Warm, green, gentle greetings your way in this fine season of Bealtaine. I hope that the greening around you has been a verdant reminder of the beauty nature effortlessly ‘is’, and that the rise of Spring spiraling its way towards Summer is lifting your gaze and your heart upwards and outwards for we have now entered the solar days, the light half of the year, and the time of the big sun (as opposed to the small sun of autumn and winter, of course).

Once, not so long ago, calendars were marked by hawthorn blossoms, the return of birdsong, and the moon’s waxing and waning, among myriad other natural ephemera. Many believe that our kin likely made collective agreements to celebrate the change in the season in a responsive and relational way with the Earth, coming together only when these markers had presented, as opposed to on a regularly scheduled or finite date. I have seen some understandable discourse recently regarding the rigidity of dates on the Gregorian calendar we now use in the West to celebrate around the wheel. I use these dates purely out of a modern pragmatic desire to coordinate a celebratory moment with other humans, for each celebration truly is a ‘season’ and like all beautiful, natural things, it arrives in washes and waves, stretching up from the Earth and unfurling from its branch in its own right and divine timing. The celebration or season of Bealtaine, of the Spring lifting towards Summer, is in part an invitation for the greening and growing within you to meet and honor the greening and growing around you. Every season is therefore an invitation towards awareness, presence, and connection with the ever shifting world we inhabit and share. What a treasure it is to live in this way.

At the start of this Bealtaine season I was honored to attend a beautiful retreat in West Cork, Éire, and share story around the fire under a glorious full moon that truly shone as a beacon of balance from the cosmos, glowing behind wafting clouds, moving softly from shine to shadow. It was my pleasure and honor to share three stories around the fire; the origin of Éire, Aengus Óg, and the Twelve Wild Swans. This was a retreat designed in devotion to the nettle, however gorse in its shining beauty really captured the heartmind of our retreat holder, my beloved sister, Tara Lanich-LaBrie (the land was aglow with gorse golds) and so it was that gorse and nettle were honored, as well as magical Irish seaweeds, and the endless bounty of medicinal and nourishing herbs that live among the countryside folk of Éire.

To dance and sing with women is always a treasure, and this retreat truly offered us space to be nourished by the land, sea and sky, and to nourish them in return, with our hearts, voices, and offerings. For it is always a relational practice, to lay on the land, and I was grateful to be among sisterkin who understood this implicitly. What a respite to be surrounded by women who came from their many professions and myriad responsibilities to coalesce on this beautiful, green, peninsula with hands and hearts effortlessly offered in gentle service and deep gratitude for the opportunity to live simply and walk gently among the wilds of such a beautiful, tranquil, and for many, deeply ancestral place.

It was a treasure to wash my face in the predawn dew of Bealtaine while in Éire, and I hope it is not the last time that precious rite is undertaken by me and my sisterhood.

On our last day, we went to sea and visited the Southernmost inhabited Island of Ireland - Cape Clear Island (Oileán Chléire) a Gaeltacht places where the Irish language is predominately spoken while also viewing the Southernmost Island - Fastnet Rock. Shortly after leaving the hidden harbor of Baltimore, we made our way South and West, passing Sherkin Island to our right. Not 10 minutes beyond the harbor we spied large, slow moving fins, ancient black fins, and we had the great honor of seeing not one, but two large (15ft long) female basking sharks. Ancient beings, beautiful, gentle creatures, and soft filter feeders (plankton eating) of the ocean. If you aren’t familiar with these creatures, they are the second largest fish in the sea behind whale sharks and similar to those beauties, inspire awe and wonder among those of us who sing the song of the oceans. We also saw many coastal and ocean-faring birds and of course some playful and curious seals that day - beloved selkie kin.

While there, steeping myself in story and a daily dip in the wood-fired hot tub overlooking the sea (mostly filled with other wonderful women, though there was an occasional moment alone), I spent some time wondering and wandering about living cultures, ancestral walks, and what it is to listen to the sky, sea, and land. As though a mist, reaching softly into my consciousness, what presented were questions around what were my ancestors seeking? Not so much in the practical, though that of course always has a huge part to play (there’s no denying the realities of survival and safety) however this exploration was more regarding the philosophical questions of our existence, life, purpose, and capacity for connection and kinship with all we share our homeworld with. They, my ancestors, held my head and slowly turned it towards what they too had been seeking and looking towards, as though I was sitting among them and staring in the same direction. Universal questions, ponderances of all ages. The plants and waters had a lot to share, mostly through visions and feelings, and in response to my questions offered deep somatic transmissions of primordial connection and of change and the wild journey of being alive. Of course, as though in response to my question, I randomly(?) then stumbled upon this Japanese quote:

古人の跡をもと めず、古人の求たる所をもとめよ
Kojin no ato o motomezu, kojin no motomeshi tokoro o motomeyo
Seek not the way of the ancients, seek what they sought.
(Follow not the the footsteps of the ancients, seek what they sought.)

Matsuo Basho quoting Kūkai (空海, 774 – 835), a Japanese Buddhist

Basho, quoting Kukai (Kobo Daishi), spoke these words to his student, the samurai, Morikawa Kyoroku. The characters 古人, kojin means an ancient (great) person of the past.

This is exactly what I was feeling.

What were they seeking and how might we too look towards their view while removing any hubris and assumptions wrought by our modern minds?

The quickening is upon us, the rise of technology, the rise of robotics, and the era of AI. Our ancestors also witnessed technological breakthroughs and changes, and also dreamed of animate objects, and technologies that would lessen the burdens of their daily lives. I remember speaking to my grandfather in his late 90s about how the world had changed since he was a boy. He took me on a journey from a childhood without electricity to cars, the introduction of personal computers, flying on the Concorde, and then the internet. We discussed medical breakthroughs, surgical breakthroughs, and world wars. I remember being in awe of what he had witnessed and wondering if the same starkness of change might happen in my own lifetime; he assured me that it would. The elders have a long view, especially those with curious minds who stayed curious to the end, as he did. Recently I have been tracking the robotic rise and AI in particular, wondering more and more about this next race to the billions and trillions by the tech elite, and whether deep Earth connection and contemplative spiritual life will become a relic of humanity’s past. Whether my way, a path that walks in communion with the waters and the seasons, that stops to swoon at foxgloves and lilacs, will, in the not too distant future, be considered primitive and arcane, and that the storykeeping I adore and my devotion to the practice, would also be lost to the annals of time, in favor of all stories being held somewhere in the digital plane of existence. Will my beloved Celtic mysticism dry up and dissolve into the dust of the stars?

I wonder what the children of today will devote themselves to, and whether their capacity for art, music, dance, love, life, creation, and exploratory and critical thinking (and therefore our species capacity for all of the above) is slowly being eroded by the rise of our own technologies. No doubt it’s having an impact. I’d love your thoughts and reflections.

I see rapid, rapid changes upon us, and I notice myself in response turning more and more towards my mammal self, meeting my kin of bark and feather, scale and wing, to ground myself into this age and time. I sit with Celtic goddesses, queens, and seers of old and seek their counsel, asking for grace through change, presence to sit with the unfailing beauty of nature, and courage to strengthen my heart in the face of those that still, still, after all this time, seek to harm others or pursue massive financial gains only for their own wealth hoarding and pleasure seeking.

So, I turn to poetry, and now more than ever, am seeking what our ancestors sought.

On that note, let’s take a wee wander down this curious path with some poets who were grappling with science and technology during their age. The first poem is 228 years old.

The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth (1798)

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

This sonnet is only a little younger, written 197 years ago. The opening is pretty stark to me, implying that science, like time, alters and destroys that which is in its path…

Sonnet – To Science by Edgar Allan Poe (1829)

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

115 years ago in 1911, Rudyard Kipling wrote the Secret of the Machines considering the impacts of the new technologies of his age. That one is worth reading though is long, so I’ve linked it above.

We know that more than 2,500 years ago Greek mythology was exploring the creation of artifical life and the ‘mythic automata’ so we know that as ever, we are living in a world of our ancestors dreaming, all of this foreshadowed in myth.1 It might be a strange pill to swallow, yet I feel it so viscerally in my own experience of this world we share.

Wait, I can feel someone asking… “Heather, what does this all have to do with Bealtaine?” A fine question, and thank you for posing it! This is the season of rising and blossoming, the time of the sun. It is the beginning of the masculine half of the year. Given that so much of this technological rise for me is driven by the masculine, and while we are in the masculine days of our year, I am exploring (with great intention) what these changes mean both to myself and to our globe as a whole, partnering with the season of warmth and action, to weave the mystical and animistic into the practical path of daily modern life. I am not someone who currently lives in an isolated place, surrounded by nature, insulated from the wilds of the world. My day job is steeped in attempts to collaboratively solve societal problems, and I bring my sacred, animistic, storykeeping lens to boardrooms and investment meetings. For a long time a part of me was desperate to find solace from the pace of the modern world and to depart from it completely. What I have discovered, and essentially concluded, is that I was born for this time and to isolate myself would be a profound disservice to all the kin I came in service of. I am here to listen, to convene, to connect, to lead, to educate, to share story, and to help women in power rise while supporting men in power to relinquish the reigns and trust that we simply can’t solve our issues with the same thinking (and leadership) that got us into this collective clusterf&*$. So I bring the joys of the season, my contemplative spiritual path, the stories of my lineage, and decades of experience forward now in an attempt to be part of the changes that need to be made on this our sweet planet - to resurrect, conserve, and update our ways of being. My hope is that I can do this without losing sight of all I hold dear, which is where my slow, intentional, practice of prayer and communion with ancestors, myth, lore, and legend comes into play. I hope that helps answer the question. Celtic lore and wonder, woven into daily practice. Animism in action.

A Blessing

May this divine season of Bealtaine nourish and enliven you.

May your heart branches blossom and your heart roots stretch far beyond the confines of your own vessel such that connection with all kin is effortless, present, and deeply loving.

May we all have the courage to speak and stand for those and that which we care for.

May all blessings of verdant connection, warming sun, and long days bring more song, story, and wonder into your home.

May the song of the flowers bring you home to yourself with every petal, every color, every moment, you witness the ephemeral treasures they are.

May you know the deep wonders of the wild oceans, clear skies, and starred heavens.

May our art, our hearts, our voices, and our dreams be an effortless offering of love and service of divine, sacred duty.

Your sister of fin and feather, sun and surf, wave and wonder,

h. xx

This post has been sitting in my drafts for a almost a full moon. I am so sorry for the delay. My life has been full, so full, with new work, that the little time I have to myself I have needed for rest and when some energy presents, to continue writing my novel. Please know that you, this space, our time together is precious to me, and to it, to you, I will always return. Fatigue has been a constant in my life these past years during this midlife metamorphosis towards my second spring, and fatigue has risen again, guiding me towards rest and nourishment, asking me to step more fully into contemplation and art, which creates a tension within and without. The year of the fire horse has me on a gallop and I am dearly hoping it will pause long enough for me to hope off and watch it run, rather than have it run away with me.

I have a day job. It is work focused on resourcing and connecting people around the world who are dedicated to regenerative, restorative, sovereign practice and is focused on collaboration in service of all our kin. It requires me to stay away from the news, the words of the zeitgeist, so I can be resourced enough to listen spaciously and closely to the voices of women living in war zones, teenage mothers who were married as children to middle-aged men and want better for their daughters1, artists seeking to weave us into presence and resilience with the wonder and pain of existence, and to connect those who can help in large ways financially to invest in changing the damaging systems that keep us trapped and poisoned, towards a world where all might flourish. A world where the waters are balanced, the air is clear, the soil is strong, and the trees and all they hold, live in safety and wellness. It is a life of service that I take seriously, and yet, as I head towards my 47th birthday next week, I notice myself and the ship of my life, starting to tack, to turn towards ways in which I might continue to be of service and not at the cost of my health but in partnership with it and with the women I love who are exemplary wisdom keepers, to create and hold space, make space, and inspire, and uplift, and actively dream, and write, and sing, and dance, and create together. For it is only together that we will call this new world into being and guide the youth of today, so confused, so scattered and separated, so screened and dopamine addicted, so desperate for connection and communion, towards the ancient mammalian call of kin that lives dormant in their bones and alive outside their doors.

The work I do and the way I walk are deeply intertwined. Spiritual people, deeply animistic people, walk among us and do all sorts of jobs in this world, quietly listening to the plants and the stones, the call of the birds and the soil and the seas. Lately I have felt the deep need to weave these walks into one, the night art of my words and heart and the day work that requires so much yet is a task I still undertake. This sharing below holds both, and is an expression of these mutual truths.

Though I am an edge dweller, I am not without awareness of the wonders and horrors of this world. It is dwelling at the edges that resources me such that I can participate in a good way, a true way, and uphold the sacred while swimming through the profane. Some of us came to uphold the sacred. It is our mission and our calling, our path and our purpose. Our sensitive nervous systems are not made for the frontlines of the masses but are made for the frontlines of every heart, every grief, and every query that might bring us closer to the softness of our loving selves and the truths that dismantle bombs and build bridges between conflict, abuse, pain, and rage. My mystical path, the deep green ancestry that weaves my words, shapes my face, and beckons my song, requires this sensibility of me and just as the druids of old, asks that I walk always in two worlds, upholding law and lore, and to this, I surrender.

As we have moved through the peak of Imbolc’s season, passing through the balancing days of the equinox and we now spiral forward towards the bright solar days of movement and growth. Here in the North, blossoms are making way for budding fruits, leaves are unfurling and flickering their green song on our trees, and dormant plants are stretching their new shoots towards the rains that come sporadically here in the high desert plains.

We had almost no snow this winter. No water. I saw dandelions, our sweet earth stars, blossoming in the middle of February and could hardly believe my eyes. It is already so, so dry where we live and as of this writing, our snowpack is at 22% of median level, driven by a weak La Niña pattern, raising significant concerns for water supplies, agriculture, and of course summer wildfire risks. The lowest of all recorded years in Colorado. Many of us wonder if this signals a very hot summer and strong wildfires on the way. A dear sister in Oregon recently shared that there had already been two wildfires with evacuations this year. During winter. Meanwhile, record snowfall has hit the NorthEastern Americas and record rainfall resulting in significant flooding just took place in the Hawaiian islands. I could go on…

The weather is on the move. So too are the humans. Estimates come in around 376 million people worldwide who have been displaced due to extreme weather conditions. This does not necessarily include those displaced by conflict or persecution which adds millions more. There is more active conflict between humans on our Earth at this time since the second world war. A war which ended only 34 years before I was born. A war my father was born during. A war my grandfathers fought in.

War. This is a poison of the patriarchy2 and I am so deeply sickened by its spread. I work with people all over the world and wherever there are women in positions of power, healing is undertaken. Communities are made stable and well. Collaboration gets underway. This is not a random pattern I have read about, this is my lived experience witnessed from years in this work. War destroys our world before, during, and after active conflict3. I feel emptied by it and it comes from within us all, as does peace. This work must be done collectively, and I feel we all have our small part to play, wherever we are in this shared world.

So, as we ebb and flow through the seasons (and changing patterns of weather and climate), seasons our ancestors celebrated for millennia and marked their farming by, seasons that are now changing and possibly for certain, a question rising within many of us is how might we stay connected to the shifting sands and general unpredictability of what is, while acknowledging the atrocities and honoring wisdoms of the past, as we look toward an unknowable future?

For now, for me, it all lives within the present. As the masculine, solar calendars shift and change, including our own beloved Celtic Wheel of the Year, we are invited to meet each dawn anew and turn towards that cycle which is still constant, dark, beautiful and feminine, the moon. The Spring Equinox arrived just after the Pisces new moon of March. We experienced severely hot days here in Colorado that felt less like the burgeoning awakening of Spring and more like a strange Summer preview that almost forced my body into action she was not ready for. For others, winter’s hold has remained steadfastly gripped to the lands they live upon, and the green sprouts and blossoms so readily found around me are sorely missing from their landscapes. As my body tries to make sense of the lack of cold, I notice myself turning ever more deeply towards the moon and her wisdom for soon, perhaps sooner than we know, it may be impossible to claim the dependable, seasonal, changes in the calendar our ancestors experienced. The light of the sun shifts in its constancy, and the response of the Earth and her systems may no longer be predictable, yet, of course, there will be places on our planet beloved where the four seasons will still arrive and make their way around the wheel.

Water wisdom also offers us guidance and solace during these times. To have power while being adaptable, to nurture effortlessly, without striving or straining, and to remain flexible at all times. Compassion, humility, awareness. Boundary, creativity, reverence. This is how we must raise our children. To not be afraid, but to be present, humble, and resourced. To know where their inner strength lies and to train them to see that in another. To work together. To laugh as one. To help where needed and to create with great and glorious abandon from the channel of their own spirits. To play instruments. To fail and fail again, joyfullly. To commit to excellence. To fall in love with what is, today, for tomorrow does not offer us any guarantees. To listen to the learned wisdom of their elders, living and deceased. Let us teach them our stories and the stories of our people, such that these stories might live fully and be narrated into their world, silver threads knitting pasts into futures. Inward, and onward, together.

In the spirit of community, sharing some recent reflections relating to this time from my treasured sisterhood:

Chest Full of Stars

Boundaries Are an Art Form

With all that is happening in the world right now, I had to ask myself, is a post on boundaries timely this month…

Read more

5 months ago · 2 likes · 1 comment · Rayann Gordon

The Mythoanimist Path

We Aren’t Here to Heal. We Are Here to Create.

Every tradition that hasn’t been flattened by Western psychology or colonized by academic frameworks knows a truth about the spiritual path: You don’t start with the otherworlds. You start with the ground beneath your feet…

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6 months ago · 33 likes · 16 comments · Juniper

The Charm and the Cure

Into the Mist: The Féth Fíada and the Art of Not Knowing.

When mist descends onto the Irish landscape, fields fade into outlines, roads disappear and distance gets hard to quantify. But mist has an even more potent significance in Irish mythology; it’s known as the Féth Fíada: a mystical mist or shroud associated with the Tuatha Dé Danann that concealed their presence from the human eye…

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5 months ago · 3 likes · Regina de Búrca

The trees, in their infinite wisdom, respond easefully to the world as it changes, devoid of our human judgements and fears, for they know the deep cycles, that not all is meant for forever, including their own species, and so the lesson is to live and blossom and ripen and wither for now, while all still can, in the cycles that are known to them, in beauty, and in love, without knowing what the future holds. For perhaps the great warming will call forward some species to thrive and flourish, while others will retreat into the annals of time, as so many others have, and so many will continue to do.

When people ask ‘What Earth will we leave to our (human) children?’ I hear a far more important question, booming into my consciousness from the ethers, beyond the veils;

‘What (human) children are you leaving to this Earth?’

Perhaps it is simply a counterpoint to the rampant anthropocentrism of our modern histories. Perhaps it is more. However I would encourage every parent to take heed of this question and its implications for neither can exist without the other well. As we seek to resurrect the beauty, health, and balance that once was in our non-human natural world, none of this will matter if our species does not also evolve into authentic, collaborative, connection.

For the stones and their old tales will remain, but I wonder who will be there to listen.

For now?

Poems.

Poems of the season.

All blessings of the season be yours.

Soon, soon, a return to Celtic tales for in two weeks time I will be sharing old tales by the Beltane fires of a dear sister’s retreat in the SW of Eire, and I look forward to recounting them, and that adventure, here with you.

Until then,

I wish you peace.

I wish you health.

I wish you space to hear the still song of the sunset.

I wish you strength to come through this time.

I wish for you softness where there might be atrophy, water where there might be fire, and fire where their might be stagnancy.

I wish you all the blessings of this season of awakenings, birthings, beginnings, and beloved balance.

May your spirit be nourished, your hands be held, and your heart filled with the sacred songs of life.

Your sister kin of star and sequence, firth and fire, violets and vigiliance,

h. xx

Sharing: The Wild Alchemy Practitioner Training Program

For those seeking to explore authentic spiritual leadership in a highly ethical, grounded, and alchemical container, my dear sister Juniper Stokes of Alchemessence and The Mythoanimist Path has a beautiful and powerful offering at hand and space is filling quickly.

I cannot recommend her enough; she is grounded, aware, wise, kind, and an exceptional alchemist and teacher. Her incredible decades of experience have been distilled to create this one of a kind program and if you feel pulled towards leadership and the etheric, I highly encourage you to join her on what will undoubtedly be a life-giving and life-changing journey.

The Wild Alchemy Practitioner Program is a yearlong online practitioner training in soul-centered healing, spiritual leadership, and the art of transformation.

“I believe re-ensoulment — at the individual level, the community level, the planetary level — is not a luxury. It is the work of these times. And I believe it begins with each of us becoming more fully, freely, and unapologetically ourselves.”

• Juniper Stokes on The Wild Alchemy Practitioner Program

For more: https://www.alchemessence.com/wild-alchemy-apprenticeship

Ceud mile fàilte a chairdean agus fàilte gu fèis Imbolc!
One hundred thousand welcomes friends and welcome to the festival of Imbolc!

Ever spinning, ever spiraling, the wheel of our seasons circles us onwards now through Samhain’s thinning towards Imbolc’s beginning. This marks the next cross-quarter festival on our calendar and during this liminal time of earth awakening and the soft lengthening of days, the festival of our most beloved wisdom keeper, guide, protector, healer, source of inspiration, and exalted one, the great and holy, Brigid takes place. We come together to honor and celebrate the peak of winter as it begins its descent towards the rising of Spring, Brigid’s return, and the continued return of the light and life of the Earth. Each year, wrapped in these thinning weeks between the seasons of Samhain and Imbolc,

I sit with Brigid and
The Cailleach.
Seeking to more deeply understand
their relationship with each other,
their wisdom teachings,
and the hidden mysteries of this treasured threshold time
between their reign over
the dark, cool, feminine
half of our seasonal year.

It was their counsel that drew this space, Animisma, deeper towards a woven sharing of the embodied, intimate, deeply relational experience of living a life that is seasonally aligned. It is in communion with their wisdom that this space becomes even more of an altar to the Earth, in veneration and loving adoration, of the holiness of all life.

It is by their call that today we explore lessons of leadership that hold us blessedly within the finite, material realm we live within. Aligned with and enlivened by sufficiency.1 A realm that when authentically partnered with, offers us all we need to live a deeply connected, richly held, humble, joyful, and beautiful life. A realm worthy of our care, respect, and devotion. Spiritually abundant and materially sufficient? Yes please.

Hag of Wonder, Hag of Night

The Cailleach has been my keeper and guide this past decade, and no doubt in all living memory of this life’s walk. It is her voice that calls me home, her wild dreaming that knocks at the dreamdoor of my heart each night, her rusted teeth that tear my pains apart, and her blue hands that mold me back into form, again and again. With her hammer and staff, this great and fearsome creatrix thwacked and carved the mountains, waterfalls, and islands that claim my bones and my voice. Perhaps she also took the sharp, stony point of her staff and scratched a disc of life into the ice, its edges marked with points of fierceness, nourishment, wildness, wisdom, unexpectedness, and an unyielding sovereignty that beckons we all consider and heed her way, one that would never contort to to the will of another, honoring her will as power for all that walk as purely as her plaid, white and untethered as the cold winter blanket she lays upon the world, tucking us in to the necessary death and dreaming time of winter. Her song has called me home time and time again and it is upon this ephemeral disc I dance and cry, heal and wail, roar and slumber, love and wonder, dying over and over in honor of my own untamed, glorious, and free wild twin. She who is ever guiding me home. She who sees the beautiful wildness in you, and calls it forward, whether it is stag or bear, doe or hare, owl or salmon, hawk or mouse. For our wild selves are thirsting for each other and the Cailleach can only speak to them, for they alone speak her native tongue, the language of cosmic origin, the dust language of creation.

It is from here, with her, fallen to my knees that shiver and blacken in frost’s gnawing bite, having voiced the great interconnectivity this whole life’s walk, that I began to ask what leadership at this time, could be, in union with all indigeneity that lives in holy kinship with our beautiful world, both within and without. Beyond the mind of man, beyond the corruptions and interpretations, and beyond the straining and divisive exploitations. Beyond the shame of this our modern artifice. And if, where, and how, we might continue to seek its resurrection within ourselves for in my witnessing of our modern world it is only through inner discovery (one’s own awakening) and direct communion (one’s own connection) will the traction of any reverent choice hold.

It is only through inner discovery and direct communion will the traction of any reverent choice hold.

Brigid

If you’ve joined me in this mossy, cliffside corner of the internet’s slippery web for some time, you will know that each cycle of Imbolc brings a welcomed directive from Brigid as she returns and rises, the seasonal mantle of wisdom passed from The Cailleach into Brigid’s powerful and protective hands. She sparks my mind flame and as the dreaming dust of winter is burned away, oracular imprints are left as glowing labyrinths, the paths ahead pulsing and flickering as embers in my cerebral hearthfire.

One year, she beckoned embodied poetry and dance.
One year, she beckoned we rise.
One year, she thrummed through my mouth and offerings tumbled onto the page.

This year, Brigid is a wayshower of feminine leadership, weaving both the primordial wisdom of the Cailleach and her own exquisite guidance into my mind’s eye replete with care, compassion, hope, and strength. The leadership we crave today has been honed and polished across ages and epochs and it lives within the bone memory of us all. Whether we lead only ourselves, our families, or nations, the work of the leader is one of embodied compassion, profound listening, known kinship, dignified care, and sympoesis2. Its guidance is sourced from the widsom well of ‘all-flourishing’ and clear sighted interdependence where all decisions are centered in this space.

A note: I can only speak to the modern west, the culture I was raised in and live within. I cannot speak to other cultures that we share this world with who already/have never not operate/d in this way of deep partnership.

So, Brigid, our exalted one, beckons we look deeply within, relinquish any ‘power over’ we may hold, in any place or space, and calls us to action.

Walk as you would want a leader to walk.
Speak as you you want a leader to speak.
Act as you would want a leader to act.
Love as you would want a leader to love.

And in doing so she invites us to release the cynicism and judgement we so readily spit from our pain out into the void in desperate hope of being heard, seen, or healed.

Oh sweet void. How much you hold. How patient you are.

Forgiveness is both path and teacher. Grief is both path and teacher. Intimacy is both path and teacher. Kindness is both path and teacher. As is fear, hatred, wonder, and ego. From these paths and teachers perhaps we can learn all we need to know about stewarding our living Earth and being in communion with our non-human and human kin alike. Perhaps, drenched in grace and adorned in the beauty of integrity we might truly blossom into the best version of humanity. Words are pretty, however, as Maori elder Bruce Stewart once said;

“I don’t trust words. I’m frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles and fantasies. As Maori, we already have the words, the concepts. But we can’t rest on what our ancestors gave us. The work has got to be done.”3

I’m frightened too, Bruce, and I agree deeply on the work. The words alone have gotten us into endless festering pickles and dark, isolating fantasies. Even the smallest glance towards majority academia or the ‘fix-it-tech-bro’ culture confirms the widespread addiction of hubristic intellectualism. Surely it is through our being and connecting we will demonstrate a way forward out of whatever darkness each human finds themselves navigating?

The way of reverent leadership must strike a chord within your heart alone and from there its harmonic radiate outwards, as rays from the precious sun that lives within you, seeking to shine from behind the heaviest clouds and darkest storms. Seek no permission! Claim your sovereign authority to be in loving kinship and reciprocity with all that is around you.

Brigid in her endless generosity and from her inspiringly magnanimous heart invites us to lovingly deny the extractive, wasteful, and cruel in favor of the healing, beautifying, and hopeful. If we need competition to feel sharp and well honed, may we challenge ourselves into ever more wellness, kindness, and love. Ever more forgiveness and compassion. Ever more grace. What might the world look like if our primary global challenge was to see who could appropriately4 reforest the fastest, who could make springs potable again, who could safely replenish their aquifers5, or who could invite the fish back into their rivers6 first? What about who could remove microplastics from the soil, air, waters (and all bodies) with ease, who could create nourishing communities, or who could live robustly without the use of destructive chemicals across the entire chain of their life? Need a physical challenge? Dump that gym membership and see how quickly you can collect rubbish from every park, roadside, path, and waterway in your community. Make it a sprint! Make it a marathon!7 Planting trees and removing invasive species is physical work. As is lovingly brushing the coats of horses rescued from abuse, building a home with one’s hands, or dismantling rusted infrastructure in favor of returning a space to the wild. If you are a warrior, train in the arts of defense so you know viscerally how important it is to avoid conflict and war. If you’re capable, offer to carry groceries for every elder in your neighborhood. That might keep you busy, connected, and strong. Challenge yourself to learn the names of every tree, plant, and person on your street/in your building and say hello to them with authentic care as the kin and space-sharers they are. Dance vigorously under the dark sky of every new moon as an offering of thanks and grace for this precious planet we call home. Dance daily and laugh as much as possible for we all know that deep laughter alleviates suffering; a critical balm for every heart. Finnegan agrees, no doubt.

Never give up. Please.

My dear sister Regina de Burca (she has a glorious Substack - highly recommended) recently reminded me of Ram Dass’ beautifully simple and loving quote “we’re all just walking each other home” speaking to our shared journey. No matter what you think about ‘other’ we’re all in this together, and my most desperate prayer and hope is that we all claim our mantle, whether it is dragon or dragonfly, and each day choose better, choose integrity, and choose for the wolf, the wanderer, and the wind. And if you can’t see the way forward, perhaps ask ‘what would Brigid do?’ for we are all sacred and spiritual, all emanating at different frequencies along the light spectrum of existence. Not one of us, not one, can know what is truly best for another, save to live in a healthy world full of mutual honor and respect for each other, knowing that honor and respect for our shared waters, earth, and sky is one and the same.

May the armor of our hearts soften towards each other, and our smith craft be used to recycle metals already mined in service of sufficiency. I tire of the ‘abundance’ mindset of modern western capitalist (and new age coaching) movements. We have an abundance of food and yet in the US one third8 of it goes to waste annually. We have an abundance of riches and yet the gap9 between wealthy and poor, at least in the US, continues to stretch and grow. Clearly abundance has not equalled compassion. Surely, could we not instead center the limitations of the Earth to provide, and reimagine this axis into one of scarcity vs. sufficiency? We absolutely can flourish in a space of grateful and nourishing limitations. Such a respectful reciprocity.

The extractive and exploitative corrupted colonial machines of humanity have pillaged the glory of our sweet planet all the while twisting our minds towards the bottomless hunger of ‘endlessness’ (masked as abundance) so they can continue their rampage despite us having but one planet to share and partner with (and no, absolutely not, am I interested in supporting mining the moon10 or asteroids for ‘more.’ Hard pass. And while we’re off planet, I don’t recall voting for or being asked whether I would approve of filling our exosphere with satellites, ruining our views of the night sky11 - when were the whales, moths, migratory birds (kin who navigate by the stars), and us collective humans consulted? They weren’t. We weren’t.12 That ends now. Welcome to the great Age of Aquarius).

Joyfully, may we uphold the notions of sufficiency, flourishing, and resiliency, all themes echoed by our brilliant Brigid. Lovingly, you are invited to explore what flourishing in the finite might mean, for you, under the light of this month’s Wolf moon.

I ask a lot of humanity. I know I do. I’m also never going to stop and I know I’m not the only one. Just because my words can be floral and lyrical, does not mean I don’t take this business of action seriously. The heart of this matter is that I have loved our shared world and sought to create space for its flourishing my whole life, and I will never stop. The Earth is in a constant state of regeneration and it is our actions that stunt and damage this state, often now to the point of destruction. We did this. So let’s give it the old college try and do our level best shift and resurrect.

If you do not know or if you are confused as to what is next for you, perhaps Brigid can be your guide, for she is magnificent, compassionate, endlessly kind, wise, expansive, and will spark your mind’s flame. If she seems a little out of reach, my suggestion would be to visit the nearest tree and see if you can model your life on its way of being. If vegetation is out of reach, may you be touched and blessed by the wisdom of a sunset or sunrise. If you are in a place of endless midnight, may the stars and the cold winds be your guide. And whatever you do, pause first, invite in your breath, and read the labels on everything you buy. Avoid plastic everything (yes, even recycled plastic fabric is a terrible and deeply damaging fallacy) as much as possible (microfibers are now within us all and this madness must stop). Be a leader for your self, your home, your garden, or your community. Be a human modeling what it is to receive the wild flames of awen, of Brigid’s divine touch, and still go grocery shopping in a modern context and via your wallet teach the producers that you will not tolerate their expedient packaging and cheap, life-destroying fabrics any longer because it is clogging our arteries13 and preventing birds from breeding14 among myriad other horrors.

Brigid calls us to invite the sacred into the profane, for truly, they are one and the same.

This is the animist way.

Blessed be her name.

A Blessing

Beloved Brigid, shining Queen,
Exalted one of love and flame.
May our homes and hearts be blessed this eve,
May we know your wisdom, and take aim,
T’ward all that is beautiful, precious, fleeting,
All that is honorable, free, and wild.
We are humbled by your love, your presence, your kindness,
May we know your strength and feel your smile.
Beloved Brigid, shining Queen,
Exalted one of love and flame,
May we learn from your guidance, magnanimous leader
May your blessings of compassion upon hearts rain.
I have lit a candle for my home, your home, and for our Earth home this Imbolc eve, lifting prayers of peace and magnanimity from Brigid across the vast breadth of our species.

Brigids Cross

If you have a moment. don’t forget to clean your home and if you can, light a white candle as an offering, an invitation, to welcome this innovative, wondrous, protective deity into your home and across your threshold such that all you hold dear are warmly held in her embrace. My Brigid’s cross is permanently placed above my front door - perhaps you too might either find or weave one to invoke protection and blessing from this our Prime Goddess of Poets.

And if perhaps you do admire,

That this great house did ne’er take fire,

When sparks, as thicks as stars in the sky,

About the house did often fly,

And reach’d the sapless wither’d thatch,

Which dry spunge the fire would catch,

And where no chimney was erected,

Where sparks and flames might be directed

St Bridget’s cross hung over the door,

Which did the house from fire secure.

- 18th Century Irish Poem, author unknown (to me)

---

The Seven Elements Prayer by Clann Bhride

Brighid of the Earth, bless me with prosperity, bless those I love with prosperity, bless all the world.

Brighid of the Waters, bless me with health, bless those I love with health, bless all the world.

Brighid of the Sun, bless me with beauty, bless those I love with beauty, bless all the world.

Brighid of the Clouds, bless me with wisdom, bless those I love with wisdom, bless all the world.

Brighid of the Winds, bless me with vitality, bless those I love with vitality, bless all the world.

Brighid of the Stones, bless me with strength, bless those I love with strength, bless all the world.

Brighid of the Spirit, bless me with illumination, bless those I love with illumination, bless all the world.

Bless all the world x

May the blessings of this season of restoration be yours, dear human kin, and in whichever ways you celebrate, may they be celebrations of peace and an offering of kindness and kinship into whatever world and whatever time you find yourself in (this is being written during the hibernal solstice in the Gregorian year of 2025). If you’re looking to embrace rest and contemplation, you’re also ever welcome to spend a few minutes with this wee podcast or a story…

r e f l e c t i o n s

Somewhere in the recent steps of this life’s walk, the desire to teach/guide from a human lens began to quickly dissolve. The fizzing sting of release has been pricking itself all around. Risen hairs calling in response to fierce winds, cold mornings, and unseasonably warm days, they are speaking more than the words of man ever could. Slowing to listen, the sensations are unescapable… The bubbling and popping of my worn hubris and the sloughing off of my ‘knowing’ are revealing the raw pink skin of a wild, untouched, storied being. The intimate, tender, epochal beauty of animal. Uncorrupted by the thinking mind. Washed over with lore and mystery, unable to enter the human prison of facts, she is teeming with primal verity.

Ever present. Ever free.

Stopped by a sliver of moon at dawn. Willingly caught in its net of invitation to enjoy a few moments of delicate and exquisite connection. One being staring towards another, each captured in a thrall of grateful beauty and cosmic togetherness.

Called by an ending day. The fading chorus of light pulling the animal towards itself. Shelter or flight. Rest or play. Either way, the call is honored. The call is honored.

Kin to all. Never grasping, never hoarding. Simply living and trusting and moving through the great consonancy of Earth life. Always stopping to smell the rose. To witness the fallen tree. To honor the animal lying on the roadside. To listen to the wind. To wonder with the cloud. To remember all the lives lost be they whale, flower, human, or mountain. Always stopping to honor the needs of the vessel, free of the veiled promises and fickle weaknesses of human language. And laughter, much, laughter.

Her walk is an analog wonder, calling me deeply home to a place where art is governance, humility reigns, and the hollow assurances of modern saviors are barely noticed as she busies herself with actual living.

Given this, it is becoming harder and harder to find words that hold meaning, outside of the ancient teaching structures of poetry, song, and story. Human-made pictures and paintings make sense. Nature’s sounds and rhythms align. The Frankenstein spell craft and dull mirrored pageantry of AI do not resonate with my particular harmonic. Spending less and less time in counsel with humans and more and more time in counsel with trees, horses, miniature donkeys, herbs, rivers, and stones. Spirit, too, of course, however, in a more raw and unencumbered way. My animal self requires this of me, and lovingly, willingly, I honor her.

This contemplative animistic exploration now shifts into its next permutation. An invitation to join me behind the word wisdom of humanity and to shift into that gorgeous bone song we all have, via the wonders of story, poem, picture, and presence, always and ever dancing, sleeping, and scrying around our beloved seasonal wheel. I do so hope you’ll continue to join me here, and that this creative undertaking might be both a spark and a balm for you.

All this being said… my first book finally breathes, a sweet darling held in the arms of my voice whose tendrilled word limbs are starting to spill and crawl onto the page… she tells me she seeks to be shared widely as she comes into being… she is much more courageous and open than me! I am so private, so quiet, and she is so available, so universal, so willing to be seen.

Soon, very soon, her contemplations will be offered in this space as we follow along with the writing, and we, she and I, dearly hope you’ll continue to join us as we come together into this new world. Our offering is one of unity, connection, beauty, and remembrance. I feel her excitement, and I follow her lead with great and unyielding devotion. Is this how human mothers feel about their children? I suppose it must be. For I adore her and hold her so closely, and am regularly reminded of Rumi’s words that though she comes through me, she is not of me. My spirited daughter of story and page.

My love.

b l e s s i n g s

On this longest night, may you and all you hold dear be blessed by the spark of life, a spark that has returned since the dawn of creation, a spark that will return all the days this beautiful, sacred blue planetary pearl spirals through the vast reaches of our cosmos.

May the peak of Samhain and the time of the Cailleach’s reign hold you and nourish you into restoration and sweet, glorious surrender.

May your love for the Earth and all her children remain steadfast and true, and may all your choices be those in service of intimate, tender, epochal beauty.

Seeing you quietly lit by the light of a trillion stars, your heart shining with grounded presence, your mind softened by the primordial wisdom of your animal within.

Your kin of shadow and shell, winter and wonder,

h x

Here in the Northern hemisphere, we have spiraled our way through the peak of the heat, of the light, of the life, and of the doing, and we have now arrived at the most excellent season of the dark, wild, feminine dreaming.

Samhain/Samhuinn.

The rising night.
The fading light.
The final harvest.
The time of the Cailleach.
The first and the last of our beloved, ancient fire festivals.
The ending and the beginning.
Our spiraling wheel brings us to the fluttering edge of the thinnest of thresholds. Worlds and realms whisper pale secrets across the mossy ears of time.
Flickering shadows cross the cold, wild places. Light, once hot and bright, now cools and fades, welcoming us into the slow and restorative time of our year.
The golden glow of Autumn lights a hallowed sky path each evening, beckoning we follow, we surrender into this next season.

Crisp-edged winds snake and curl their way around ankles, lifting leaves, brushing across bare skin with the edges of their sharpened, silvered fingers. Our tree kin explode, engulfed in rich flames of amber and gold, then murmur their way down into the sublime autumnal rot of grays, browns, and blacks. Hush, hush, they say. Walk quietly through our forested bedchamber, for we are all in need of the dark night’s mantle.

We are all in need of the dark night’s mantle.

As eyes close, the veils are revealed, a thousand coal lace curtains, thin as a spider’s setae, parting by silent drift, lifting you forth through the timeless doors of star and decay.

Can you feel the etheric royalty dancing darkly across these glowing liminal edges?
Can you feel the spirits, the ancestors, the fair ones, the dark ones, rise?

The wild rises tonight.
They are coming.
They are screaming.
They are laughing.
They are howling.
Crooning and calling to all that is wonderfully wicked, worn, wishful, and free.
Joan the Wad,
Queen of Pixies.
Nicnevin,
Queen of Witches.
Cailleach,
Queen of Winter.

I hear their faery host, the glorious sidhe singing, watching, and waiting.
Watching.
Waiting.
Peering.
Is it truly them I hear?
Or is it the crunch of frost underfoot?
Do they sound the same?
The ice clawing along the river’s edge and the cackle of the witch queens?
The soft slap of the leaves falling from oak, yew, birch, and blackthorn into a cold muddy puddle makes for a quiet rumble.
As does the creaking of the pines in the wintering air.
So too the cracking of a candle within a neep’s roughly carved mouth.

Crowsong.
Caw me into the darkness, great birds of death and night. Please.
I am done with the high solar time.
I yearn for the cave.
May the womb tombs loom and rise around us.
May we recover from the cacophony of life’s luscious blossoms.
May we receive rest and peace to balance the life and noise.
May we now slow and recover from the active madness of the days in the sun.
Nourish and heal us, long moonlit nights. Please.
Bless us with your quiet light of inspired reflection.
Fill our vessel bodies with your clarity, your grace.

Great Cailleach, great hag of the world,
clutch me at your bosom. Please!
May my cheek freeze red against the blue starkness of your infinite form.
May my pathetic desires fade in the face of your eternal sight.
May we never forget your stories of unimaginable creation.
May all the world know your unconquerable power.

May all the world know your unconquerable power.

Cailleach, Cailleach, we are readying for your annual reign.
Your season is here! Oh, beloved ancient, cosmic mother.
Fires, candles, and cauldrons stand at the ready.
Dry, kindled, and desiring of that first flint, first spark.
As the last of the croneswort is harvested, we seek your wisdom in our dreaming.
What portents might you share with us this night?
What futures might be flashed and foraged by our sleeping forms?
What might our sun-frayed minds divine, as you guide the delicate wisps of our visions?

This night is for shapeshifters, darkseers, and dreamweavers.
For nightdancers, starwatchers, and leafsingers.
For earthwalkers, kinseekers, and all souls from all times.
Be vigilant!
Be wary.
May your homes and hearts be protected from any that would run amok. May your offerings be sweet to those who walk this night.
If the ancestors and descendants of flesh and flame visit us this eve, perhaps a seat at your table can be set for them. Or a seat placed lovingly by your hearth. An offering. A remembrance. A small ceremony of acknowledgment for their formless selves. A ritual of love; that great serum of healing, harmonic of humility, and nectar of the goddess. Perhaps you will pour them a glass and toast to their memory! Their life! Toast your life. Strange and precious, fleeting and fragile, wondrous and mystifying, juicy and confusing as it is.

A toast!
To the mortals and the mirrors, to the saints and the sinners, to all who are eking out their way in the chaos of this world, we toast your memory, your knowing, and your song. We toast you for yesterday, today, and tomorrow. To those we lost too soon, we toast you. To those who lived long, we toast you. And to all those who are in need of love, may you be wrapped in a cloak of warm comforts this eve, and may you know your value, your worth, and your wonder this day, and all the days of your human walk.

For now, basking in the glow of our ancestors reminiscing, let’s light a flame and, through its warm portal of golden light, lay claim to the dark, delicious, divine, feminine half of the year.
The season of story.
The season of rest.
The season of gestation and the season of creation.

Here’s to Samhain.
Our glorious celebration!

Celebrate with Animisma

Lovingly offered your way are two wee podcasts devoted to this glorious portal and other musings from the past couple of years...

For the Druids

This is the most ancient of all our ceremonies. Three days of direct connection and communion with the otherworld while the veils are lifted and time is suspended. Three days to connect with all those who have moved into the beyond, into the ‘wider life’ across the borderlands of our world and the next.

As this is also the most private of our rituals and the most solemn, it is not generally performed in public. For those who are not of the order yet are interested, we, like so many, honor those whom we love in the beyond and perform a beautiful ceremony with flame and ritual gifts, and invite the spirits of the departed to partake of loving offerings. Great gestures of love. Feasting with the dead and divining the year ahead.

May you release all of your worries, fears, and burdens. May they be burned on the sacred fires and offered back into existence to be transmuted into offerings of clarity and beauty.

May you find, share, and radiate peace and may it reign, within, and without. May you be showered in blessings, and so too may your well and wise ancestors of spirit and bone be blessed with profound gratitude and offerings of love.

May the Oak, Yew, and Birch hold you, the sky bless you, the earth keep you, and the waters stir warmly within you.

Blessed Samhuinn!

My favorite tree near my home.. the wise and beautiful giant Weeping American Elm from a few weeks ago beginning her autumnal descent.

The Celtic Creatives

An Irish Samhain Ritual

A Chairde, Friends…

Read more

10 months ago · 374 likes · 39 comments · Jennifer Murphy

Though it’s linked above it felt important to share the full link here as well. A beautiful Irish Samhain ritual from the ever-wondrous . This ritual is exquisite in its simplicity and is highly recommended.

Samhain by Marilyn Hung

Come in! I knew you’d be here this night.
My, how cold your hands are - like blocks of ice!
Let’s close the door, keep the wind out.
The others are already here.
We’ve kept a place for you, here, by the fire.
Sit down, you’ll soon be dry.
Hear how the wind blows around the house,
Rattling the windows.
Good thing we’re inside, safe and dry.
I pity those who’s loved ones are out at sea tonight.
Still cold? I’ll put another log on the fire.
Let me tell you what’s been happening
Since you’ve been gone.
The harvest was good.
No-one will go hungry this winter.
The rain held off till the corn was brought in -
Blue skies all the way.
Remember how blue the sky was that day?
Not a cloud in the sky.
And the sea as still as a mill-pond.
the mill-race nearly ran dry, the rain held off so long.
Then it started to rain, and didn’t stop.
The river overflowed its banks.
No-one could have seen the storm coming,
It came out of nowhere.
Then the mist.
We saw you disappear.
Into the rain and fog.
We found the others in the morning -
The sea brought them home to us.
We looked for you all day,
Called and called, in case you were asleep somewhere.
We held a wake for you.
People came from all over.
Many a toast was drunk to your memory.
Grandmother McCready got a little tipsy,
Climbed onto the old oak table, hitched up her skirts,
and danced a jig.
You should’ve been here. You’d’ve died laughing.
Did you hear us calling you,
Where you lay, under the waves?

For the Witches

No, dear ones, I did not forget about you.
How could I ever?
You, in your midnight cloaks, cauldrons bubbling, brooms at the ready, smiling seductively at the bitter oysters, destroying angels, amanitas, and oh so many other delectable, dangerous fungi of the forest floor. I see you chatting with your kin of rot and renewal. I see you.
You, in all your deep and tender knowing, bones twitching, skin aching at the touch of the frosted air, shadows scratching at your dance cards, overflowing with the promise of revelry and festive cheer.
You in all your profound connection to our natural and supernatural kin, your love thumping through your chest to the rhythm of the owl’s silent flight, landing in your earshot, staring at you with her deep, ancient eyes.
You who knows the secrets whispered by the webs and weavings, the ancient codes carved by skittling beetles along the trunk of that wintered tree.
You.
Beautiful.
Exceptional.
Rebellious.
Free.
Mavens of magic and mayhem!
Happiest of new years to all the witches, wise ones, and seers this night!
May this next year offer you power and presence in honor of the wild, willful, watchful, wickedness within and without.
Blessed Samhain!

Our great seasonal wheel has spiralled us through Winter’s dark nights, Spring’s budding delights, and Summer’s clear sights, to bring us to our harvests that all take place through the gorgeous season of Lughnasa. This first harvest marks the hottest time of the year; the high heat closing of the dog days of Summer, ending the heliacal rise of Sirius’ journey across our sky. Sirius heralds the change in seasons, and from its bright distant call, we can know that as the light and heat will gently start to fade, so must we begin our harvests.

For those in the Southern hemisphere, you will be greeting the rise of Spring - see Imbolc for all things ‘you’ at this time.

Please take a moment to read Jen Murphy of The Celtic Creatives’ post about our beloved Lugh; it is well worth your while and includes an excerpt from her beautiful retelling of Cath Maige Tuired (‘Second Battle of Mag Tuired’) where Lugh looks to gain entry to the court of the Tuatha Dé Danann…

The Celtic Creatives

Lugh, our Shining One

A Chairde, Friends…

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a year ago · 9 likes · 2 comments · Jennifer Murphy

I also offer you two podcasts devoted to this festival:

Hoof and horn, hoof and horn
All that dies shall be reborn
Corn and grain, corn and grain,
All that falls shall rise again

Transformation, strength, accomplishment, pride, celebration of the first harvest, the grain harvest - Lughnasadh is a time for honoring all that has been achieved in the warmth of the summer sun, while starting our gentle walk away from the light towards the darker half of the year.

In this offering, we explore the story of Lugh, the Great Goddess Tailtu, and the festival celebrating their myth at this time of year. We pause through poetry and reflection to honor our divinity, wounds, and healing journeys. And we close with a rattling to honor the Sun Gods and the well Divine Masculine energy in our world. May you and all you hold dear be blessed by the radiance of the Sun, the Season, of the Ancient Ones honored by this festival, Lugh and Tailtiu. I wish you a beautiful, sacred, and health-filled high summer festival of Lughnasadh!

In Truth

Read more

Horehound, hollyhock, hellebore, and heather,
Delicate, medicinal, powerful, pleasure.
From ancient seed, we welcome such treasure, as
Horehound, hollyhock, hellebore, and heather.

Lilac, lisianthus, lavender, and lily,
We offer you our hands, truly, willingly.
Surely they are not real, such indelible beauties, as
Lilac, lisianthus, lavender, and lily?

Aster, agapanthus, ambrosia, and azalea,
To ignore your wisdom of humanity is a failure.
May you live into eternity, enchanting earth regalia, dear
Aster, agapanthus, ambrosia, and azalea.

Marigold, milkweed, meadowsweet, and mallow,
To say you delight would be insufficient, shallow.
We honor your medicine and teachings as hallowed, dear
Marigold, milkweed, meadowsweet, and mallow.

I could go on.
And on, and on, in
love and joy, in
reverent song.

Our flowered elders, our ancient kin,
To you, we owe most
everything.
It is by plants we’ve seen each age.
Be they saffron, soapwort,
sunflower or sage.

To you, dear kin, of leaf and petal,
Our lives, so small, mere cosmic pebbles,
May we claim our voice and in adoring you
rebel.

For in the face of all human darkness and pain,
You return each year, after blood, after rain,
To bring light and joy through the cracks and the rubble.
Food for the winged, and joy to the troubled.
Despite our weakness, our madness, our terror,
You make meaning of life, as an effortless carer.

I could go on.
And on, and on, in
love and joy, in
reverent song.

Let us scratch out our poems of justice and awe,
Collecting seeds to cherish, seeds to store,
We’ll teach our children to seek your wisdom.
A transmission of care and kindness as dictum.

Through each stage of life,
through darkness and strife,
through all they’ll explore,
You’ll be there with more.

Through all this strange, sad, and dark worldly weather;
We’ll honor dear,
horehound, hollyhock, hellebore, and heather.

Hymnus Floralis By H.L. Porter

For The Love of The Sun

The longest day is upon us. As this season of heat and light continues and plants come into their abundance, the wheel turns and we rise even more, unfurling ourselves fully to be nourished by the sun, joining every leaf, flower, weed, and tree in this annual dance of life. So, as we spiral onward and inward through the beautiful season of Beltane, meeting the wheel at the notch of the Summer Solstice, today offers us an invitation to pause, once again, and notice all that is blossoming around and within us. All that we have achieved to date this year. All that is fueled and revealed by the life-giving and life-sustaining power of our home star.

I find that it is also a wonderful time to consider who might you be being witnessed by? What kin and creatures are clawing at your edges and occupying your heart? What spells of Summer are inked upon your lips, and who might you whisper them to? How can this green warmth call you into even greater, even more natural, states of powerful and perspicuous presence?

While watering a budding potted yarrow on Monday, I was grateful to meet a baby katydid, the first of the season. A pale pastel green tiny leaf with legs (I believe it’s a type of grasshopper). We met while it was resting on the soft fronds of the yarrow. I honored what felt like an invitation to sit together, taking a few moments to witness each other and to feel the radiant warmth of the sun, the delight of the shade, and the feathery silk of the yarrow’s beautiful leaves. There I sat, and we looked towards each other for a minute or two. Just two random earthlings hanging out together on a hot Monday afternoon.

Sun, shade, yarrow, katydid. Repeat.

On Wednesday, while on a long evening walk with a dear friend, passing shoulder height grasses and rushing rapids carrying snowmelt from Colorado away from the mountains and towards the West, we walked alongside many young bunnies who stopped and stared at us as we drew closer, or, very cutely, turned around and hid their faces showing us their perfect white fluffy cotton tails. We passed the cormorant lake, covered in breeding couples and nests, walked over a couple of bridges and under a large freeway, and then at the end of our path, we witnessed a sight most divine. A single doe, walking slowly towards us along the same path, her form backlit to the West by the sun setting over the mountains. We all stopped and observed one another. I bowed slowly. Three female mammals (two human, one deer) taking each other in. There were no fast movements, no fear or concern, just curiosity and presence. She stayed for a while, watching us sit and enjoy our halfway rest, and then she slowly turned towards the thick lakeside brush and disappeared, as though walking out of our realm and into another. Vanishing, in the twinkling of an eye.

It is in this same place, with this same friend, that we watched seven coyotes playing on a frozen lake last winter. It was mesmerizing. Definitely play. They were jubilant, almost (perhaps) laughing with one another? The temperatures were subzero, the river was frozen, and on this lake, we saw them run that morning. I’ve never seen them again, though I know they are about based on the occasional small animal carcass and of course the signs warning people not to feed them. Winter coyotes. Yes please.

We are so fortunate to have such abundant natural areas close to our city. In the Spring, we and many of our human neighbors witnessed the birth and growth of two (I think?) Great Horned Owl chicks. These owls are magnificent and huge, with a wingspan that can reach 5 feet and feathers called ‘plumicorns’ atop their heads that look like feathered horns, hence their name. They hoot in the most classical sense of an owl, ‘whooo whooo’ it’s gorgeous (you can hear them via the link above). The chicks, like all baby owls, were a mess of feathers, and I missed them in their training flights as I was overseas. I wonder if this couple will return next year for their next wee brood. Great Horned Owls mate for life after all.

All of these wild, beautiful creatures inspire me endlessly. While we all have life and breath, may we seek to act in conscious, honorable, and connected ways, as much and as often as we can. And, of course, may we forgive our slips and follies, for we are human, after all.

Human.

Humanity?

Compassion, kindness, benevolence, empathy, tolerance.

The more I write with pen and page, the more I sit with poppy and sage, the more I’m not so sure that the internet in its latest permutation is a promoter of the qualities above, plus authenticity, patience, and grace. Regular cleansing of its sticky net feels like required, elemental self-care these days, with as much time spent outside when/if possible. Interestingly, for those of us who work with curses (or agreements/bindings/bonds/entanglements), it’s hard not to look towards this technology, what it tries to feed its users and what we have collectively created through its use, without seeing the erratic madness, hidden rage, and perverse desire for it (or the powers that be that leverage it as tool) to consume, well, us.

If I am to be consumed by a technology, may it be the divine dusky hoot of an owl. It has permission to consume me whole. Or perhaps by the gentle blinking of a sunset doe, that too is welcome to consume me. But the vicious madness of the news media and the fear-mongering algorithms and dopamine mining plague of today’s internet?

No thanks.

I have breaths to take and connections to make, flowers to sing with, clouds to consult, and humans to listen to. Dreams to be witnessed and books to be read. Soups to be prepared, herbs to be harvested, oceans to adore, nieces and nephews to shower with love, and mountains to sit with. And none of these, not one, can be replicated by the machine. So I shall take my leave as much as possible, and, if you feel so called, you’re always welcome to join me.

Perhaps you would like to join me in a commitment to listening to the red-winged blackbirds (or whoever graces the spaces you find yourself in), the wind, and the waters whenever they feel compelled to share? Especially at this turn of the wheel, when the days are long and the clouds seem to stretch even further across the horizon, let’s allow these black mirrors to collect some dust while we spend more time with the hummingbirds, house finches, and hawks. As the light stretches on and on, perhaps we too can take up a reverent song to sing to the flowers in all their majesty, while we are still here, to honor them, and they here, to witness us.

During this solstice moment, and on my knees, I ask our dear deities of the light; Lugh of the Long Arm and Queen Áine and her faery host, to shine their strength and benevolent light upon all who need it, all who yearn for light to shine into the delicate and damaged parts of their lives. May their mid-Summer wisdom illuminate all of our hearts and dreams, guiding us towards the highest expression of our beings. Guiding us towards authentic and magnanimous connection.

May peace reign in the hearts of humanity.
May the watchers of the night within call us away from that which imprisons us.
May the watchers of the light within balance our eternal illumination.
May we remember the sacred blessings of work, water, shelter, warmth, and connection.
May we never, ever, forget the sacred treasure that is life. All life.

Life.

For in a flicker, a moment, an instant, we could be welcomed across death’s sacred threshold, our time complete. Let us make meaning and peace with these lives we’ve been given; let us commit fully to its challenges, honor its pleasures, defend its wonders, and care for all life as though they are our family.

For all are our kin.

Including the juniper, jacaranda, and beautiful jasmine.

Blessed be their names.

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Celebrate with Animisma

The Summer Solstice is a time of power, a time of strength, and is the celebration of our glorious, life-giving, and life-sustaining home star - our sun.

I currently have one wee podcast available for the summer solstice.

May you be blessed by Birch, Vervain, Oak, and Rose - sacred trees and plants honored at this time of peak light! May the long days and warm evenings bring you ever closer, ever more aligned, with the sacredness of your own walk, site, and service.

For The Druids

Albin Hefin, the light of the shore, and the festival of joy is upon us. The longest of our celebrations, here to honor the richness of the Earth and the power of the Sun.

Whether you undertake the full vigil or the dawn or noon ceremonies, may your observation of the day be a blessed one, and may you be blessed by both water and fire.

May your harvest of herbs be brimming with the light of the Sun.
May you dance and sing and celebrate with ease and joy.
May you find the elemental balance within and without.

May you find, share, and radiate peace today and all days and may the awen flow deeply and richly around and through you.

Poetry As Prayer - Upcoming Workshops

"To write poetry is to be alive."- Rainer Maria Rilke

This Spring I completed a training with the Institute for Poetic Medicine to become a Poetry as a Tool for Wellness Peer Facilitator. It was a moving and inspiring training, and I am thrilled to shortly bring my own Celtic mysticism/animism version of its teachings forward as both an in-person and online program. This series is tentatively planned this for the northern hemisphere’s late summer/autumn seasons.

The program is intentionally limited to a maximum of 7 participants per session to make space for sharing and reflection, and my hope is that it will be a nourishing journey of community and connection for all who participate. No prior writing experience is necessary! The purpose of this is to experience communion and connection (and some magic), making space for the words to find their way to and through you.

The online program will account for time zones in the US and Ireland/UK/Europe.

The in-person program will take place in Colorado, USA.

Please feel free to submit your interest here to be notified.

Summer Writing Prompts

Apart from ceremony and blessing, it will come as no surprise to you that one way I love to celebrate the warmth of summer is with poetry and prose. Reading, writing, listening… a true pleasure for the senses and this season has of course, inspired countless writers towards myriad poems and stories.

Below, I offer you some summer solstice writing prompts. If you feel so called, I’d love for you to share what comes through you in response.

• Within the radiant chamber of this day’s long light and strong heat, the shield of my winter self melted, and I wondered…

• The wide, dark moon rose swiftly over the summer’s shimmering horizon, and I noticed every…

• At the summer solstice, the ancestral memory of ceremony rose within me, and I heard…

All blessings your way, today and all days.

Your kin of bud and pollen, petal and prose, thorn and thunder,

h. xx

Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
—BBC Nature News

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you

I speak for the snail.

I speak of underneathedness

and the welcome of mosses,

of life that springs up,

little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,

the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.

I speak

from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you

one thing today and another tomorrow

and I will be as consistent as anything alive

on this earth.

I move as the currents move, with the breezes.

What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle

ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent

as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful

and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances

between meadows of night-blooming flowers.

I will speak

the impossible hope of the firefly.

You with the candle

burning and only one chair at your table must understand

such wordless desire.

To say it is mindless is missing the point.

My Dear Kin,

Warmest greetings your way as the merry month of May arrives. The bealfires are being lit, ringing in the dawn of the season of the Sun and its rituals of purification and protection are underway, as well as its celebrations of fertility, sexuality, and renewal. What an honor and blessed ritual it would be on this night to extinguish one’s home fires and then journey to a roaring communal bonfire, whereby we might light our candle, warmed by the shared bond of the village, and then return its flame to our home. The light of the community, of the season, brought into the home to protect, to nourish, and to inspire.

Bealtaine is here, and I feel honored and blessed to be celebrating this time in sisterhood, friendship, and on ancestral lands. I live as a person whose bloodlines are woven from many lands and many tribes from this fair and wise part of the world. I am compelled to honor my ancestors, their stories, and their ways by regularly pilgrimaging to the lands, waters, and skies that wove my bones. I also do this for those who may not have the means or the ability to travel, and I pray that through my sharing, they might feel the ancient sapphire, ruby, and emerald sparks of consciousness that rise up when communing with these important, vast, and inspiring places. These places also hold endless layers of grief, pain, and loss, entangled with resilience, humor, and beauty. The older I get (I just celebrated my 46th solar return), the more I realize I know nothing, and I wonder about just how profoundly complicated and also profoundly simple life is… OH life.

For now, let’s honor the peak of Spring and call forward in one glorious hawthornic, heathered, gorse-filled hymn, the warm wonders of Bealtaine.

—

—

A Celtic Convergence

For years now, I have been seeking my place. Where can my voice most authentically lend itself to the cauldrons of Celtic creation? I was not raised in the cultures of Éire and Alba; I was raised on lands in another hemisphere, far, far away, in a culture that never fit (me), in seasons that were upside down, by a people that were rough and harsh and couldn’t name the medicine or wisdom of the plants that surrounded them. ‘Australian culture’ has always perplexed me, and the systems of governance there, even more so. The land spoke to me, though it was clear I was not from there, yet a welcome child given my desire and capacity to listen to the lands sing.

My actual voice (my accent) is from that place, though a little skewed and confused as I’ve lived now for over two decades in another settler society, a few hundred years senior to Australia yet still fraught with the deep wounds colonialism and environmental destruction bring. I never expected to stay in the US. It is also a strange place. It was young love that brought me there, and it is a forever love that keeps me there and has me living inland and tending a garden in the high desert plains. No one would have seen that coming for this ocean-loving selkie.

I have also found an incredible community in the US, my childhood dream come true. A band of wild, wise, creative, intuitive, caring, and kind plant women who honor the earth and each other. Women who can listen to the wind and channel the wisdom in all the ways I can and more. It is my treasure and my pleasure, my heaven, to share life with them. They are everything, and I am traveling with one of them right now, as I write to you, preparing our fires to be lit here in Scotland.

So, no longer from Australia, and not from the US; the face I wear, my bones and blood, and the stories I sing, are from the wild islands of the far west of Europe, yet I was not raised there. Woven of the many threads. From the Earth and sea, yet not from any one place. Outcast in some ways, adrift in others. Perhaps you can relate? Or perhaps your people still live rooted in the lands of your ancestors? Or maybe a wee mix of both? Or perhaps neither?

I continue to query my place in this space and in this world. What is mine to hold, to release, to surrender? What might I share, with integrity and care? When I commune with the stones and trees here, I notice silken roots growing from my womb, the tips of my long hair, and the soles of my soft feet. These roots are welcomed downward, kissed by the wet soil of the land. The waterfalls that flow from the tops of dark mountains hum my soul name, and I know I am kin to every drop of water that falls and falls and falls. I see my face in every sheep and every lamb mirrored back to me.

Given the ancient histories of human movement, grouped by choice, need, or force, I wonder if instead of naming where we are from, we might instead consider naming by where, or by whom, or by what we are claimed?

Mine might look like this.

My beloved claims my heart.
Alba claims my bones.
The sea claims my sight.
Éire claims my wisdom.
The spéirbhean claims my voice.

And if I whittled it down further…

The rose claims my path.
The yarrow claims my edges.
The hawthorn claims my song.
The birch claims my stories.

And so…

The Cailleach claims my humor.
The Morrigan claims my cunning.
The bees claim my listening.
The kelp claims my anchoring.

On and on and on it goes…
Where it stops?
Nobody knows.

Who/what/where claims you, dear kin? I’m vastly more interested in knowing by what you are claimed, than where you are ‘from’ for it splashes color and texture onto the unique fabric of your being, and at least for me, helps me to understand how you came to find yourself in this moment in time. I welcome in this particular dance of nuance and clarity.

I’d love to understand, deeply, how you see the world, and perhaps, how the world sees you.

Guideposts, markers, influences, inspirations…

Claimed.

A Thousand Worlds

I write to you today from the southwest of a gently warming An t-Eilean Muileach, Alba (Isle of Mull, Scotland). This island is vast and majestic, replete with crystal beaches, stone islands that shuffle in the night (trust me, they do), and endless waterfalls. It houses one of the clan seats of my lineage on my maternal grandfather’s side, Clan Maclean, and their stark cliff dwelling home, Duart Castle.

Thirteen days ago I left Denver for Dublin where I spent a couple of days with dear friends visiting some of the scared sites of our lineage. My beloved sister Kimberley of Banfhile in her spacious wisdom toured me around a place deeply known in my bones, yet I had not visited in this lifetime. It was a gloriously wet, windy, cool, and misty day. Magics abounded. I can’t wait for us to return together, though it’s unclear if we’ll make it back to this timeline.

I then traveled to Manchester to reconnect with a dear soul sister, and we traveled to Wales for my birthday, then onward to the Isle of Arran to visit family, and now, the isles of Mull and Iona.

We are staying in a small stone bothy on a farm by the water, replete with views of cliffs, surrounded by oodles of white, fluffy, playful lambs. The island is full of the energy of Spring; six kittens were born on the farm the day we arrived. While on Arran, I saw a Golden Eagle and was mesmerised.

Here on Mull, another Golden Eagle was spotted, as well as a host of other avian friends, and the sister I’m traveling with insists it is part of an initiation I seem to be (endlessly) journeying through. The midlife unraveling, dying, bloating, chrysalis. I am officially liquified. I pray wings emerge once my amorphous goo-state returns to form and flesh. The knowing of who I am is unraveling with every step, for I’m sure I’m not who I once was, and I’ve no idea who I’m becoming. I walk through a thousand worlds every day and every night. Dreams take me to the edge of the cosmos and beyond, inter-realm dialogues with former selves, pixies, friends, and many creatures not of this Earth.

And many of this Earth.

A return to the Isle of Arran with a dear soul sister was incredibly special. She too felt deeply at home there, and we were blessed with beautiful weather, views, and forest connections. Many of the large trees Mum and I saw last September had fallen during winter storms, yet the beauty and resiliency of the Island and its people remained, unsurprisingly.

The Isle of Mull holds strange and wonderful energies. Vast valleys and cliffs, sweet towns and people, birch and gorse the likes of which you have never seen…

And then, there was Iona.

It is stark when one visits a space that has been prayed over. Not casually, for a year or two, but daily, multiple times daily, for an age.

The Isle of Iona is a 10-minute ferry-ride from Mull and is a world unto itself. Again, this journey, a thousand worlds opening up with each moment. We walked all day today, this last day of April, and we greeted with some truly spectacular weather, views, energies, flowers, and people. We even bumped into the royal couple (we were stopped a short walk away from where they were being photographed), Prince William and Princess Katherine (though in Scotland they are known as the Duke and Duchess of Rothesay), visiting on their 14th wedding anniversary. The day was a truly glorious and magical.

This island, is a dream.

Claimed.

I’ll leave you with a snapshot of me and some of the beautiful souls I spent time with here. These women are also a dream…

Claimed!

May the blessings of the season be yours!

I’m off to light a fire and will sing to each and every one of you who has joined me here in this salty, warm, mossy, wild, corner of the digital realm.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

May you and yours be blessed by the rising green wonders of the season!

May your loins be brought to life, lifting high as the sap rises and returns the green glory to our blue jewel home planet.

May you be forever claimed by beauty, strength, honor, and grace.

Ever with love and care, your kin of gorse and haw, weed and stone, sea and sky.

h x

Human Kindness

In an effort to provide gentle and continual reminders of the myriad pools and places where human kindness, both towards other humans and towards the natural world exists, this wee organization recently crossed my path.

May kindness be your activism, compassion your shield, and radically fierce, dragon-fueled self-worth your home eternal. May we accept nothing but grace. Long may it reign.

Loose Ends

This small nonprofit was founded by two women who had each finished craft projects for people who had passed on. They function as matchmakers, matching unfinished projects with those who have the skill to finish them. I can imagine the joy of receiving back the finished product a dear grandparent, aunt, or friend was working on. Something tangible to hold on to, to keep their memory close, to honor them. Such kindness.

This wee offering is inspired by the sublime generosity of those who have been able to support my work financially.

I understand that this is not available to all, and I am deeply grateful for any who stumble across this mossy, moonlit road. All who join me here, on this path of inquiry and integrity are beloved by me. Truly so.

For those who …

Read more

My dear kin,

As we move our way through the wild dawning that is the season of Imbolc, we find ourselves at its midway point, the vernal (Spring) equinox. We have arrived a full half turn of the year from the autumnal equinox, when I was back in Alba with my mother, visiting cousins, celebrating ancestors, weaving ourselves back in with the soils and smells and islands of our bone home. I am grateful for the peace of my life that I may reflect on the the turning of the wheel in this way; a spiral notched by moments of connection and reconnection.

May peace reign. May it find its balance in the heart of all beings. May it claim the warring mindhives, turning them away from wretched destruction, towards purpose and compassion. May the military might of the world be used to build homes and bridges, reconnecting families and saving lives, while the dated and putrid structures of puritanism, misogynism, colonialism, and nepotism are dismantled and transmuted such that they become forgotten concepts recorded only in the oldest of books that spoke of humanities ancient and forgotten horrors.

The vernal winds have been whipping us here in the high country. I feel their wild call, pulling the last leaves off wintered trees, making space for the unfurling new growth that waits patiently for the waters and the warmth to welcome each precious new leaf forward. Spring in the high desert is a wondrous dance, warm one day, snowy the next. Still in the morning, squall in the afternoon. We waltz.

Sometimes the wind sounds like it is undertaking the rites of an ancient astral birthing, replete with the groans and pains of the past season yielding to the present. Summer’s heat wrestles with winter’s end, trees bend, grasses tremble, and clouds spray across vast skies. Spring is truly a wonder, and as the night passes to the day, along these liminal edges of the equinox, the invitation might be to sit a while, to pause, and to consider where new action is making its way into one’s mind and vessel.

I suppose all seasons are this way. Treasured transitions. Endlessly spiraling. The winds in all their wisdom have taught me to release myself from the burden of guarantees, to witness each moment as holy.

Of course I forget sometimes.

And then they howl the remembering back into me.

Thank you, wind.

This season has had me exploring fulcrums and tipping points, questioning ‘where do I begin and where does the wind/geranium/water/crow end?’ and where I seem to be landing is in a world filled with imaginary lines, claimed edges, and odd verges. My own imaginal celestial meridian1 glows with a phosphorescent shine as it spirals its way through me. Curving from above, it drops somewhere through the center of my head, intersecting my heart, and then slithers its way around my organs, torso, and legs until it lands somewhere beyond my feet in the earth or waters or sky. Wherever I find myself, I suppose. A meridian continuum. I imagine that it looks different to each observer, as the celestial meridian does, and I notice just how thrilled I am by that prismatic possibility.

It’s honestly rather hard to know where I begin, though if I had to choose, I might begin at the dusk. When the moon rises, and the sky darkens, that is where I begin, I think. Perhaps it is in the center of a slightly wobbly northern loch, roughly reflecting the light of a waxing crescent moon, the moon that graced the sky when I entered this world as a human, this time around.

I might begin when the last apple falls from every apple tree in the world, each landing fruit a note played on autumn’s golden elysian harp. Millions of fruit falling, a symphony of seasonal transition. Glorious thuds heard the world over. Yes, yes, perhaps that is where I begin.

Inseparable from this holy human walk, I have to wonder; if I begin in the orchards and forests of a million places, do I end inside of a song? A poem? Perhaps I end on the dried lips of an elder seanchaí spinning ancestral tales into the threads we can access and thrum today, plucking the storylines of long-held tales of salmon and witches and gods as men. Or perhaps I end in a child’s drawing on the desert floor, fingers saturated with earthen hues, tracing faces in the sand, soon to be lost to the approaching dust storm threatening the horizon.

Yes! If I begin at dusk, and I end in a song, that feels an appropriate way to explain the endless edges of my being. Porous, ephemeral, eternal.

For I believe I do not begin and end in this body, and I also believe that neither do you.

We are as liminal as the steam that lifts off the waters of a hot spring being blessed by rushing snow.

We are as large as the universe itself, larger even, accounting for the many realms and places where time and space bend and stretch, including of course the myriad worlds of the dreaming.

The Earth is the sovereign territory of our soul selves while we walk on this plane. Our shared garden planet. A blue marvel. A cosmic miracle.

Where do you begin and end, dear friend? I would be delighted to know.

For Hope

Goddess, I am tired.

Fatigued by a life of sensing the boundless interconnectivity of all things, of clear knowing that as we harm other, we harm self (and vice versa). Of the deep feeling that the breath of the mountain and the harmonic of the hive are but my own lungs and my own dear sisters.

I am tired, as are so many, who give voice to the voiceless and defend the weary, the sick, and the forgotten, and yet I do not give up hope. I can’t. I won’t. These hands and this heart and these words are of service to all that is good and true and loving in this strange shared world. If the Hawthorn can blossom, if the finches can fly, if the crows can gather en mass in the sky and caw a collective cry through the ethers, then I can continue.

Blessed be the dreamers and the doers.

Blessed be the Earth guardians.

As we move through Imbolc’s seasonal dance, I pray, as I do every day, that the humans might choose the Earth, first.

Not convenience

Not haste

Not easefulness

Not waste

May we presence the penguin, and center the cereliac.

May we deny the synthetic, the plastic, the putrid.

May we speak words of kindness.

May we loosen our grip on knowing.

May we welcome forward more pauses, more starlight, more singing.

May we welcome forward more porosity, more potential, more hope.

May we welcome forward every voice that has a story to share that is rooted in the boggy cedar swamps of the human heart.

May we invest ourselves into the resurrection of our wild selves/kin/Earth/gardens/forests/oceans/mountains.

May we relinquish our pasts, as we surrender to the gusts of Spring.

May we strengthen in our softness.

May we try and count the crows, and, may we be counted by them.

We couldn’t tell if they were crows or ravens, though we’d never seen anything like it. A murder (of crows)? An unkindness (of ravens)? Hundreds?

For The Druids

May Alban Eilir and the power of the elemental balance ever remind you that though you have entered through this doorway many times before, you will never come through the same gateway twice.

May the balance of the light and dark harmonize within you, your words ever kind, your arms ever open, your wisdom ever a fire to be tended.

May the second of the Spring festivals be a time of glorious celebration for you and your kin!

May the earth support you, seed inspire you, ash nourish you, and waters bless you.

May the blessings of the Goddess be always with us.

Blessed be the ways.

Celebrate with Animisma

If you’d rather spend a moment or two in ceremony, you are ever welcome to listen to the following offerings (also available wherever you find your poddys).

A Blessing

May any parts of you that feel tightly coiled hear the whispers of the stretching light and softly unfurl such that you might become even more supple, everywhere.

May the balance of day and night remind you of this holy walk, this treasure that is life, and despite its twists and turns, its hardships, and its sorrows, there is a flame eternal that burns within the heart of every human.

May it be remembered, and daily.

May the Spring breathe its freshness into every part of your mind and heart that may have dried during the winter months, softening and plumping you, as you ready yourself for the days of the Sun.

May you know love and forgiveness every day of this life, from self first, then other.

May any shame you carry be offered up upon the altar of Spring, and may you feel attuned to the gentle freedom that comes from releasing past burdens.

May your path be blessed, your hearth be warm, and your words be kind.

Ever with love and care,

Your bluster-loving, wind-dancing, wild-claiming, absolutely not symmetrical but very much a cackling spiral sister of flesh and breath.

h. xo

Mind of fire,
Mind of flame,
Brigid’s come to bless,
To reign.
To ignite our words, our thoughts,
Our pain.
Brigid’s come to bless,
To reign.
No hearth too small, no blade too vicious,
No tongue too sharp, no child too precious,
No bard too new, no mother too anxious,
Brigid our queen,
Supremely glorious.
Ruadán’s keen,
Her song harmonious.
She shines as sun,
Eternally luminous.
Feasts and fires, portents in wells,
Protections sent by chiming bells,
Inspiration’s call is what she tells,
The Celtic heart is where she dwells.
Mind of fire,
Mind of flame,
Brigid’s come to bless,
To reign.
To ignite our words, our thoughts,
Our pain.
Brigid’s come to bless,
To reign.

(Brigid’s Reign, by Heather Louise Porter)

Imbolc

Ceud mile fàilte a chairdean agus fàilte gu fèis Imbolc!

A hundred, thousand, welcomes friends, and welcome to the festival of Imbolc!

Awakening gently from our long winter’s sleep, Imbolc invites us to stretch and yawn, farewelling the dark delights of Samhain’s slumber. In the North, we find ourselves at the peak of winter’s embrace, and atop its icy crescendo, we witness the days lengthening as we welcome the season of Imbolc forward.

Last year, she called me to rise. This year, she fills my head with poem and my mouth with song. Offerings tumble in celebration and gratitude for her benevolence, the fire in my head ablaze, shining wild and bright in hues of rose, amethyst, and verdant greens.

Old customs abound. Dolls and crosses, songs and stories, feasts and fires, we are woven with serpents and dragons, journeying to holy wells and holy springs. As Samhain has waned and I have been turning towards the new season of Imbolc, I have been praying at my altar daily for death is dancing her way through so many lives of those I know, and those I love.

I pray for sisters, daughters, mothers, and grandmothers; I pray for brothers, sons, fathers, and grandfathers. I pray for kin, for familiars, for animal companions, and for each dying tree claimed by flame as it returns to the Earth. I keen their departure, my voice and spine and hands held by Brigid, held by her unfathomable capacity to hold love and pain, life and death as one.

If you are navigating loss or death and if you ever need a prayer, please reach out. You are always welcome to comment here on Substack or to connect with me here.

I truly wish we were culturally excellent at death. Death is life is death is life is… Perhaps I’m actually wishing that we were collectively excellent at life, for I cannot understand how one can be good at one and not the other for they are one and the same. Within the fields of hope and life, death is always planted. And within the fields of death, hope and life is always planted. We celebrate the return of light just as we mourn the ‘death’ of night; we pulse, we dance, we shift, we tumble.

We winter, we spring.

We laugh, we keen.

We rage, we wonder.

We human.

Brigid is such an exceptional guide within this wild walk of ‘human-ing.’ Her wisdom is beyond measure (I know I say that all the time, I just really mean it) and she surprises me, constantly, with how she can light the fires of our paths and our minds.

Once, when I was tending death for someone I love dearly, my own transition crossed my thoughts. Brigid presented, as she does, shining, wise, and eternal, and I asked her for a little more insight into my own transition from this world. She walked with me, within the wild forests, fields, oceans, and mountains of my inner landscapes, and we visited the places where I meet with my kin who have departed this Earthly realm. She then showed me the place where I will go when my time to cross comes. It is a quiet place with soft grass for bare feet (no shoes, please) with a broad view across the sea. I hope one or two of my well and wise ancestors will meet me there to take me onward with them. I visit this place from time to time, familiarizing myself with its edges, chatting with the roses and hawthorns that mark its territory. It is gorgeous in every season, I have been there on clear days with gentle breezes, and in torrential deluges where I feel soaked to the bone, fully one with the divine spirit of water. I am grateful to know that it is there, in that beautiful place, where I will wait for my kin to greet me and where I will cross from, when my time comes.

I wonder, what might your inner threshold out of this world look like? A liminal space? A beach? A door? A mossy nook, a mountain top? A deep valley, a dry mesa? An island in the middle of the Caribbean? The dark void itself? A simple room? A rowboat on a river? A bridge across a canyon? Perhaps the Féth fíada itself will envelope you in its misty embrace.

As we enter Imbolc, perhaps you might lovingly request that Brigid support you in seeing and familiarizing yourself with your crossing place, just for a moment or two. Perhaps invite your well and wise ancestors to meet you there, so when the time comes for you to leave this human realm, you are familiar with your crossing and feel welcomed home, to your eternal soul-self. It’s worth visiting, from time to time, even tending, as you would tend to your own home.

May it be a beautiful and empowering experience for you.

A Blessing

Held by Brigid, may we gracefully surrender the darkness and welcome the emerging light, allowing ourselves to slowly release any ties we have to winter’s dark slumber, encouraging the sparks of inspiration born in winter’s dreaming to glow and shine and turn their tiny faces towards the warming sun.

At Brigid’s beckoning, may the mindfires of humanity be set alight, burning with clarity of sight, passion of heart, intensity of care, and the benevolent wisdom of wonder.

In her eternal name, may we never stop believing in the resilient heart of humanity to rise in solidarity, kindness, and humility. Together, in partnership with each other, the Earth, and the infinite wisdom of Brigid, perhaps we can resurrect our beautiful home planet, and rekindle love and communal friendship.

In honor of our exceptional, beloved, Queen of Heaven, I wish you peace.

With love and care,

She who fans the fires of the forges of your inner strength,
She who stands with you as your swords of justice are honed and shaped,
She who upholds the vision of a healthy, loving, compassionate world.

Your kin of fire and flame,

Heather Louise xo

In Celebration

Below please find additional offerings in celebration of Imbolc!

The Celtic Creatives

Brigid's Cloak: A Ritual for Imbolc

A Chairde, Friends…

Read more

2 years ago · 96 likes · 15 comments

For The Druids

May you find peace, share peace, and radiate peace this Imbolc.

May the Earth, Sky, and Sea bless you, today, and all days.

May the white milk of nurturing offered by our Bright Lady of the Turning Earth, and the

Bringer of Light bless you and always be with you.

A Wee Animistic Chat on Substack

I had the wonderful pleasure of chatting with a dear soul sister and friend, Jennifer Murphy, of the sublime ‘The Celtic Creatives’ a short while ago. It was very early in the morning for me and Jen was so patient with my meanderings! We chatted about animistic practice, loneliness, shape-shifting, and even the wildest one of them all, Mis entered our field and joined the conversation.

You are warmly invited to click here to see our faces as we speak or click below to listen.

The Celtic Creatives

This Animist Life with Heather Louise Porter

A Chairde, Friends…

Listen now

2 years ago · 20 likes · 17 comments · Jennifer Murphy and Heather Louise Porter

Blessed Imbolc! Blessed Brigid! Blessed Spring!

Firstly, a warm welcome to all new followers/subscribers who have chosen to join us here. Please know that with every notification of a new subscriber, I say your name aloud and offer a blessing your way.

“Welcome, (you). I’m grateful you are here. May your path be blessed, may your heart be full, and may your hearth be ever warm and tended.”

You are so welcome here. Perhaps we will meet one day in person; perhaps we will not. Either way, please know that I am grateful to connect with you in this realm at this time. This is my truth. I am deeply grateful. There is much wisdom here among the readers and the writers, and it is my honor to offer even a small drop of contemplation into the cauldrons of creativity and inner explorations. As with all types of media, I lovingly invite you to curate your Substack feed with care and fill it with inspiring, challenging, interesting, and wondrous folk. I’m fascinated whenever I open the app, meet new people, and read new offerings, and I love returning to my favorites to savor the nectar of their knowing.

The Sanctuary of Solstice

In the northern hemisphere, we arrive at the winter solstice. That most revered of days, where the luscious darkness of winter cloaks us fully on the longest night of the year. Many (including my past self) write about how this signals the return of the light, which it does. No doubt. Halfway between the equinoxes, we recount stories of light, strength, and the resilient spirit of our ancestors. We honor the evergreen trees for their reminder of life everlasting, just as we honor the bare-standing skeletons of grey deciduous forests and the soft, pale light that is permitted passage by their leafless forms, finding its way to the forest floor.

This is also the most Northern point on our spiraling wheel of the year. It is marked by midnight on our seasonal clock, and it is a time ruled by the dreaming wisdom of hibernating bears, the familial strength of our wolf-kin, and the symbolic death and rebirth represented by our wise seer, the eagle. It is also the time of the Deer Mother. Our Celtic heritage honors many sacred animals, many of which are shared across the indigenous tribes of the Northern half of our world. So, in addition to folklore and tales, sacred herbs, and plants, we can also connect with the eternal, ancestral wisdom of our furred and feathered kin at this time. Wisdom that does not include artificial light or mandate a rapid return towards brightness, wisdom that honors the slow, sacred sanctuary that is the winter solstice season. Wisdom that inspired our ancestors to align the dawn light of the winter solstice to illuminate the long passage and chamber of the ancient passage womb/tomb of Newgrange, celebrating the return of the light. Wisdom that inspired our ancestors to align the great Sarsen Ring (outer circle of upright stones) of Stonehenge with the setting sun of the winter solstice. Whether rising or setting, the light of the solstice is revered and celebrated to this day.

It was through the wisdom of the bear that I embraced slowness fully at this time on the wheel. I plan for it. My life during the light half of the year is often filled with travel and movement, so I claim this time of year as a much-needed respite to honor the season. To move as the bear moves, to dream as the bear dreams. To be more still, more contemplative. To eat less and to sleep more. To move my body slowly and more steadily and to eat from the preserved harvests from earlier in the year when I can. I know that for many, this time of the year ramps upwards, and I would ask all those who might feel caught in the light-filled storms of consumption as to whether there might be a space, even a very small space, to stop and introduce some story and stillness to their world.

Perhaps a story about dream-weavers, or wise badgers, or a story about how this is the time of the Cailleach and she holds us, as she always has, beneath her white plaid of winter wonder, reigning on high from her mountain throne, casting her frosty primordial gaze far and wide across the northern worlds. Perhaps a story of the brother kings, Oak and Holly, the Druid’s Tree, and the Holy Tree.

Reciprocity

There is, of course, a long tradition of giving and receiving at this time of year. As someone who is fundamentally opposed to the propagation of more landfill (i.e., gifting short-lived plastic trinkets and any general unneeded, synthetic human junk whose life is destined to end up in the evergrowing human waste stream), what a treasure it is to find one or two small hand-crafted offerings to exchange with loved ones.

As a minimalist, I am often overwhelmed by the thought of endless gifts, much of which I don’t need or want. I do, however, adore the thought of exchanges where we share loved goods we already own (scarves, pots, plants grown from cuttings, jewelry that is cleaned and ready to move on), as well as supporting artists and makers who create from natural fibers, oils, and woods. And what about gifts of handmade foods and preserves? Quality wines or herbal vinegars? Natural perfumes and hydrosols? Or gifts of experiences to support artists (theatre productions, choral shows, dance and movement, museum experiences)? Perhaps you memorize a tale and recite/perform it as a gift for your kin? Perhaps plant a tree in a native woodland (or make a charitable donation on behalf of a loved one to have a tree planted). The list of earth-forward, gentle, tasteful, respectful, minimal gifts is, ironically, endless, and considering them is grounding for sensitive systems.

Most grounding for me, is my query about reciprocity for the Earth at this still time of year. Many of our wealthy modern cultures are so focused, so adept, so practiced at taking and taking and taking. What might it be like to live in an authentically balanced, joyfully reciprocal way with our Earth home? What if this time of year was entirely devoted to giving back to the Earth? What if every gift, every thought, or every prayer was an offering on the altar of love for all things?

This solstice, today, I will be sitting in gentle, lengthy prayer, communing with the Earth, and dialoguing with Spirit about how I can come into ever more alignment with my desire to be an aligned participant in honoring our shared home and leaving this Earth more beautiful and well than I found it. What is now mine to hold? What is now mine to speak, to write? What is now mine to action on? These constant questions I return to call for lengthy, hushed contemplations and conversations with the etheric wisdom of my council of elders, the trees, my mythic kin, the directions, the elements, and the Earth, of course. Divine, reciprocal, relational living.

Perhaps this solstice, you too might find a moment to stop and offer your hands and voice in service. I’d be honored if you joined me. I’d also be delighted if you choose to do nothing, nothing at all, attuning yourself to the deep quiet without letting it hold you within. The medicine of this time offers deep feminine dreaming and slow receiving rather than actioning and doing. Please give yourself all the permission you need to do nothing if you feel so-called.

The day after the solstice (tomorrow), I will be holding space for a healing ceremony for one of my beloved sisters who is navigating cancer treatment. We will gather in sacred circle to surround her with love, and we will sing and call and pray for ancestral patterns and lessons to come to a graceful completion, drenching her field and spirit with blessing upon blessing upon blessing. We will be supported by winter plants, as ever, for they hold a wisdom and frequency we as humans could only dream of living. She has held so many of us in her gorgeous, wise embrace, and it is now time for us to hold her in divine reciprocity. May the soft energies of solstice renewal find their way to our circle and uplift this healing in her name.

May all who are unwell at this time be held by the etheric rippling of our solstice healing prayers.

And as within, without.

And as above, below.

May it be so.

A Solstice Blessing

May you connect deeply with the parts of yourself that yearn for rest amidst the quiet, darkness of this season.

May you spiral ever inward, partnering with your dreaming, and surrender to the storied blessing of the long night.

May the sparks of light and life eternal be planted in the void-womb of your field, reminding you once more of the endless nature of your soul, of cosmic consciousness, and of your beautiful place within the pattern of all things.

May our hands and hearts be used in service, for the good of all, today and all days.

For The Druids

May Alban Arthan, the Light of Arthur, inspire the light within you to awaken, to be reborn, and to emerge from your inner caves of the alchemical, stone-held stillness.

May peace reign in all four corners of the Earth, and may the light of life be remembered within us all. The seed of life itself, now planted within Winter’s dark womb.

May your mourning of the old be full and rich, your releases offered with grace, and the new dawn bless you with its cold, gentle light.

May your ceremonies be beautiful, filled with devotion, and may we always foster the magic of community.

May the blessings of the Goddess be always with us.

Blessed be the ways.

A Gift You

Last winter solstice I offered you a story of the Brother Kings (linked above). This solstice is a different version, one for the child within you (or for your children). A short and easy tale about the return of the light.

The Light of the Oak King

May your season be filled with peace and hope.

May our world be filled with peace and hope.

Ever with warmth and care,

Your womb-cloaked, deer-antlered, winter-revering sister.

Heather Louise x

We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree
Are of equal duration.

Chorus:

And all shall be well
And all manner of things shall be well.
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T S Eliot

(We Die With The Dying, from Little Gidding, the fourth quartet of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets)

My dear kin,

If this is your new year, may it be a blessed one. A grounded one. An expansive one. A year where you surprise yourself with just how kind you can truly be. A healed one. A marvelously magical one. A year of blessings dropping from your tongue like syrupy crystals, offering wellness and connection with every word, every smile, for every human, every cloud, and every tree you pass. A year of hope. A year of love. A year of giving and humility and responsibility for your dear soul and this strange human walk. A year of peace.

As within, so without.

As above, so below.

Peace.

Peace, for I will not rage at this world.

I will offer blessing, listening with the ears of my whole body, expanding my arms towards others until I might, even for a flashing instant understand what happened to a life/within a lineage that that resulted in humans seeking to undertake harm and destruction. What depth of wounding is this, this human-ing? What depth of fear and pain?

I will not rage at this world.

For rage is easy, even lazy. It is infinitely harder to love. To steward souls who passed before their time across the ways while we comfort those who grieve their loss, to keen with every cell of my being, every drop of my knowing. To ask for blessing upon all who suffer, all who suffer, and to mean it.

To seek connection as effortlessly as the quiet roots of mugwort searching across dry soils, and hyphae branching softly and endlessly across the horizons of this sacred world.

To walk as one who, despite violence and abuse, neglect and cruelty, despite poverty and fear, abandonment and projection, still stands and seeks the water to share and the stories to carry. Who still, despite every attempt by the zeitgeist to disintegrate into difference looks towards the high teachings, and pulls herself up upon its sharp and cold path, and walks inwards along the spiral of connection, though the way is windy, the signposts worn, and the light is dimming.

We have all suffered and so many continue to. This simple truth once lit in the mind-fires of humanity has the potential to illuminate nations and histories when coupled with the kindling of compassion, of course. We are kin through our living, our loving, our suffering, and our sacrifices. And yes, all have sacrificed something.

Unyielding kindness. Infinite compassion. Lessons from both the acorn and the squirrel, the cresting wave, and the basking shark.

Can this be our way?

Can this be our way?

As the days recede and the nights expand, and as we enter this gorgeous liminality that doesn’t arrive in a thunderous roar but slowly thins, I sit with my ancestors of blood and star and branch and fin and ask them to stay a while, and, goddess willing, to help me deepen even further into the strange wilds of human mysteries. I sat with a descendant too, my beloved niece. She is wise beyond measure, her spirit beautiful beyond reason. She is free and exploring and joins me on quiet occasions to share some of what she has seen, and some of what she knows. I will make a place for her at my table (on true Samhain, Nov 6th this year) and hope she will return and stay a while, joining me and other ancestors in celebration of the thinning veils and each other.

I miss her, especially at this time of year.

Life, so sacred, so strange. So wonderful, so rotten. So confusing, so untethered.

Life.

My ancestors once carved swedes (neeps/turnips/rutabagas) to make lanterns at this time of year. Gathering last harvests, preparing winter foods, lighting fires, and celebrating the new year born into darkness. The Cailleach, her name was called (is still called) as she returns from her summer slumber to take her place on the thrones of winter, our Winter Witch, our Queen of the Weather. Our veiled one. Creatrix. Beira. Her stories are endless, timeless, and stitched into the battered coasts and boggy hills of Alba and Eire.

Perhaps you have you sat with a Queen of Winter before?

Perhaps you have felt her ancient, primordial wisdom stretch out over peaks and waters like fingers of scalding ice, calling you into stillness for this is the time of dreaming and rest?

Perhaps she has visited you in your dreams, a flash of a raven’s eye, the swift jump of a deer through the forest, or perhaps the chilled breath of a she-wolf lifting the small hairs of your neck as your eyes get heavy and your head dives towards the realms of dreaming. There are stories that say when the Cailleach’s reign began, she could be seen riding through the sky on the back of a wolf. On stormy nights she would wander the countryside singing a sorrowful song, striking down any signs of green and growth with her blackthorn staff that contained the cold of winter, such that wherever it hit the ground, nothing would grow. As Spring rose, and with it, the light, she would then hide the staff under a holly bush, until the dark returned and her power rose again.

The Cailleach Awakens - Samhain (by Tom Langhorne)

I awaken with the setting of the

hazy, white Sun

The otherworld, invisible to you, starts to appear

I stretch out my hand.. And tighten my grip upon the land.

I am the falling golden leaves, the mushroom.

I am the sigh of the sleeping mist above the loch, the frost.

I rule over Winter, I bring with me a tribe of your ancestors.

Who will share their wisdom, for a Dram.

I am the last harvest,

With a hammer, I strike the grass beneath the Holly.

I am death,

And I will take what is needed to be taken,

To clear space for new life.

I honor those who grieve the end of the sun’s strength. I was once one of those people. I understand the joys of heat and Vitamin D and trees covered in leaves and flowers and then fruits, bees and birds, and life humming dutifully and beautifully around us. I understand, truly, and if you are grieving, I hope you can find a landing place inside of the soul womb that is the dark half of the year. May soups and stories hold your hands as the wheel turns, and may the stars shine brightly for you.

I have been grieving the loss of winter since she left completely at Beltane, and I find myself sighing on walks, humbled by the splendor of the autumnal colors and the winter songs I hear the trees singing as they change and go within. Filled with absolute wonder and delight by each raindrop and each russet leaf, I can’t imagine a more beautiful time of year. These treasures are some of nature’s high teachings, offered to all of us, and are worthy of our gaze and meditation.

I love this Samhain Spell by Donald L. Engstrom. It takes courage to drop fully into its meaning, and yet, every time I speak it aloud, I notice it resonates more and more deeply within me.

I also love, love, love this Samhain poem and read it regularly throughout the season, hoping to have it fully memorized soon, living in my bones, honoring our once oral tradition, my new year’s commitment it to begin to embody the stories and lore in a way where I can be a true lore-keeper in addition to story weaving, and offer its wisdom with the strength of the bards of old…

Samhain, by Annie Finch.

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

A Blessing for Samhain

In honor of the Cailleach,

May your beloved dead be welcomed at your table, a place set for them, offerings left for them, a wee dram, a piece of their favorite pie or fruit;

May your beloved dead know what it is to hear their name spoken by the living, may their souls shine knowing they are remembered by some who still walk on this plane, love moving across the veils, to spark the places where their heart once moved;

May your beloved dead be invited to share their wisdom and their humor, their memories and their songs, may you sing them loudly, with gusto, in their memory;

May all you hold dear, whether living or otherwise, be blessed by this glowing liminality, hands held across the thresholds, tears shed across the veils, and may the dreaming time offer you space to rest, to winter the oceans of your thinking mind, such the only movement within you is the clunk of giant icebergs meeting on salty seas shading goblin sharks as they undulate slowly in the black ancient depths of your silenced being;

May this sunsetting time of year and its hilltop fires of celebration invite you into even greater connection with your kith, kin, and community.

Your shadow-cloaked, poetry-soaked, wild-loving, kin,

Heather Louise

Delights from Our Substack Community…

• The Cailleach | The Witch Is Coming by Jen Murphy, is a gorgeous offering sharing lore and wonder (always) from the Irish Tradition.

• The Cailleachs Cosmic Eye. A Primordial Ritual of Life, Death and Renewal by Jude Lally, is a beautiful offering of one of the Cailleach’s stories of transformation from Scotland.

• Reclaiming Halloween | Beyond sugar and plastic body parts: advice from 3 experts by Rayann Gordon, is a wonderfully honest offering from a deeply connected, spirit-working parent, seeking to reclaim the old traditions away from its obscured modern permutations.

Celebrate with Animisma

True Samhain this year falls on November 6th (the cross-quarter day between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice), so you have some time yet to celebrate the season! There are two episodes devoted to this gorgeous time. You can find Animisma on your favorite podcast app, on Substack, and on my website here.

May the transformative blessings of Samhain be yours.

The Isle of Arran

The wild wind whipped my long hair into a tumbled frenzy, and the rain pelted my face with bullet strength, forcing me to seek shelter on the port side of the ferry taking my mother and I across to the Isle of Arran (Arran). I wanted to stay on deck for the crossing, for as long as I could, to sing to the seas and listen to the rains, to let the land of my ancestors know that their daughters, their cousins, their nieces were returning however on this particular day, I might well have been blown off the deck, and as beautiful as I find the Firth of Clyde, the truth is that I would rather enjoy its gray depths, capped waves, and vast views from the safety of a ship. There are parts of me however that hope to sail it one day, to be close to the waters, to feel my selkie sisters swimming beneath me, beside me, moving in unison with the air and waves.

Arran.

Home.

Goatfell, Arran’s highest peak.

Above is The Book of Arran, original editions published in 1910, photographed at the Arran Heritage Museum (the once childhood home of my cousin’s husband). I intend to share folk stories from these pages very soon, they are of course, magical.

The gentle, beautiful resting place of my great, great grandparents, and my great aunt and uncle.

The Holy Isle viewed at sunset from Lamlash | Perhaps you also see a giant laying on her side to rest? The earliest recorded name for Holy Isle was Inis Shroin, old Gaelic for 'Island of the Water Spirit'. This beautiful island directly off the coast of Arran has been a spiritual center since at least the 6th Century. Today the island is home to a Centre for World Peace stewarded by a Tibetan Buddhist Lama and includes a retreat center where various offerings are shared. Perhaps one day you’d like to join me there to pause and commune deeply, and perhaps through individual and collective ceremonial meditation reignite relations with the original water spirits known to the Celts.

Arran of folklore is an isle of legends… Giants, fairy glens, and selkies… The Machrie Moor Standing Stones, a sacred landscape, 4,500 years old.

Close to the standing stones is Fingal’s Cauldron Seat. Legend has it that the famed warrior giant, Fingal (Fionn MacCumhail) ate from a cauldron supported by the inner ring of stones, his giant dog tethered to the stone with a hole through its center. Other tales also tell of a brownie that could be appeased by pouring milk through the hole…

A short walk from where we were staying near Whiting Bay.

Along a green path, over a bridge, into a glen, climbing across washed rocks, the fairy glen appears…

Everywhere we turned, everywhere, Rowan berries were painted across the hills and burns. Blood-red wonders shining around every corner. The 5-pointed star of the Rowan Berry is considered by many a protective symbol, repelling evil spirits. I’d never seen them so red, often more of an orange color. Perhaps these were vibrant, rich, warnings of a cold winter to come, I could hear them singing, singing the change, singing the songs of a Summer passed and an Autumn to come. An important food source for birds and mammals, humans have also benefitted from its rich Vitamin C for an age. Rowan jelly made with apples, another sacred plant of the Ogham, is a gorgeous, nourishing winter food.

Looking SSE from Arran towards Ailsa Craig, famed for its microgranite used to produce curling stones.

The Shetland Islands

After a beautiful, familial week on Arran, we drove northward through Glencoe to Inverness. After a brief stay, we took two short flights from Inverness and arrived in the Shetland Islands (via Kirkwall). Its stark, watery, green landscapes, stippled with sheep and the rocky remains of crofts and iron-age brochs, offered an intimacy and energy I was delighted to experience. Waters edge and boggy land in a wild, living dance of sensual movement. Liminality abounds in Shetland, the meeting place of Scottish and Viking culture, the meeting of the North Sea and soil, the mythic home of giants and living mists.

4,000 years of occupation at the coastal Jarlshoff settlement.

There were beautiful examples of old querns used for grinding grains for flour from Bere, an ancient Barley, still grown on the island.

On the North of the mainland, camouflaged against the rocky hills, these stones stand at the foot of a hill called The Beorgs of Housetter and come with a curious tale, as do almost all the standing stones on Shetland. Known as The Giant’s Grave, they are the remains of an almost totally ruined Neolithic chambered cairn. The story goes that a giant planned to use the hill rocks to build a causeway to the Island of Yell to rustle cattle, but the Islanders catapulted him to his death from the top of the Beorgs. The Giant’s Grave marks the foot and head of his grave, the stones are about 20 ft apart. I experienced the energy of this site to be peaceful, still, and yet mythically alive. Perhaps the best way to describe the feel of Shetland.

After a wonderfully misty arrival day, we were blessed with clear skies and far views, making for excellent coastal hiking weather. Seals and seabirds were also out and about, enjoying the stunning days, so I was grateful to connect with our Selkie kin.

It was hard to believe the equinox was upon us. Bright full moon, bright shining sun, the delicate edges of Summer seemed to stretch for an eternity sitting by the water’s edge.

My mother and I also visited the Shetland Textile Museum and joined countless other visitors in knitting a few rows on a scarf that has been continuously knitted for the last 20 years, coming in now at a whopping 223 feet (68m) long. Shetland is known for its wool and the warmth of its people and this tiny museum was a testament to both. It was an honor to knit my one wee row (it had been 37 years since I last knitted, I’d like to rekindle the practice) and offer my hands forward in service of connection and continuum. Note the Shetland Knitting Belt below - it stabilizes your arms and hands reducing fatigue and allows for the elderly, even those who’ve experienced stroke, to be able to keep knitting, keeping the craft alive.

We returned to Edinburgh yesterday afternoon, preparing for our homeward journey on the true equinox arriving tomorrow. This morning I was greeted by the glorious morning mists of Autumn; yellowing leaves, reddening trees, and the breath of the second harvest on our spiraling wheel, calling me deeper towards the end of our Celtic year, deeper into the mythic centre/er of our collective dreaming, balancing on the fulcrum moment of where light and dark come together as one.

This morning, as I walked through dark woods and cool fields, I stopped by dewy spider webs spun between soft rotting grasses, and watched ravens soaring above, circling against a grey and white sky. I wondered what this winter might have in store for the spiders and the birds, the fields and the trees. I wondered what this winter might have in store for us all.

A Blessing for The Equinox

All blessings of this time and this second harvest be upon you and all you hold dear. May gratitude for the harvest, the plants, and for life itself tumble from the full cups of our broad and capable hearts.

If you are a Druid, may the Light of the Water, Alban Elfed, bless you and keep safe your journeys towards the darkness through the gateway of the year.

May the dreaming stories of our ancestral homelands greet you upon the yellowing forests of your inner worlds; wide red leaves carrying you across deep, dark waters, bringing your thoughts and words and deeds to a slow swampy rest with bogbean and heather, readying them for the wintering that is to come.

May the energy of your thinking mind begin its glorious journey rootward, following the wise guidance of field thistles and deciduous trees, descending into the moody caverns of the dark Earth, placing every empty or completed thought upon the mycelial altar as an offering to be decomposed through its sacred rot.

May we offer our hands and voices forward in service of the mythic looms, weaving connection, story, wonder, kindness, curiosity, and nuance into the cultural quilts of our fraying world.

For all those who have joined me for years, I am blessed beyond measure by your steadfast company, wisdom, and reflections. For all those who are new, you are warmly welcome here, and I’m so grateful you have chosen to join our communal hearth.

Ever with warmth and care, I wish you peace, fortitude, and a resplendent harvest season.

Your red-leafed, thistle-skinned, briny-blooded kin,

Heather Louise

Moowan McGregor was one of two baby Heilan’ Coos I was able to briefly snuggle with as we passed through Glencoe. The nature reserve we visited uses these Highland Cows to reduce bracken and break up the soil as they replant native plant species throughout the Highlands, felling the introduced Sitka pine forests in favor of woodland species, creating habitats for pine martin, highland wildcats, and hedgehogs among other species.

Did you know that though the most known breed is ginger, they can also have yellow, silver, white, red, and black coats? Queen Victoria when visiting the Highlands said that she liked the red-colored coos the best, so breeders selectively focused on the ginger coos, making this color the most popular.

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To My Dear Kin,

You will receive two missives from me this week. Today’s recording plus a missive regarding the upcoming full-moon-summer-solstice this Thursday.

For those who are new here, welcome! The flow of my work follows the wheel of the year, and, is also peppered with surprises, reflections, stories, and songs, when I am able to rest and record. I am an animist artist and so the integration of the cycles of the Earth, her seasons, the stars, and the waters, with my own vessel’s cycles, tends to direct the way the words flow through me.

I am deeply grateful you are here. It is you, my kin of scale and sky, that I write for and am inspired by. Your kindness and curiosity is a sweet gift, a treasure, and I give grace for you and all you hold dear, daily.

I’m also a human who is tending to aging parents and work and sometimes that draws me away from this space... I am ever so grateful for your understanding and hope to delight you and nourish you and tend to the parts of you that yearn for story as best I can, with what I have.

So, for you today, let’s delight in a gorgeous tale.

First though, a wee tale of my own.

Skye and the Seal Song

Late one afternoon when I was staying on the Isle of Skye in the Autumn of 2022, I hiked through headland crofts, down a steep cliff, to a rocky beach where I found myself to be the only human greeted by a family of seals. This particular pod contained a very curious baby who I started to play hide and seek with. I would run behind a huge, fly-filled pile of seaweed and stop, then it would swim towards me, often right to the water’s edge, then I’d pop my head up and it would bark and jump into the water swimming away. I’d then come out and it would go under the water and hide, popping up in another place, to which I’d yelp in return, then go and hide behind more weed.

We played like this for a good long while, and it was, well, everything.

The water lapping softly upon the rocks, the view of the northern isles from this wild edge of Skye, and the family of seals casually watching on from the water as we played was a true pleasure for the senses.

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(To my friends)

I had started to write about these solar days, the beautiful rise of heat, sensuality, and fertility at this verdant, rich, green time of year. Last year it was a sweet song to write about peak Spring and the Pleasures of Porosity we experience during Bealtaine, I invite you to revisit its soft, hawthorny explorations and …

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To My Dear Kin,

I hope this finds the waters that surround you settling and finding their way back to shore. The recent eclipse portal was quite intense for my system, accompanied by fatigue and dizziness, and I am grateful that it has now been completed, such that my sight and my voice can return to me in its fullness.

April is my birth month, my solar return takes place tomorrow… for those who track the cosmic cycles, it’s said it will be quite the day. This year I claim the honor of halfway to 90, a big feat, and something to be so, so grateful for. Intentions for the day include writing, reflecting, dinner, and then the contemporary masterworks of the Colorado Ballet. I am humbled by where this life has led. When I feel into the hardship of my youth, the pain and the loneliness, the fear and the filth, it feels like a dream to live in this way.

Thank you for being here, with me, I’ll be celebrating you too, thanking every reader here, you, by name, aloud, and sending a blessing of care your way. Prayers for the collective and all those who suffer, all of our kin, will mark the start of my day. I feel the following, deeply:

If it is by divine right that I live, then I ask that my walk is an offering of grace, care, humility, and deeply restorative justice. For the Earth, for the humans, for the jaguar, for the oshá, and for the salmon. For the free and clear skies. For the dark hidden depths. For the vast forested mountains.

For all.

Tír fo Thuinn

In addition to our budding exploration of dragon stories, another thread of the lineage has been plucked, its songs traveling through the veils landing upon my shores, its stories seeking to be honored and spoken and remembered here in our salty cauldron of myth and mystery.

The Land Under the Wave.

For those who know me personally, it comes as no surprise I’m sure…

The merpeople, the selkies, the maiden of the wave, the merrow, the ceasg, the maiden of the sea, the finfolk, and of course the kelpie… myths, stories, and folklore abound from our Celtic heritage and so now, in honor of their call, we undertake a ‘Tales of the Water Beings’ series here as an elemental compliment to the dragons.

May these voyages offer a sumptuous steaming of stories for your pleasure and reflection, water and fire, mist and steam.

Mmmm.

Delicious.

Let’s dive in.

The Maid-of-the-Wave

Today’s tale is from Alba (Scotland) and was written by the folklorist Donald A. Mackenzie around 1917, so this version is a little over 100 years old. It was intended for children, though I think it reads quite beautifully for all ages.

There is a common thread of theft, loss, sorrow, reclamation, and return in many of these stories, and the following is no exception. The taming/taking advantage of the wild, of imprisonment, and how though the stolen may comply, their life force drains, their wild hearts yearn to return home, despite love and family, and the wild is the one thing that saves them.

• How do we honor the wild, individually and collectively?

• What happens to a wild spirit when it is domesticated and controlled?

• How do the parts of you that are wild respond to this tale?

Some women wear a skin of seal, some a salmon cloak, some wear magnificent sea-blue garments when they have left their water home, walking upon the shore…

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A hundred thousand welcomes friends,

To all who recently joined this gathering of wise and wild folk, you are warmly welcome here. This is a place of contemplation, communion, story, and song, ever inspired by the wisdom teachings of the Celtic otherworld and its mythic paths of beauty and grace.

Here you are honored, as we …

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