Musings

The heART of Ritual

Welcome to the MUSINGS room of our digital hearth.

This is a living archive – a gathering of writings, poems, stories, recipes, videos, and handcraft tutorials. Each one is woven through the rhythms of nature, the turning of the Celtic Wheel, and the elemental and archetypal movements of the Irish year. Rooted in the cosmology, indigenous festivals, folklore, myths, and seasonal customs of Ireland, these offerings speak from the old ways into the now – and are gathered here as both an honouring of those who have gone before us, and a lasting reference for those who are to come.

This collection is freely shared as a gift to the community – yet each piece is the fruit of long attention and handcraft. If you carry it onward, please do so with integrity and give proper credit to the author and source, so the lineage remains unbroken.

Go raibh maith agat.

The Bog Shaman: An Invitation to Intimacy, Wonder, and Place at the home of the Cailleach Bhéarra

On the Beara Peninsula, winter enters quietly through the bog. It always has. This is the land’s first threshold, the place that feels the shift long before the rest of the world takes notice. Winter comes on the scent of damp earth and peat, in the faint metallic clarity of cold air, in the soft resistance beneath your boots as you step onto the dark, springing ground. Before frost etches its fine geometry across stone and heather, the boglands are already turning inward. Mo

On Darkness as Origin

There are nights in West Cork when the land feels stripped back to its rawest truth. Down on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, that long and narrow reach of earth running out into the Atlantic on the south side of Bantry Bay, winter arrives without softenings or shelter. No hedgerows here. No gentle boundaries. Just long golden mountain grasses blown flat by Atlantic wind, heather and gorse crouched low as if bracing itself, and the ground beneath holding its shape in stone and sil

The Work of Winter: Touch and the Remembering of the Body

Touch. The first sense. The first language. Before sound, before sight, before any word was formed, there was the meeting of skin with world, a quiet dialogue between body and existence. Through touch we learned that we are here, that there is ground beneath us, that life can be met and known. It is the oldest way of saying yes. Many speak of five senses, yet if we listen more closely, there are many, many more, each opening a doorway between head, heart, and hands. At the fo

Elemental BEing and the Language of Nature

A reflection on returning to the elemental language of being, where the states we move through are not problems to fix but seasons to honour. If we began to describe ourselves through the language of nature, we might find a gentler way of understanding who we are. So much of the modern world teaches us to define ourselves by what is wrong, to diagnose, to categorise, to measure. But the earth doesn’t work like that. It changes by relationship, not by rule. The oak doesn’t apo

Situating Prayer: A Personal Reflection on Death, Ritual, and the Temple of the Heart

There are moments when time seems to collapse inward, as though it folds along a secret seam only the soul can sense. In that silence, everything that has gone before and everything still to come seem to breathe together. I felt this the morning I learned that Helena had died – my neighbour, friend, mountain grandmother figure, lover of plants and pack and sky. The news came just after the autumn equinox, a hinge-time in the year when the light tips toward darkness and the ai