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.
Prove it.
|
So this week's post is about the three marks of a poet, imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib - and the whole time I was writing it, my engineer brain was sitting in the corner with its arms crossed going "prove it." That's the fight I actually want to talk to you about today. Not the poet stuff, the fight underneath it. I'm a Chartered Engineer. Twenty-four years of it. I need things to check out, to be testable, to have a mechanism I can point to and say "this is why this works." And then I turn around and teach imbas forosnai - a "gift of clairvoyance," according to the old texts, knowledge that arrives already lit, no mechanism, no test. My engineer brain does not like that sentence. At all. I've spent a long time thinking those two parts of me were supposed to pick a side. Like I had to choose - be the rigorous one or be the spiritual one, and stop pretending I could be both without one of them being a bit of a fraud. But here's what I keep coming back to: any science we don't yet understand looks exactly like magic. That's not me being clever, that's just history. Lightning looked like Zeus (or given his affinity with the sky, maybe the Dagda in a bad mood?) until we understood electricity. Bacteria looked like curses until we had microscopes. We didn't used to have a mechanism for gut feelings either, and now there's a whole field of research on the gut-brain axis. The "magic" doesn't disappear when we understand it - it just gets a diagram. So when I sit with something like imbas forosnai, I've had to stop asking my engineer brain to either accept it on faith or throw it out. I've had to let it just... not know yet. Which, if you knew how much I like knowing things, you'd understand is genuinely hard for me. (This is also, incidentally, exactly what's underneath that phone alarm I mentioned in the post - going back to actually listening to my body instead of demanding it explain itself first. My engineer brain wants a mechanism for that too. It doesn't always get one.) I don't think the fight ever fully resolves, if I'm honest. I think I just get a bit better at letting both of them stay in the room instead of throwing one of them out. 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.
I did the maths on this earlier in the week and it stopped me in my tracks a bit: I build "new starts" into my mental calendar roughly six times a year. September. Samhain. January. Imbolc. Easter. The start of school holidays. Being the child of two teachers, and married to a third, the school year is baked into my DNA at this stage - it doesn't matter that I haven't sat an exam in decades, my whole nervous system still thinks September is when things properly begin. I've been sitting with...
I beat myself up for straying from my path. Every single time. Which is a genuinely stupid thing for me to be doing, given what I actually teach for a living. But there it is - I skip a checkpoint, I go six months off track, and the first thing that shows up isn't "right, let's fix this," it's "you're supposed to be good at this, you teach this stuff." I think there's a version of me that believes if I'm teaching this, I should be good at it. And in some ways, I am. I built the whole cauldron...
You'll have received another email from me today with a link that jsut doesn't work. My apologies and I'll send out a new one tomorrow with the proper link. I've redone a few blog posts and it causes some issues with links. But... the bit about my patience being gone? That's real. It might not be covered in this week's blog post, but I will come back to it and I'd be delighted to hear from you if you're in a similar place!! Bríd libh Órlagh Check out the links below: Brigid's Forge School...