A Visit to the Ancestors This Saint Patrick's Day

My family has listened to A Celtic Sojourn, a show on Boston’s GBH Radio, since I was a child. 

Because of the pandemic, my girls and I have been able to watch live streams of both their Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day concerts. These online events haven’t replaced big family gatherings or filled the gap left by my eleven year-old’s cancelled Irish dance performances, but those nights, all filled with music and dancing and poetry, glow a little brighter than all those other evenings spent on the couch over the last year. 

I love the way Celtic Sojourn host Brian O’Donovan describes this season: “It’s March, the ‘high-holidays’ for Irish culture around the world.”

This year, of course, the celebrations are all muted and permuted. 

I’m not chauffeuring my dancer to perform at corn beef and cabbage dinners all across the county, like I should be. Instead of heading to hear the local Irish-ish band, we’ll crank up the stereo, open the windows, and shiver as we raise a glass with friends on the back deck. 

And yet, bits of unexpected magic keep finding us, even without the parades and proper pours of Guinness.

Healing the Wounds of Another Year When March 17 Didn’t Happen

This morning, I had a session with a client who shares my love of Ireland. In fact, we both studied in Galway as juniors in college and missed each other by just one semester.

She originally hired me as her writing coach, copywriter, and online marketing consultant, but our relationship has shifted and grown. Now, I am her story healer, too. We begin each session with a simple question, “do you need the practical or the magical right now?”

(Actually, that is never a simple question, is it? The pragmatic “writing for work stuff” is always infused with the work of the soul, especially for healers, creative entrepreneurs, and transformation professionals who pour their hearts and souls into their work.)

Today, it was clear that she needed healing and support. She needed help detangling the knots of everyday life and this sense of being tossed from one crisis to another. Like so many, she was feeling the weight of this one year anniversary of The Great Pause. Perhaps there was a sense of mourning, of “I can’t believe we’re missing another Saint Paddy’s Day,” too.

A Whisper From the Ancestors

I called on my most trusted tarot cards - a deck that found me back in 1999 during my first year in Ireland. Following their lead, we were called to step out of the modern-day snares and endless b.s., away from the stress and the strain of keeping a business growing and a family happy in the midst of the long drawn out disruption.

We were called to visit her ancestors in a wild place just outside of Galway City. 

And so, I led her through a journey back to those rocky shores, back to the lands of her grandmother’s grandmothers. We were in search of a story, a message, a blessing.

With permission, I’ll share it with you here…

“You’re fine,” said a woman from deep in the past on a small patch of land in a place called Connemara where the Atlantic wind and waves never cease. 

That was all she had to say. And that was all this granddaughter of her heart needed to hear.

Returning from that journey across the miles and years, we talked through the layers of meaning in that simple phrase. We talked about the deep, deep blessing that this ancestral grandmother offered.

May You Have Fine Saint Patrick’s Day

We moderns have weaponized “fine” into shorthand for “not good enough.” If someone asks you how you have been and you say “fine,” that answer offers something between “absolutely terrible” and “you don’t really want to know.” 

“Fine” implies merely surviving in a world that declares you’re not really living if you’re not thriving.

What if we could liberate “fine” from all that judgement and disappointment and the sense that things should be better?

What if we remembered that fine wine, fine art, and finely-woven cloth are to be cherished and prized? 

What if we could hear the voice of the ancestors as they took in a deep breath of sunshine and salt air and sighed “‘Tis a fine day”?

There was a message, a blessing in this for my client, a woman who strives to care for all the people, the animals, and the details as she strives to care for herself, too.

There’s a message and a blessing here for all of us, I think.

Perhaps it’s the gift of perspective. (When we strip away all the 21st century stuff and focus instead on the people, the land, and the animals in our lives, wouldn’t life be the right kind of fine?)

Perhaps it’s the permission not to endlessly quest for the epic and the awesome. (Which isn’t sustainable anyway… we’re not meant to live in a constant state of peak experience and we really don’t want every day to be a holiday because that too would run thin.)

Perhaps it’s simply a blessing.

You’re a fine one. Have a fine day. Sure, if the sun rises, it will be fine tomorrow.

Let yourself be fine, just for a moment, and then see if you’d like to be fine for just a minute more. When you hold this sense of “fine” within yourself, might it become just a little easier to face the next crisis and embrace the next moment of ecstatic joy?

Can I help you unlock the stories and untangle the knots? During a Story Illumination Session we can follow the calls of the ancestors or wherever the energy wants to take us.

Want more stories of Ireland? Get a copy of The Sovereignty Knot today. Order  from your preferred bookseller or get a signed copy from me!

Celebrations and the Power of the Princess Within

They say things come in threes. 

• Luck, both good and bad.

• The human predilection for pattern recognition that makes us love lists of three. (There's poetry in "this, that, and the other thing" and "here, there, and everywhere.")

• Triple deities from around the world.

By design and sacred accident, I've built my own trinity of magic right here at the start of February (a time when we northern hemisphere dwellers in the higher latitudes surely need some sparkle and uplift):

• Imbolc, the day that we celebrate Brigid, Ireland's goddess and saint

• My daughter's birthday (she just turned seven!)

• The release of my book, The Sovereignty Knot (she just turned one!)

Our Struggles With Celebration

All of these early February events are cause for celebration. But...

It's all too easy to transform the wonderful into the stressful and get tangled in the attempt to make all the parties perfect. I admit it has been easy to feel a bit breathless this week.

That's when I remember to go back to my own words and take my own medicine...

In The Sovereignty Knot, you meet the Archetypes of Sovereignty: the princess, the queen, and the wise woman. We are always all three at once, though some of us are more comfortable working with the energy of one more than the others.

For many women who pride themselves on "holding all the things," embracing the princess within can feel regressive. We're supposed to get past all that foolish pink and naïveté, right?

Actually, I believe that we need to recognize and treasure the princess energy within at every stage of life. In part, we need the princess because she knows how to party. She's the one who is always ready to dance like nobody's watching.

So, as I try to quit trying to control everything and just enjoy this week with all of its abundance of celebrations (and all of its snowbanks), I invite you to join me and get (re)acquainted with your own inner princess magic.

Call on the Archetype of the Princess (even when - especially when - you're too old, too busy, or too important to do so)

An excerpt from The Sovereignty Knot:

Once upon a time, I wanted to slay the princess. I wanted to entomb her in my early twenties and make her stay there with all my unexamined regrets. But to do so would rob me of the ecstasy and adventure that the princess wants to enjoy her whole life through.

The princess within knows how to laugh, how to flirt, how to set aside the worries and the deadlines to simply be here in this moment. The princess knows how to sneak in the backstage entrance and how to stay up talking until dawn. She knows how to stay up all night long making love, too. You probably need her more now than you did at twenty-one, when the whole world was designed to invite you to the party.

You’re invited to consider how you might celebrate the princess you once were. This is also a chance to allow the princess that’s always been within you to bring more lighthearted energy into your daily life. What do you need to celebrate right now?

Did you know that you can get the ebook version of The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic for free on Amazon RIGHT NOW?

Through midnight ET on Friday, February 5, the Kindle edition is free. Please download your copy now.

Already read it? Please leave me a review!

Brigid, Imbolc, and a Sense of Renewal, Wherever You Are in the World

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!)

In America, the Sun Still Rose This Morning

Yesterday at noontime here on the east coast, the Sovereign Wisdom Circle gathered together to write and talk. We spent our time exploring the concept of “wisdom.” Once again (as I do every week), I fell in love with this group of wise, wise women. As their insights intertwine and flow together, I feel like we’re all held by an endless horizon of possibility.

Politics only entered the conversation when I declared we needed to change an upcoming meeting. We always meet Wednesdays, but on Wednesday, January 20, we all needed to see a peaceful transition of power. The Inauguration wanted our attention and we all needed to see Kamala become VP.

And then, once the call was done, my quick check of the New York Times live stream to see how the Electoral College certification was progressing turned into multiple screens showing multiple scenes of the growing chaos in Washington…

As afternoon turned into evening, I didn’t have any public words. I kept saying “did you see this?” to my husband as we watched reports from across the news spectrum. I texted family members and discussed what wine pairs best with an attempted coup (and drank a beer called Warlock to honor Reverend Warnock of Georgia because wonderful historic events happened yesterday before the horrible things happened). I reassured our 11 year-old that it would all be ok, even as we let her see the reality of how bad it all could be. I watched The Muppets with our 6 year-old because she proudly wanted nothing to with “people who don’t want Joe to be president.”

This morning, before I checked to see if our republic had made it through the night, I woke up thinking about the woman who stands on top of the Capitol dome. Beneath her feet, terrorists broke windows, waved Confederate flags, invaded offices, and attempted to destroy the national religion of democratic process. 

The Statue of Freedom, US Capitol Building

She is the Statue of Freedom and she has watched over the US Congress since 1863. 

Crafted in Italy, calling on symbols from Rome and the French Revolution and even wearing feathers that nod to the native peoples of America (as an honor or a symbol appropriated by gloating colonizers, you decide), she’s very American in her mix of traditions…

And she’s very American in that though she represents freedom, she was completed thanks to the labor of an enslaved man named Philip Reid.

Yesterday, we saw how words that are supposed to be “good” - like freedom - can be weaponized and subverted. Actions in response to a cowardly, delusional man’s words can weaponize a group of people and nearly subvert democracy. 

“Words mean what I say they mean and will be used to support the ideology I support” isn’t a new concept, of course. The whole country was built on high-minded ideals and elevated language for all, but it’s also built on the idea of freedom for some, on full humanity for some, on safety and protection for some. Regardless of the aspirational script, the United States has never been all that good at ensuring everyone has the same rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Seeing the contrast in the police response to the Black Lives Matter protests and the law enforcement response to an insurrectionist mob of angry white people shows us this absurd and deadly paradox.

But let me come back to the flash of an image that got me up this morning… I didn’t know the story of that twenty foot statue, but I half-remembered what a tour guide said when I was a high school kid on a field trip. I knew it was a woman who faced east and greeted the rising sun.

I checked the weather in Washington DC this morning. It’s sunny.

So, beyond language, beyond the original intent of the artist, beyond the circumstances of her construction, there was a mighty feminine being standing over our government this morning and she was touched by the light.

Let’s hold on to that image and keep trying to tell a new story of legitimate, full freedom for all and peace for all here on the ground.

My Cats Have Fleas and Other Unexpected Routes to Wisdom

I spent the majority of my weekend vacuuming. When I wasn’t vacuuming, I was washing blankets, asking everyone to keep their clothes off the floor, and spraying everything with this stuff that smells like cedar wood and herbal medicine.

Last night, I tore apart the couch - again. I made sure I got the skinniest vacuum attachment in all the cracks between the cushions.

Tonight, my husband will take on the bedrooms again. Tomorrow, I’ll vacuum the couch again and go along all the baseboards downstairs. We’ll be doing this for weeks. (Fortunately, I’m in a marriage that bucks the trends and does not lay the vast majority of domestic tasks at the female partner’s feet.)

My house has never been more clean. It’s never felt this vile either.

Our indoor cats have fleas. In the winter. In the middle of a pandemic.

This is not the kind of disruption our already disrupted lives needed.

As I vacuum every crevice and revisit every place an 11 pound cat or a minuscule beastie might crawl, I am getting to know this house in a more intimate way.

Everything they say about the house as a metaphor for self seems to be true. You have a lot of time to think when all you hear is the whine of the Kenmore and you’re using a headlamp to survey the territory under the bunk beds...

What emotion am I noticing most? 

Shame.

I was surprised to realize how vulnerable and foolish I felt for having the kind of home that could be infiltrated by something as gross as blood sucking insects.

As a woman who makes her way in the world talking about sovereignty, magic, and wisdom, I felt I couldn’t tell anyone but my closest cat owning friends about our infestation. It was too icky and mundane. 

There was a sense of failure, too. If I wasn’t so busy chasing myths and creativity, maybe I would have done a better job tending what matters most: ensuring that our home was a safe, comfortable place where we could play, work, create, and love.

Anyone who knows me knows that housekeeping is at the bottom of my list of skills and interests. The fact that this minor calamity has felt so unsettling is rather shocking.  

There are bigger stories to explore here. A lot of them are about security and the way things are “supposed” to be. There are stories about living in the extremes, particularly how this has been the best and the worst of times for a family like mine. A lot of my stories are about releasing what’s worthy of my time and attention and simply being in the present, meeting the needs of reality. And, of course, I get to look at why I could feel such paralyzing, silencing shame for experiencing something that could happen in any home that’s inhabited by furry creatures. 

Somewhere along the way, vacuum wand in hand, this ridiculous experience has taken me a little closer to wisdom and self-knowledge. It has also helped me find the reading glasses that fell behind the bed.

And it gave me a chance to remember that this is one reason I founded the Sovereign Wisdom Circle.

(You may have heard of the SWC. For the last three years we called it the Sovereign Writers Circle. I just renamed the group to reflect our understanding that writing is the vehicle that takes us to sovereignty and wisdom. The creative entrepreneurs and transformation professionals in this group are growing and changing. The community that supports them must grow and change, too.)

In our online community, we explore the biggest ideas around the nature of self and soul. We explore and craft stories about the most pivotal moments in life. We also have space to consider the significance of something as small and annoying (and potentially life changing) as a flea infestation.

Sovereignty, wisdom, creativity, and magic depend on the vastest truths and the tiniest revelations.

Perhaps you’re looking for a community and a guide who can help you make space and make meaning of the sacred and the mundane and everything in between?

We’re accepting new members into the Sovereign Wisdom Circle now.