Earth Element | 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.

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

The Door the Earth Opens

The elder looked altered. Clear ice held to every branch, not as ornament or weight, but as precision. The tree did not carry ice upon it. It looked as though it had been cast in glass – not iced over, not hung with icicles, but rendered entirely transparent, its form taken and held. Branch after branch stood revealed, exact and uninterrupted, the whole shape suddenly legible. The apple beside it shared the same condition, as though both had slipped, briefly and without resis

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

WATCH: Grianstad an Gheimhridh ag Sí an Bhrú (Newgrange Winter Solstice 2025 live stream)

The annual Winter Solstice event at Newgrange in County Meath is going to be streamed virtually this year on December 21 and you can tune in to watch live right here. We are delighted to partner with Ireland’s Office of Public Works (OPW) to help bring the annual, magical event of the Winter Solstice at Newgrange right into your homes around the world. In a statement, Ireland’s Office of Public Works (OPW) said: "It is great that the OPW is able once more to broadcast the Win

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,