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.
Tailtiu didn't have children of her body either. She fostered one instead.
|
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 killed her, the foster mother of Lugh, the figure whose death the harvest games were held to commemorate. The foster mother detail stopped me. In Irish tradition, fostering wasn't a lesser relationship than blood parenthood. It was sometimes the more significant one. The foster parent who chose you, who shaped you, who gave you what you needed - that relationship carried real weight. Tailtiu chose to raise Lugh. She gave him what he needed to become who he was. And then she cleared the land so that the people of Ireland could eat, and she died of the labour, and the festival that bears his name is actually, at its core, a commemoration of her. She didn't have children of her body. She fostered one instead. And what she gave him, and what she gave Ireland, was everything she had. I didn't expect to find my own situation reflected in a figure from Irish mythology. But there it was. My husband and I have ended up - unofficially, organically, without anyone planning it - as a kind of anchor for a collection of teenagers and younger adults who we refer to collectively as "the kids." They're not ours in any formal sense. They drifted toward us at various points and stayed. Between them and my nieces, I am thoroughly surrounded by the next generation in the best possible way. Tailtiu's story helped me understand that this was not a consolation prize. It was its own thing - valid, significant, and in its own way, a kind of clearing of ground. Making space for people to grow into who they need to be. This week's post is about her - who she was, what she did, and why the quiet necessary work she represents matters just as much as the more celebrated kinds. [Read it here ] 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.
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....
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...
For a long time, I had a problem I couldn't solve. My relationship with Brigid was growing. My Catholic upbringing wasn't going anywhere - not because I was still practising in any conventional sense, but because it's in me, in the way that anything you're raised inside is in you. And I couldn't work out how to hold both things at once. I've written about this conflict recently - the specific discomfort of being a pagan Catholic, of loving figures who belong to a tradition you've also had...