I'm dedicated to helping women in particular develop their spiritual path in life. I'm focused heavily on Brigid in Ireland, although not all my followers are! I teach, speak, coach and mentor people to help them along their own individual path, based on what lore we have, but also allowing for each individual path to develop as it needs to.
A day late (which, honestly, fits)
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This post is a day late. I'm not going to pretend that's not a little funny given what it's actually about. Some of ye might have noticed things have been quieter here than usual, and when I did post, it maybe didn't quite sound like me. The honest reason: I started asking AI to help optimise things for SEO, trying to get found in the searches. And that's exactly what happened - it got optimised, and it stopped sounding like me. Which is kind of the bloody point, isn't it. But underneath that, the real reason is simpler. I wasn't well. For a lot of this year, I've been struggling - and while the Forge isn't the day job, so it's easy to let it slide first, I let a lot more than that slip too. This week's post is the honest version of what that actually looked like, and the moment that finally made me stop and look properly. It comes back to something I don't practise nearly as often as I teach it: Know Yourself. Next week, I'll tell you what the reset actually looked like. Bríd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: Website |
Hi, I'm Orlagh, of Brigid's Forge
I'm dedicated to helping women in particular develop their spiritual path in life. I'm focused heavily on Brigid in Ireland, although not all my followers are! I teach, speak, coach and mentor people to help them along their own individual path, based on what lore we have, but also allowing for each individual path to develop as it needs to.
My official working hours are 8 to 4:30. My actual working hours, for much of this year, have been closer to 7:30 in the morning to 7:30 in the evening. Sometimes later. This is, as I discovered the hard way earlier this year, not sustainable. The anxiety I mentioned a few weeks ago didn't arrive from nowhere. It arrived because I had quietly allowed the boundaries between work and everything else to dissolve, one small compromise at a time, until I was operating on empty and calling it...
Trigger warning: this email contains a brief reference to miscarriage and pregnancy loss. If you need to step away from that today, please do - the blog post linked below doesn't contain this material and is safe to read. When I first read about Crom Cruach and the first-born sacrifice, I was doing what I usually do with mythology - approaching it academically, looking for the patterns, thinking about what it tells us about how our ancestors understood the world. And then it hit me...
My mother grew up in rural Clare in the 1960s. And one of her fondest memories from childhood is the trip to Lahinch for Garland Sunday - the last Sunday of July, which in her memory was simply a great day out. The men would walk the seafront. The women came too - which was notable, she says, because most of the fairs and gatherings of the time were horse fairs or cattle fairs, places where women didn't usually go. Garland Sunday was different. It was for everyone. Children ran and played and...