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.
đI climbed Croagh Patrick once. These days I just buy flowers.
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have climbed Croagh Patrick. Once. In 2001, I think, or thereabouts. It took about three hours up and considerably less time down, partly because my knees had opinions about the descent that I couldn't ignore. It was a college weekend away...) It's a remarkable experience. I won't pretend otherwise. Standing at the top of a mountain on the west coast of Ireland, with the islands of Clew Bay laid out below you, is genuinely moving - whether you're doing it for Patrick, for the pre-Christian tradition underneath Patrick, or simply because someone dared you. I have not climbed it since. And I don't particularly plan to. What I do now, in late July, is put flowers in the house for Garland Sunday - the last Sunday of July, which also goes by the name Reek Sunday in Mayo, where Croagh Patrick stands. The mountain climbing and the flower strewing are the two main traditions attached to this day across Ireland, documented in community after community in the Irish Folklore Collection at duchas.ie. Both of them appear to carry traces of something far older than Christianity. Possibly older than the named Irish deities we know as well. I find this remarkable. That a Sunday in late July - unremarkable by modern standards, not a bank holiday, not a feast day in any mainstream sense - has been considered significant in Ireland for longer than anyone can fully trace. That my ancestors were doing something on this day. That I can do something small on this day and be, in some tiny way, continuous with them. The flowers are enough. They're more than enough. This week's post is about the opposite point on the wheel from Imbolc - what LĂșnasa means, what Garland Sunday tells us about our ancestors' practice, and what's coming over the next few weeks as we move toward the 1st of August. [Read it here] BrĂd libh Ărlagh Check out the links below: âBrigid's Forge Schoolâ âWebsiteâ |
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 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...
My husband and I can't have children. This isn't something I talk about constantly, but it's part of my story and it's directly relevant to why Tailtiu matters to me - so here it is. When I first came across her, I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I was following the thread of LĂșnasa back through the mythology, trying to understand what my ancestors were actually doing at this time of year. Tailtiu was there in the sources - the woman who cleared the plains of Ireland until it...
The August bank holiday is, in my house, taken seriously. Not in a spiritual performance sort of way. In a genuinely practical sort of way. I use it - and the few days around it - to take stock of where I am. How am I doing on the goals I set at the start of the year? Not to beat myself up about what hasn't happened, but to look honestly at what has - what's come in, what's still outstanding, what I've quietly abandoned without quite admitting it. The harvest metaphor is a useful one here....