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The Blackbird – An Lon Dubh, Song, Season, and Cultural Knowledge
Imbolc is most often associated with the snowdrop – the first visible plant to break winter ground and a familiar emblem of the season’s quiet turning. As a plant herald, the snowdrop marks Imbolc through presence alone, appearing when the land has not yet outwardly changed. Less often named, but no less significant, is the blackbird. Where the snowdrop marks Imbolc through sight, the blackbird marks it through sound. Its song is among the earliest sustained voices to return
When Perception Loses The Other
Modern life no longer suffers from invisibility so much as from a saturation of attention. Images, voices, opinions, and selves circulate constantly, soliciting response and recognition, asking to be seen. Beneath this glare of visibility, however, something quieter has begun to fail. Perception itself, once rooted in encounter, has become unmoored from the world it claims to apprehend. For most of human history, perception arose in friction with what resisted us. Ground had
On Inactivity, Stillness, and the Radiance of Life
Spring sharpens our awareness of time. Not clock time, but lived time – light edging earlier across walls, mornings opening a little wider, the air carrying more movement than warmth. In Ireland, spring has never been understood as sudden arrival. It is a season of watching. Of waiting. Of knowing that movement does not mean readiness. The land teaches restraint before it teaches growth. Modern life has lost this literacy. We have been trained to equate intensity with activit
Fire Without a Hearth – On Ritual, Integration, and the Quiet Work of Balance
Something subtle has gone wrong in how contemporary spirituality understands time. The error is not loud. It does not announce itself as distortion. It appears instead as enthusiasm, productivity, and devotion to light. It looks like progress. It feels like forward movement. Yet beneath this constant reaching toward what comes next, something essential is being skipped. The pause. Across modern spiritual practice, attention is repeatedly drawn toward moments of visibility – t
Imbolc and Brigid: On Timing, Thresholds (and Confusion)
Willow, snowdrop and rowan protective talisman for the hearth and home As February approaches, references to Imbolc and Brigid begin to circulate again. Articles are shared, festivals announced, and familiar language returns – new beginnings, fresh starts, the promise of spring. The tone is often hopeful, sometimes celebratory, and usually well-intentioned. Yet for many people, it does not quite land. The difficulty is not with the impulse to mark change, but with how several
The Language That Carries Us: Part Two – When the Word Is Spoken
If Part One belongs to language held in the body, this second movement belongs to the moment when breath becomes sound. In oral cultures, speech is never neutral. Words are not simply descriptive. They are acts. They intervene in the world they enter. This is why, within Irish tradition, language was never treated casually, and why silence was understood not as absence, but as restraint and discernment. To speak was to step into relationship and to accept consequence, not on
The Language That Carries Us: Part One – Before the Word
Oral tradition is fragile. Not because it lacks substance, but because it depends on closeness. It survives only where people remain in relationship – to one another, to place, and to those who came before them. Once that proximity is broken, once knowledge is lifted out of the hearth and placed at a distance, something essential thins. The words may remain, but the transmission weakens. In Ireland, much of what is most vital has never been written down. It has lived instead
Sedna, Snow Wisdom, and the Long Northern Memory
Every winter, I pull on the same pair of mukluks before stepping outside. They are old now – reindeer skin, hand-made in Kalaallit Nunaat (aka Greenland), lined with sheepswool that has softened to the shape of my feet over years of use. They keep my feet warm in a way no other boot ever has, but more than that, they carry memory. Each time I wear them, I am brought back to the North – to Greenland, to Ísland (Iceland), to my time in the Arctic circle, to places where winter
The Door the Earth Opens
This kind of weather does not belong to extremes. It emerges only when conditions align just long enough for something else to surface – a narrow interval, a hinge that exists more in timing than temperature. The ice forms not through storm or spectacle, but through steadiness: cold held evenly, moisture allowed to settle, movement slowed to the point where structure becomes visible. When I came upon it, the ground was sealed in a skin of clear glaze ice. Grass, leaves, stone
In the Presence of Absence
There is a phrase that keeps opening rather than closing: in the presence of absence. It does not behave like an idea. It behaves more like weather – something you stand inside, something that alters perception without asking permission. Absence is usually treated as lack. As failure. As something to be corrected, filled, resolved. Yet life is shaped as much by what withdraws as by what appears. What goes quiet. What ceases. What no longer flows. Absence is not empty. It is s
On the Sacred Pause: An Chailleach Bhéarra and Brigid at the Hinge of Winter
Winter’s work does not end with thaw or birdsong. It ends more quietly than that. There comes a point when the land has already given up what it can give – when the inward pull has completed itself and nothing further can be asked. The fields do not move toward spring. They pause. The year holds its breath. This pause is not the space between seasons, nor a handover from one power to another. It is a living hinge within the year itself – a moment when winter has not released
On Solace, Stillness, and the Discipline of Less
Deep winter asks very little, yet it offers something increasingly rare – permission to stop shaping oneself. When the year has withdrawn from growth and display, when light is scarce and sound softens, a quality of quiet emerges that is not empty but sufficient. It does not console or reassure. It simply holds. This is not the stillness of waiting for what comes next. It is the stillness that arrives when striving has loosened its grip. The nervous system settles. The mind g
The Monastery Of Winter: On Path, And The Quiet Architecture Of Self
On interiority, simplicity, and the discipline of being. There are winters that feel less like a season and more like a structure the world has quietly entered. Not a building in the usual sense, but an arrangement of cold, stillness, and time that gathers around a person the way stone gathers around a cloister. It is a kind of architecture formed not by human will but by weather’s discipline. When it settles, the ordinary noise of living recedes. The familiar scaffolding o
Snow Season: The Five Elements Under White Sky
A winter study of landscape, form, and elemental clarity Across the world the year divides itself differently. Some landscapes speak in broad strokes, others in subtle ones, and the language of season depends entirely on what the land considers important. In Ireland we move through four seasons and eight thresholds. In other places the year is governed by monsoon, by wind shift, by the arrival of insects, by the flowering of one particular tree. High latitudes often speak in
When Darkness Is No Longer Permitted to Do Its Work
On the Beara Peninsula, the winter solstice still arrives as a working cosmology rather than a seasonal motif. Under a north-facing sky where the old bearings remain legible, the longest night exposes a deeper crisis – not of technology, but of orientation, rest, and cultural memory. On the winter solstice, standing on the Beara Peninsula and facing north, the rupture shaping modern life reveals itself as cosmological rather than technological. This is the longest night of th
The Cailleach And The Hidden Self
A psychological descent shaped by timing, truth, and return. In the old stories the Cailleach appears at the moment when turning back is no longer possible. She is not a figure of menace but of unmistakable gravity, a presence that signals a change in direction long before the mind admits it. She belongs to winter because winter reveals what cannot be postponed. The season strips the world to its structural truth, and she stands within that clarity, watching what rises when
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
Where the Womb Enters Winter
Menopause is most often framed as loss – of fertility, rhythm, relevance, ease. It is medicalised, managed, and softened, yet rarely understood in terms of season. What is absent from much of modern societal language is a more fundamental recognition: the womb, like the land, has a winter. Nothing that lives is organised for perpetual outward motion. Growth withdraws. Energy consolidates. Life turns inward in order to endure. In indigenous cultures shaped by land and season,