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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
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
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 When the year has withdrawn from growth and display, when light is scarce and sound softens, a quality of quiet emerges that is not empty but sufficient.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
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
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