A Symbolic Look at Goundhog Day

This essay is featured on Episode 1 of the MeadowSong Podcast. You can listen on this page, the MeadowSong Podcast website, or most major podcast platforms.

Today is Groundhog Day, and I am reminded of another Groundhog Day many years ago, and being in the car with my father that morning, and him saying that we’d be having six more weeks of winter before the arrival of spring because the Groundhog saw his shadow that morning. As years went by, I learned more about Groundhog Day and continued to delight at this quirky ritual, especially since Punxatawny Phil and I shared the same home state.

My father has always had a certain reverence for Nature’s holidays. On solstices, he would comment to my sister and I about it being the longest night or the longest day of the year, and on walks in the woods behind our house, he modeled a respect for the natural world, not only as an rich ecosystem to admire and preserve, but as a source of wisdom from which we might learn if we could quiet ourselves enough to listen to what it had to say.

When I was in high school, my father held a Candlemas celebration with some other naturalist friends of ours. On the night of February 2nd, we lit candles and voiced intentions we had for the new year. That dinner was, for me, the beginning of a far deeper appreciation for the significance of early February, as I began to learn more of the cultural and spiritual traditions that have centered around this time of the year. 

But it wasn’t until later, when I had my own home and held my own Candlemas dinner with friends, that I learned that Candlemas was a feast day in the Christian Orthodox calendar. Also called the Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus, and the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, it marks 40 days after Christmas, when the baby Jesus would have been brought to the temple for presentation. Today, observers of the holiday light candles in dedication to the God-bearing mother and feast in celebration.

The lighting of candles in early February, however, precedes Christian tradition. The ancient Romans had the festival of Lupercalia which involved rituals of fertility. Celtic tradition had Imbolc, an homage to the fertility goddess Brigid (who the Catholic Church later adopted as St. Brigid, patron saint of, among other things, newborns and midwives). These early observances included the blessing of seeds and the purification of planting fields. It is also said that shamans of ancient villages would set out in early February to scour the countryside in search of hibernating rodents that may have left their dens – a sign of the approach of an early spring – coming full circle to our present day celebration of Groundhog’s Day.

February 2nd is halfway between the Winter Solstice – representing death in Earth’s lifecycle – and the Vernal Equinox, representing its birth. So, as my father suggested when we spoke of it recently, we can think of early February as the point of conception for the new year. 

Groundhog Day falls on the second day of the second month of the year. The number Two, of course, is the number of partnership. It represents the relationship between who we have been and who we are becoming, and the relationship between the ego and the soul. In the case of most life on Earth, it takes a partnership to conceive of new life. 

Two is also the number of duality, and to be conceived and made manifest in the world is to come into a world of duality – light and dark, good and bad, life and death. Following this logic and the teachings of the mystical traditions, two is also then the number a paradox, and wholeness is never found on one side or the other of duality but only in the space in between. And so we find ourselves, presently, living in the spaces inbetween the opposites of duality: we are somewhere in between birth and death, heaven and earth, and our souls are experiencing life somewhere between the space of consciousness and unconsciousness. Of course, new life is conceived in the space in between… in the merging of opposites.

As a boy, the material logic of the Groundhog’s prediction system never made sense to me. I thought the presence of a shadow should mean more sun, and more sun should mean spring is closer. Of course, this isn’t how the astronomy works. But I also wonder now if the shadow isn’t also representative of something new that we might be conceiving during this time of the year. Indicative of one of those great dualities, the psychologist Carl Jung used the word “shadow” in reference to repressed parts of our psyche that have fallen into unconsciousness due to the ego judging them as unsavory. For example, if I learn as a child that it is bad to get angry, feelings of anger fall into my shadow (the part of me that I don’t want to bring into the light). The thing about our shadow, is that it is also the part of us that possesses great power and potential for transformation. When we can bring our shadow into consciousness, we are giving birth to a new part of ourselves and we become more whole.

Isn’t it true that, when we are setting intentions for a new year, we are choosing to become more conscious of something that has been neglected, or perhaps some untapped potential waiting to be developed? So perhaps the Groundhog seeing his shadow, only to return to his burrow for another six weeks, is a way our culture has chosen to represent our capacity to see a cast out, or latent piece of ourselves (which, by the way, could cause mischief in our lives, should we choose to ignore it) and then sit with that shadowy part of the Self as it gestates and incubates in preparation to emerge as new life.

So to celebrate February 2nd this year, I’ve asked friends and family to share with me intentions they have for the new year, so that I may hold a space for those intentions and let them come out through the piano. 

Until next time, I wish you all things best and beautiful.