Blessed Imbolc

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From The Belly of Mother Earth,
may the flame of Light grow strong and brilliant
to enlighten your path and inspire your life!

A Blessed Imbolc to my pagan friends! Blessed Lughnasadh to those in the Southern hemisphere! The above wish I read in a forum post by one of my Italian Ara friends. I think it's beautiful, so I like to pass it on.

I celebrated Imbolc with the Olympia group in Amsterdam. It was a beautiful ritual, but also a great learning experience. Imbolc celebrates the goddess when she is pregnant: the promise of new life, of spring coming. We had a pregnant woman in the circle, which gave an extra special feeling to it.
I cast the circle with my athame. I had found a lovely way to do that online: casting the circle thrice, once for the maiden, once for the mother and once for the crone and their energies. I adapted the words a bit to make it my own.
The altar looked good, with stuff from all of us there. I brought my Millenial Gaia statue, my little cow (milk is an Imbolc theme), a green spring puppet and a yellow table runner.
We did a very nice pathworking from the Pagan Dawn magazine. In it we got a gift with a message. My gift was a wonderful silver spiral. The sacred spiral is an ancient symbol of growth and evolution. It dates back many centuries and has been used by the ancient Celts, Greeks and many other cultures and peoples. As a witchcraft symbol it represents divine energy and the cycle of life, of death and rebirth. When drawn clockwise, it's said to bring things towards you, and when drawn anti-clockwise, it pushes negative energies away from you.
We each brought a cup with cotton wool. We charged the garden cress seed on the altar to awaken the numen (earth energy) and then put them on the cotton wool. While doing that we were thinking of an area in our life that we would like to grow or come into fruition. My seeds are already starting to germinate.
For cake & wine we had fresh juice and delicious bread. We gave thanks and opened the circle. After a chat and a cup of tea we each went our seperate ways.