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.
What I do with the August bank holiday - and a question for you
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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. Not everything you plant comes in the way you expected. Some things fail. Some things you didn't even know you'd planted turn out to have grown quietly in the background all year. I also use it to assess my energy. Specifically - what do I have the bandwidth to do in the coming months, and what do I need to let go of or postpone? Which brings me to a question. Awakening the Flame - my live programme on working with Brigid's fire aspect - hasn't run live in a number of years. The honest reason is that I haven't had the energy or bandwidth for it. But I'm starting to wonder whether the time might be coming around again. If Awakening the Flame is something you'd be interested in - if a live programme specifically on Brigid's fire aspect would be useful to you - hit reply and let me know. No commitment, no mailing list sign up, just a reply to this email. I'm genuinely asking because I want to know if there's appetite for it before I commit to anything. The rest of the bank holiday, for what it's worth, involves my husband, some food, probably a walk somewhere, and an aggressive refusal to do anything that feels like work. Lúnasa has been a festival of rest as well as harvest for a very long time. I'm in favour of that tradition. This week's post is about what Lúnasa actually is - where it comes from, what our ancestors were doing at this time of year, and why the questions it asks are still worth sitting with even if your harvest is entirely metaphorical. [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.
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...
I want to be honest with you about something, because I think it might be useful. The last few months have been hard. I've been struggling with anxiety - properly struggling, not just the background hum that most of us carry, but the kind that makes the ordinary things feel effortful and the future feel unreliable. I'm getting professional help, and that matters. But alongside that, I've been going to the sea more than usual. On the rougher days - the ones where everything felt loud and sharp...