Imbolc and Brigid: On Timing, Thresholds (and Confusion)
- The heART of Ritual
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
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 different systems of time have come to be folded into one another. In Ireland, at least three distinct traditions now sit under the same name. They overlap, but they are not the same. When they are treated as interchangeable, something essential about Imbolc is lost.
The first is Saint Brigid’s Day, held on the 1st of February. Brigid, canonised by the Church and recognised as Ireland’s national female patron saint, holds an important place in the civic and religious calendar. The fixed date belongs to the ecclesiastical tradition. Since 2023, it has also been marked as Ireland’s first public holiday named after a woman, and has been used publicly as an occasion to acknowledge the role and achievements of women in Irish life.
The second is Imbolc itself – one of the eight seasonal festivals of the indigenous Irish year. These thresholds were never fixed by date. They were astronomical, governed by the movement of light rather than the calendar. Imbolc occurs at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, a moment that shifts slightly each year. In 2026, that midpoint falls on February 3rd.
The third is the agricultural calendar, where the 1st of February traditionally marks the beginning of spring. This reckoning is practical rather than symbolic. It reflects changes in daylight, animal behaviour, and the slow reorientation of work on the land. It does not suggest that winter weather has ended. It signals a change in attention, not in temperature.
These three systems are related, but they carry different kinds of intelligence. When they are collapsed into a single idea of “new beginnings”, Imbolc is often asked to do work that does not belong to it.
In Irish indigenous tradition, Imbolc is not a time of outward movement or visible renewal. Winter still holds authority. The land has not thawed. Growth is not apparent. What has changed is orientation. Attention begins to turn, quietly and inwardly, toward what may yet come.
Imbolc does not depend on surface conditions. It may arrive while snow still lies deep on the ground, or when the land shows little outward sign of change. Its work takes place beneath what can be seen. The seeds are already stirring, though nothing has broken the surface. The lamb is carried long before it is born. Milk gathers before it is needed. In this sense, Imbolc is as much an inner threshold as an outer one – a state of being marked by attentiveness, restraint, and the quiet labour of preparation. It asks not whether spring has arrived, but whether something within is ready to be carried forward.
Snowdrops offer a quiet illustration of this work. Long before the wider thaw, they generate and retain warmth at their growing tips, melting a narrow passage through frozen ground and snow. They do not wait for favourable conditions to arrive fully formed; they create just enough warmth to move, just enough space to emerge. Around them, winter may still hold fast, but a local thaw has begun. This is Imbolc’s instruction in botanical form: tend the inner flame carefully, and the ground immediately around you will begin to soften.
This is why Imbolc has long been associated with milk rather than abundance, with tending rather than expansion, with heat held close rather than fire cast outward. It marks the point where survival gives way to discernment – where life asks, cautiously and without drama, what has endured the winter and what will continue. Brigid appears here not as a figure of declaration, but as a keeper of early continuity. She belongs to hearth and well, to the protection of what is fragile, to the steady holding of potential that has not yet taken form. This aspect of Brigid does not propel the season forward. She remains with what is still vulnerable, ensuring that warmth and nourishment are sufficient and that nothing is rushed into exposure.
Between Imbolc and the spring equinox, Brigid’s work is inward and receptive. It belongs to water rather than fire – to the homemaker, the nurturer, the midwife. This is the phase of holding, warming, and protecting what is still forming. Nothing is asked to prove itself. The labour is quiet, domestic, and exacting.
From the spring equinox toward Bealtaine, that same presence turns outward. The work becomes one of fire and air – of forging, way-showing, and movement. Brigid appears then as torchbearer and path-maker, shaping what has been carried into something that can act, travel, and take its place in the world.
When Imbolc is framed solely as “new beginnings”, the work of this threshold is easily flattened and bypassed. Listening is replaced with momentum. The land – and the body – are asked to perform before readiness has been established. A subtle hinge is flattened into a theme.
None of this negates Saint Brigid’s Day, nor the value of communal marking, nor the importance of honouring women’s labour and care. It does, however, ask for precision. When names are shared across traditions, their meanings deserve the same care.
The Irish seasonal year does not announce itself loudly. Its thresholds are modest, often unremarkable to the casual eye. They reveal themselves through long observation: light shifting on the hills, animals changing behaviour, the body’s own rhythms of fatigue and recovery.
Imbolc asks for restraint. It asks for honesty about where warmth is still required, where effort would be premature, where the urge to begin again may be masking a need to remain with what is unfinished. It is not a celebration of spring, but a conversation with its possibility.
As the weeks unfold, the nature of the work changes. What is held at Imbolc is not meant to remain held indefinitely. By the time the year approaches the spring equinox, attention turns outward, and the work shifts from holding to shaping.
Direction matters. Intention gathers. What has been kept warm begins to seek form and movement. That work belongs to the equinox, and to Brigid’s presence there.
To honour Imbolc is not to mistake it for the whole of spring, but to give it the stillness it requires – so that what follows is not rushed, distorted, or forced.
The year does not turn because we declare it so. It turns when the land – and the body – are ready.
A closing note
Some readers may recognise a familiar tension in what has been described here. A sense that Imbolc, as it is often spoken about, never quite accounted for their lived experience. That Brigid, as she is commonly presented, felt partial rather than whole. Not wrong, but incomplete.
What circulates most widely now tends to represent only a narrow portion of a much larger seasonal and archetypal landscape. The emphasis falls on what is visible, forward-moving, and light-oriented, while the quieter work of holding, gestation, and integration is often passed over. When that happens, the deeper coherence of the season (and its festivals) is easily lost.
Imbolc is not only a festival to be observed, but a state of being to be inhabited. In the same way, Brigid is not only encountered through dates and symbols, but through the inner weather of preparation, care, and gradual emergence. These movements take place within the psyche and the body as surely as they do in the land, regardless of climate or geography.
For those who sense that there is more here to be understood and lived, there are two distinct pathways of study available through the Online Hedge School from February 1st onwards:
Brigid, Light-Bearer at the Threshold is a depth exploration of Brigid as an archetypal presence, following her movement through stillness, emergence, and outward shaping as it is experienced inwardly over time. This work is for those drawn to the inner life, to psychological and mythic patterning, and to understanding how Brigid appears within lived process rather than abstract symbol.
Spring – a Seasonal Passage with the Celtic Wheel of the Year follows the arc of spring from Imbolc through the Spring Equinox as a coherent passage, attending to the different phases of the season as they unfold both in the land and within the inner landscape. This path is for those who wish to deepen their relationship with the festivals themselves and with spring as a lived, sequential movement rather than a single moment.
Both offerings stand on their own, and both are held within a wider body of work devoted to restoring these traditions to their full, living shape – not as reinvention, but as remembrance.
© 2026 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.
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