Keeping the Flame on a Tuesday
My shift is the seventh night, which falls on a Tuesday more often than seems statistically fair.
I have kept the seventh night for six years now, which means about a hundred and ten shifts, and I have never written about it, partly because flamekeeping is a private practice and partly because what actually happens on a shift is so unremarkable that it seems absurd to describe. But it is Imbolc, which is her day and the anniversary of our cell, and the other keepers asked, so here is a Tuesday.
Dusk
I get home from work around half past five, which in February is just before dark. I do not do anything for the flame until the light has actually gone; the shift runs sunset to sunset and I am a stickler, which the others find funny. I make tea. I feed the dog. I change out of work clothes into the jumper I only wear for this, which is not a robe or anything so dignified; it is a green jumper my mother knitted, and my mother was a Kildare woman who lit a candle for Brigid every year of her life and would have had strong opinions about my calling it paganism.
At dark I light the lamp. It is an oil lamp, brass, from a junk shop, because I like the sound the wick makes and because a candle in a lantern felt too much like a decoration. I light it from a match, not a lighter, and as it catches I say her name three times, once for each of the sisters in the old glossary: poet, smith, healer. Then I say the thing we all say, which is on the flamekeeping page and which I am not going to repeat here because I have said it so many times it has worn smooth, like a step.
The first hour
I sit with it. That is all. I have a chair by the window and the lamp goes on the sill, on a tile, and I sit and look at it and at the dark outside and I do nothing. For the first year this was agony. I am not a meditator. I fidget. I would last about four minutes and then get up and do the washing-up and feel guilty about it. Now I can do an hour, most nights, and I do not know when that changed, which I think is how these things change.
What goes through my head is not holy. It is the day: the email I should not have sent, the thing my sister said, whether the dog's limp is worse. The difference, and it took me years to notice this, is that I am thinking these things in front of her. Not praying about them. Just thinking them in the light of her lamp, in the knowledge that this is her night and I am keeping it. And somewhere in the hour they sort themselves, not because I have solved anything but because I have let them be seen. She is a healer. I think this is what healing looks like from the inside: not being fixed, but being witnessed until you can stand up.
The second hour
I write. She is the poets' goddess and this is the part of the shift I came for and the part I would never have kept up without the shift. I have a notebook that is only for flame nights. It is nearly full; it will be the fourth. Nobody has read any of them. Some nights it is a poem, or what I would call a poem if I were braver. Some nights it is a letter to her. Some nights it is a list of people who are ill and need her, and that is where the brat Bríde comes in, the cloth from Imbolc Eve, which lives folded on the sill beside the lamp and which I hold while I read the names. Several of the names are Hearthkeepers. One, since the autumn, has been Hazel. I have written her name every seventh night since the diagnosis and I will go on writing it for as long as it takes, because that is what the cloth is for, and because writing it is the one thing I can do from here.
The third and fourth hours
I make something. Brighid is the smith as well as the poet, and I am not a smith, but I am a mender. On flame nights I mend: the hem that has come down, the dog's blanket, the button, the book whose spine has gone. There is a basket of mending that only gets done on the seventh night and so is never quite finished, which I have decided is correct. The forge is where the raw becomes the useful by heat and patience. A darned sock is a small forge. I believe this and I am aware of how it sounds.
Then I read, usually something old, usually Irish, by the lamp, until my eyes go. Then I bank it.
Banking the fire
I do not keep the lamp burning all night; I am not going to sleep with an open flame and neither should you. At bedtime I turn the wick down until it is a bead of blue and then I put the glass over it and put it out, and I say thank you, and I say the thing you say to a fire that you are banking rather than killing, which is until tomorrow, and then I go to bed. Technically the shift runs until the next dusk, and I think of it that way; all through the next day at work I am still keeping her night, just without the lamp. Then at dusk on Wednesday I hand it on, in my head, to Ash, who has the eighth night and a cat.
The eighteen others
This is the part that I did not expect and that has become the whole of the practice for me. On any given night, one of us is doing this. Not the same thing; Rowan sings, Wren gardens by torchlight, one of the keepers in Scotland does a full ritual with quarters and everything, and one in Ohio just lights a tealight on the kitchen table while she does her children's homework with them, and all of those are keeping the flame. But one of us is doing it. Every night. For six years. And on the twentieth night nobody is, because it is hers, and I lie in bed on those nights thinking about the lamp I have not lit and feeling her keep it.
Gerald of Wales saw this at Kildare in eleven-eighty-something and wrote it down as a curiosity. Nineteen women and a fire. I do not know whether the fire he saw was older than the saint, and I have stopped minding. I know that the thing he saw is still happening. I know that it is happening in my flat on Tuesdays. I know that when I light the lamp I am in a line of people doing exactly this, back through the sisters who relit it in 1993 and the ones who kept it until the Reformation put it out and whoever the nineteen were that Gerald saw, and possibly further, and that none of them were doing anything remarkable either. They were sitting with a flame. They were thinking about their day. They were mending. That is what keeps a fire alight for fifteen hundred years. Not devotion, exactly. Tuesdays.
Bríd was one of the four at the original kitchen table and keeps the seventh night of the flame. Her mother's jumper is holding up.