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 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

To Rise Like a Tide – On Resisting Hopelessness in a Time of Unmaking

It would be tempting, these days, to curl into the dark – to say the work is too great, the damage too deep, the hunger too vast. That we...

Samhain and the Cailleach

Samhain, the astronomical moment of liminality, is drawing closer. Although Halloween will be celebrated on the 31st of October, the...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'The Thing Is', by Ellen Bass

To love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Sojourns in a Parallel World', by Denise Levertov

We live our lives of human passions, cruelties, dreams, concepts, crimes and the exercise of virtue in and beside a world devoid of our...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Learning from Trees', by Grace Butcher

If we could, like the trees, practice dying, do it every year just as something we do— like going on vacation or celebrating birthdays,...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Mistletoe', by Walter De La Mare

Sitting under the mistletoe (Pale-green, fairy mistletoe), One last candle burning low, All the sleepy dancers gone, Just one candle...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Hoar Frost', by Moira Cameron

In icy cover of the dark- too cold, the Arctic air can’t muster up the will or care to gust- strange magic thrives in stillness stark:...

Tale of a Scottish Brownie

There was a Brownie who lived and worked in the house of Maxwell, Laird of Dalswinton. This Brownie was particularly close to the...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'The Lamplighter', by Robert Louis Stevenson

My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky; It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by; For every night at teatime and...

Wintering, and how Trees illuminate the Art of Self-Renewal in difficult times

“Wintering… is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a...

The Complex Root Systems of Plants

Winter is the season of the earth element and earth, and it's hard to speak about earth without speaking about physical roots, our...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'A Wintry Sonnet', by Christina Rossetti

A Robin said: The Spring will never come, And I shall never care to build again. A Rosebush said: These frosts are wearisome, My sap will...

What can we learn from how Nature spends Winter?

Life's adaptations to the cold and dark part of the year demonstrate how time and patience, in the end, teach us how to survive....

Fear and the Earth Element within

Fear is one of the themes that destabilizes our root, the earth element within us. Here are a few powerful words to consider on fear, and...

The Magic of the Earth Element

The forest breathes, it lives, as one. Primordial, intricate, wild. Wild in it's impossible terrain, teeming with life; buzzing, dancing,...

Seasonal Poetry & Prose: 'Holly', by Andrew Blakemore

At the edge of the field in a hedgerow so tangled, So thick and so dense where the holly does grow, Berries of scarlet are caught in the...

The Cycle of Form and Formless

We are taken into winter, when the leaves are fallen from the trees and the branches are bare. Winter is this barrenness that belongs to...