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 9-5 is actually a 7:30 to 7:30. Lúnasa is where I fix that.
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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 dedication. Lúnasa is where I fix this. Not because there's anything in the ancient tradition specifically connecting the harvest festival to diary management - there isn't. But because I use the four fire festival bank holidays as structured check-in points across the year, and Lúnasa is the one where I look hardest at what I'm sacrificing and whether it's worth it. Here's what that actually looks like in practice. I confirm the days off I'm taking between now and Samhain and put them in the diary before anything else can claim them. I look at my meeting load and block out working time - actual protected time to do the work - so that my 9-5 doesn't get entirely consumed by meetings that could have been emails, leaving the real work to happen after hours. I put my self-care commitments in the diary as meetings: exercise classes, massages, the walks and the sea visits and the things that keep me functional. Sacred in the diary means nobody - including myself - can quietly move them. None of this is revolutionary. Most of it is basic. But it requires a deliberate moment to do it, and Lúnasa gives me that moment every year. What am I harvesting? What am I sacrificing to get it? Is the trade-off one I'm making consciously, or one that has just crept up on me? The God of the Day Job is a demanding deity. He doesn't always give back what he takes. Lúnasa is a good time to renegotiate the terms. This week's post is about how to mark Lúnasa practically - without lighting fires in drought conditions, and with a genuine look at what the festival is actually asking of you. [Read it here ] And if you've been following the whole series and want to go deeper into the Lúnasa figures - the Lúnasa Bundle is €97 for all three courses, saving you €14 on the individual prices. Beannachtaí Lúnasa oraibh. 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.
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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 Lúnasa 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...