do something good by recycling end by sabotaging the whole process.

As soon as I sat down at the coffee shop, I knew what I needed to do. I am am clearly passionate about this—I mean, why else would I ruin the day after Jesus’ birth for a complete stranger? And I can write. I typed up a quick pitch to the local newspaper offering to write a piece with a clip-out graphic on recycling for Earth Day. Just an hour later, the pitch was accepted.

It feels like January for me is to be a rededication to the earth. I will start collecting data and setting up interviews for this recycling piece. I will do a long procrastinated peace tree ceremony that is part of my priestess training. And I will be on the lookout for other ways to honor nature in January.

And the omen didn’t come delivered by a bird or seen on the tracks of a deer or even in a sun rising or setting in a way that sparked something in me. It came at the recycling bins.

What omens will find you over these next twelve days? Let’s pledge to honor them even when they come packaged in ways that aren’t as sparkly as we’d like. I included a sunrise shot I took at the top of Big Bearpen Mountain on Christmas morning in the hopes that some of my omens will emerge from this natural beauty the surrounds me.

Please let me know what omens find you!