It’s the evening before Brigid’s Day.
As she does every year, Brigid pulls at my sleeve and asks me to tell our shared stories. All too often, I’ve been too busy or felt like these were not my tales to tell. This year, I’m not going to push her away.
On the first days of February, we mark the Celtic festival of Imbolc. If you’re in Ireland, on Brigid’s home turf where she walks in all her forms, you feel the first signs of spring and the snow drops prove there’s hope upon hope of a blossoming season to come.
We’re called to celebrate the rebirth of both the earth and the spirit. (And conjure the optimism and faith that warmer brighter days are coming, even if you’re on a part of the earth still wrapped by the mantle of winter.)
Meeting Brigid, Goddess and Saint
If you’ve read my book The Sovereignty Knot, you’ve met this divine woman of Irish mythology and Christian lore. Brigid (or Bridget or Brigit or any of the various spellings) is at once goddess and saint. Fertility and birth, fire and creativity, healing and hospitality, poetry and smithcraft… She blesses all these facets of life and holds all our prayers and spells and intentions.
Oh, and she has the power to turn water into beer. (Apparently, it’s a great cure for lepers. And thirsty people of all sorts.)
Brigid called me to her when I was a Catholic kid on Cape Cod with little connection to Ireland beyond a vague awareness of my great-great-grandmothers. Inspired, I took my confirmation name in honor of the saint (and one of those grandmothers). Throughout high school, I strained to feel Saint Bridget and understand what she saw in the prayers and the mass that had sustained my family for generations, stretching back to the old country and time immemorial, but it always felt like a strange way to spend an hour that could otherwise be spent walking the beach or curled up with a good book.
When I did start to feel some sort of stirring of the spirit, it came in an unexpected way. I believe I was hearing the whisper of the goddess Brigid when, in my mid-teens, I was always overcome with dizziness sometime between the gospel and communion. I fled to the church gardens where I could address my prayers and questions to a sacred grove and a wide open sky. In college, I’d find the poetry, the books about the goddess and neopaganism, and the translations of medieval manuscripts that would create a structure for all my longing and wondering.
And then, I followed her to Ireland and spent a couple of years seeking out her holy places, her ancient stories, and her modern translations.
Though it was never the plan, I left academia and Irish Studies and ended up coming back home to build an American life that had little to do with Ireland’s poetry or holy folk. Though I stepped away from the scholarly stuff with its footnoted versions of a peer-reviewed world, I held Brigid and her goddess kin within my heart for more than half a lifetime.
Eventually, of course, I brought those stories back to the center of life when I wrote of Brigid, the Cailleach, the Morrigan, and Medb and spoke of the kind of Sovereignty that comes from the ancient, timeless spirit of the land, not from the mad world of modern politics…
The Season of Imbolc, The Birthday of a Book
The Sovereignty Knot was published a year ago. It’s hard to believe, since she was essentially birthed into another world.
Elsewhere this week, I’ll be writing about how strange it has been to author a book about being sovereign in a time when that word is often associated with the toxic individualism of the anti-mask, anti-vaccination, conspiracy theory set. For now, however, it is time to speak of Brigid and rebirth.
Celebrating a Holiday Thousands of Miles from Its Sacred Ground
There’s always a question of how (and if) one can celebrate a holiday or a deity rooted in a distant part of the planet when the power your honor comes from the land itself. That’s yet another question for another day, but for now, I’ll say that I’ve maintained the connection even when I went 14 years between trips back to the place I have called “my heart’s true home.”
Place matters. Being able to fill every sense with the specific magic of a piece of the earth is essential. And yet… experience has taught me, and the past ten months in particular have taught us all, that it is possible to build and maintain connections across the miles. All it takes is some passion and imagination. The right information and some technology help too, of course.
I am deeply grateful for my favorite form of technology: the little black journals I have been filling for over twenty years. They let me step back to what it was like to wake up in Ireland on Imbolc morning in 2000 when I was in Galway during my junior year abroad:
This morning when I stepped into the grey air that was, nevertheless, fresh and tinged with warmth, I felt more alive than I can remember. Alive in my own right. Awake not for others’ company or a lover’s hands (as sacred as those both can be), but because I was that much closer to the tune of the universe, to the breath of the Goddess.
Am I making all this up? Can I really feel her in the air?
Why should I doubt this sweet taste of waxing beauty? This morning the birds sang more clearly that I remember on any winter day, for this is Brigid’s Day… The turn has come. Rebirthing. Spring is asking to dawn.
Tomorrow, on Imbolc of 2021, I’ll wake up to a Hudson Valley snow storm. I’ll wake up twenty one years older than that girl who wanted to know if she could trust herself and her sovereignty, who wanted to see the sacred in the earth and in herself. (I’ll also wake up fully healed from the ridiculous break up that filled most of the rest of that 2/1/2000 journal entry with drama, thank the goddess!)
Tomorrow, I’ll wake up and trust that on this journey, as wide and meandering and far from the source as I have been, I have never been alone.
I’m curious… do you feel a particular connection to Brigid or to a deity who springs from a different part of the earth than you call home? Tell me in the comments.
How am I marking Imbolc this year?
re/reading books about Brigid and the stories of her life and legacy as goddess and saint including this one, this one, and this one.
Leaving my winter cloak, my favorite scarf, and my summer wrap out on the porch for Brigid to bless as she passes by. Is it strange to imagine that a goddess tied so intimately to the land of Ireland and Scotland is jumping over the pond to spread her love to the splintered pieces of the diaspora? All I can say is that there is magic and meaning the ritual and I think there’s still a touch of her hand on that winter cloak that I hung out the window of a dorm room overlooking Galway’s River Corrib.
Maybe weaving a Brigid’s Cross. Rather than rushes we have some dry grasses collected from the hollow at the back of our land we call Blackthorn Alley. I think it’s a lost cause, but it may make for some snow day fun?
Celebrating the first anniversary of The Sovereignty Knot by making the ebook free on Amazon from Tuesday - Friday of this week. (Look for emails on Tuesday with a reminder to download the book for free. You could always buy a copy you can hold in your hands right now!)
