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The Turning Thread – Fibre, Breath, and the Spellwork of Spring
Long before cloth warmed the body or marked status within a household, cordage, string and strands of plant and animal fiber, including our own hair, was understood as something far older and far stranger. It was time made visible. It was duration given form. It was continuity that could be held between finger and thumb and drawn steadily into the present from what had already passed and what had not yet arrived. The making of thread stands among the oldest human gestures tha
Feather, Bone, and the Woman Who Crosses: Bird-women, piseoga, and bird-shape in Munster memory
In the older Irish imagination, birds were never only birds. They were weather before weather reports, messages before letters, and the visible proof that the world holds seams. Munster carries this knowledge in a practical way. In West Cork, the day has long been read by what arrives over the water, what lifts from the fields, what gathers in hedges, and what refuses to show itself. Birds form part of a living script written in movement. Within Irish tradition, where the oth
The Singing Bond – Brigid, Breath, and the Ancient Language Between Species
Spring enters the pastoral world first through sound. The hedgerows remain spare, fields hold their winter colour, and frost may still linger in shaded ground, yet barns, byres, and lambing sheds begin to fill with voices. The low murmur of ewes turning restlessly toward birth. The soft, searching bleat of newborn lambs learning the pitch of their mothers. The steady human voice moving between animal bodies in lantern light, humming or speaking without urgency, keeping rhythm
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
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
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
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
Opening the Window: Death Customs and Soul Beliefs in Irish Tradition
In Ireland, death has never been a hidden thing. It moves through the home, the community, and the land as something to be honoured, witnessed, and spoken of. Death is not treated as an abrupt severing, but as a threshold that involves the living and the dead in a shared passage. In rural Ireland, particularly, these thresholds have traditionally been marked through a series of household rituals, communal practices, and seasonal observances that bind the fate of the soul to t