archetypal psychology | The heART of Ritual

The heART of Ritual

musings

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 an ongoing 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.

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

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 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 Iceland, to my time in the Arctic circle, to places where winter is not something endured until i

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

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

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,

Water at the Threshold: Autumn Rituals of Bathing and Remembrance

The path climbs steeply. On either side, belladonna plants rise like green sentinels, their glossy leaves and purple-throated flowers marking the way. At the height of summer, on the day of the solstice, I walk this path each year to greet them. Their presence has become part of my calendar, a quiet ritual of return. At the top, the sound of water thickens in the air before the falls themselves come into view. Angel Falls, I call it, for the angelica that surrounds it in tow