On the Sacred Pause Between An Chailleach Bhéarra and Brigid

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 does not belong to winter, though winter has made it possible. Nor does it belong to spring, which has not yet found its footing. It occupies the interval between descent and ascent – a narrow, easily overlooked threshold in the Irish year, where time stands without leaning toward either dark or light.

Within Irish cosmology, the descent is governed by An Chailleach Bhéarra, the elder presence of stone, bone, and weather, who draws life inward and brings it to ground. By the time this interval arrives, her authority has already done its work. What could be composted has been returned. What could be relinquished has loosened its grip. There is nothing left to surrender. What remains is stillness without demand.

This interval is not preparatory in the familiar sense. It is not a season of cleansing, intention, or renewal. It is not a holding pattern for what comes next. It is completion itself – the moment when effort ceases because nothing more can be asked of the land, or of the body that belongs to it. Here, the year does not move forward. It stands.

The ground is neither barren nor fertile. It is finished. It has been carried as far as it can go and is now allowed to rest in that fact. This is a form of virginity that predates innocence – not untouchedness, but freedom from burden. Nothing is being gathered. Nothing is being promised. Only from such a pause can return begin.

The ascent belongs to Brigid, whose presence arrives not as rupture but as quiet warmth, whose fire does not consume the dark but steadies it. Yet Brigid does not come through momentum or activity. She enters only when the ground has already laid itself down, when nothing is being pulled toward the future. This interval is what makes her possible.

It is the moment when power pauses, when authority withdraws, when the year stands unclaimed by either ending or beginning. No teaching is offered here. No practice is prescribed. The work has already been done.

To remain in this interval is to resist the reflex to move too quickly toward return. It is to trust that nothing essential has been missed, and that what rises will do so in its own time.

Between elder and virgin, between bone and flame, the land keeps this silence. Not as absence, but as fidelity.

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© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

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Photo credit: Ken Williams