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 rituals I actually hang my life on ☕
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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 that this week, cos it made me look sideways at all the smaller ones too. My first cup of coffee in the morning. My husband tucking me into bed most nights (yes, even now, yes, it's as lovely as it sounds). Our weekly takeaway with our friend we've basically adopted at this point - known affectionately around here as the "pet gay" - who we act as surrogate parents to, right down to trying to feed him every single time he sets foot in the house 🍽️. My twice-yearly trips to Monart. My monthly massage. All of it is ritual. Every bit. The hooks I hang my actual life on. And here's the bit I keep going back and forth on: some of that list is enormous privilege, plainly. Not everyone gets a twice-yearly spa trip or a monthly massage, and I know that, and I'm not going to pretend I don't. But sitting with the discomfort of naming that hasn't made me want to strip the list back to only the "acceptable" rituals - the free ones, the humble ones. It's made me think the opposite, actually: that the size or the cost of a ritual was never really the point. Some of what's on my list is spiritual. Some is just relationship, showing up for people I love in a repeated way. Some of it is just... a coffee. But it's all doing the same job. Worth asking yourself the same thing this week, I reckon. What are you actually hanging your days on? Bríd libh Órlagh P.S. If any of this has you thinking about where ritual actually starts, I went further into it on the blog this week - the actual moment I worked out what a ritual even was, and it was a lot less impressive than a spa trip. 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.
Six weeks ago I wrote about not knowing what a ritual even was. Since then we've covered opening and closing properly, what my body actually needs before ritual work, learning to feel things at all, where my own ritual structure genuinely comes from, and talking to the dead without people getting worried about you. That's the whole arc, more or less. Land, sea, sky, and everything underneath it. So now I want to tell you plainly what I've built out of all of it. If you're curious how a Buffy...
I mentioned a few weeks ago about having a breakdown while talking to my dead Nana. I have also - at times - muttered a bit ruefully. That there are times the problem is getting the ancestors to shut up. Maybe it's just that I have talkative ancestors, or maybe I just pay a bit more attention. But I've never had issues in connecting with them. Even if there are some I'd prefer I didn't connect with at all. Yeah, none of us have purely innocent and perfect family trees, there's always a few...
It's no secret I love to read. I mean, my library is spreading out from the room it's in. And books are quite literally all over the house. Well, they're not in the main bathroom - yet - but I can't say there's none in the en-suite. And I was looking for a foundation in Irish myth to base my ritual structure on, when Lora mentioned to me about the Settling of the Manor at Tara. It's about two lines I base the whole thing on - read more details in this week's blog post if you want them. But I...