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Ritual doesn’t mean candles and robes. It means repetition with meaning – and you’ve been doing it since you started brushing your teeth.
When I started out in spiritual work, I really struggled with this one. Ritual. What even is it. I had this picture in my head – candles, robes, a circle of people who all somehow knew what they were doing – and none of it matched anything in my actual life, so I figured ritual just wasn’t for me yet. Totally wasn’t ready for that level of commitment. I needed to learn more first, get more serious, earn my way into it somehow.
Well, it took me a long time to work out that I already knew what ritual was. I’d been doing it my whole life.
Why light one candle when you can light three? And some incense….
So What Was I Missing, Orlagh?
I grew up Catholic. Still am, in my own way – pagan Catholic, I call myself, which tells you something about the in-between space I live in. And it took me an embarrassingly long time to connect the dots that the sacraments I’d been raised on – weekly Mass, confession, baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage – are rituals. Not “ritual-adjacent.” Not “a bit like ritual if you squint.” Rituals. Full stop. Never mind the “special” Masses that show up around specific points in the year, Easter, Christmas, all of that – that’s ritual wearing a different coat, tied to the turning of the year the same way Imbolc is.
What Else Counts, Then?
So then I went further. If Mass is a ritual, what else is?
Turns out: loads. Brushing your teeth every morning. Your (semi) regular – if you’re me – hair appointment. The weekly takeaway. Your daily coffee, made the same way, at the same time, in the same cup. None of these look like ritual cos none of them come with candles or robes or anyone chanting anything. But they’re regularly repeated actions that carry meaning beyond the action itself, and that’s the actual definition. That’s it. That’s the whole bar.
Ritual doesn’t mean massive. It doesn’t mean huge, elaborate, performed for an audience, done “properly” according to some rulebook you haven’t found yet. It can be that, sure, if that’s what you want and what you can sustain. But it doesn’t have to be. The Mass you sat through as a child and the coffee you make every morning without thinking about it are doing the same basic job – marking something as significant through repetition – even though one has incense and the other has instant coffee granules.
My First Ritual
Once I understood that, my first actual, deliberate, this-is-a-ritual ritual was almost insultingly simple. I lit a candle.
Surprising no one, if you know anything about Irish people and our relationship with candles. We’ve been lighting them for intentions for generations – a candle for a safe journey, a candle for an exam, a candle for someone who’s sick, a candle just because you needed to do something with your hands while you hoped for something you couldn’t control… I was following a very long tradition without even fully realising it at the time. No need for a script. I needed a match and something I wanted to hold in my mind while it burned.
That’s genuinely where I’d tell anyone to start, if they’re standing where I was standing – convinced ritual is a locked door they haven’t found the key for yet. It isn’t locked. You’ve been doing it for years, just without the label. Light the candle. See what happens.
What happens when you skip your own spiritual check-in – six months off track, and why building a way back matters more than never going off track at all.
I know, people associate the cauldron with the Dagda far more than with Brigid. But honestly, the Cauldron step is so important on Brigid’s Path. And it’s the one people are most likely to skip…
My Dagda statue and his totally size appropriate cauldrons!
The cauldron is the checkpoint. A fixed point in the year where you stop and ask yourself if you’re still on the path you think you’re on, or any path at all.
I use Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain for mine. (Have to be honest hear, I stole the idea of 4 checkins a year from the 12 Week Year…) Others use the first of the month. Some people use their birthday, or New Year, or nothing fixed at all, just a feeling that it’s time. Doesn’t matter which one you pick. What matters is that you actually stop and look.
Why this is the hardest step of the whole lot
Here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud, myself included until recently: the cauldron only exists because we go off track. Not might. Will. Every single one of us, at some point, drifts from whatever path we thought we were walking. The cauldron isn’t a nice-to-have for the odd bad week. It’s built for the assumption that things will go wrong.
And planning for things to go wrong feels antithetical to most of us, cos it feels like admitting defeat before you’ve even started. Like you’re supposed to walk a spiritual path with total confidence, straight line, no wobbles, and if you need a checkpoint system for when it falls apart, doesn’t that mean you’re already failing at it?
I don’t think that’s true. But I understand exactly why it feels that way, because I felt it too, and I built this whole system myself.
We don’t like admitting we’ll need a way back before we’ve even left. It feels presumptuous, almost. Or pessimistic. Or like you’re jinxing it. So we skip building the checkpoint in the first place, or we build it and then quietly don’t use it when the year gets busy (ahem, not looking at myself at all here. Nope.), because using it means admitting there might be something to check.
What actually happened to me this year
Earlier this year, I knew things had to change. I wasn’t getting the time to do everything I needed to do – that was obvious to me by January, if not before. And then Imbolc came around and just… floated by me. I didn’t do my usual check-in. I had no time alone. Definitelydidn’t get the cobweb clearing done inside my own head that Imbolc is supposed to be for (if you saw my Instagram post a few weeks ago, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about here!).
So I went off track. In all sorts of ways.
And now, six-plus months later, I’m pulling myself back together. Slowly. One step at a time. But getting there.
I want to be honest about the order of events there, cos it matters: I didn’t skip Imbolc because I decided the cauldron wasn’t for me this year. I skipped it because life got in the way, and skipping the checkpoint is exactly how “life got in the way” turns into “six months off track.” The checkpoint doesn’t stop life from getting in the way. It stops you from paying attention or acknowledging it for half a year.
The bit that’s genuinely hard to admit
This has happened to me over and over and over again throughout the years. Sometimes massively, catastrophically. Sometimes barely a wobble. Either my path changes, or I change, or my circumstances change – and every single time, the cauldron is what brings me back to check.
That’s not a failure I’m confessing once and moving past. It’s a pattern. A recurring one. And admitting that a pattern is a pattern, rather than a one-off you’re finally past this time, is a much harder thing to sit with than admitting a single mistake. A single mistake, you fix and move on from. A pattern means building your whole approach around the fact that you’ll be back here again, and being at peace with that, instead of treating each return to the cauldron as evidence you’ve failed at this all over again.
What the cauldron actually allows
Not a guarantee that you’ll never go off track. A way back when you do.
The cauldron doesn’t judge how far you’ve drifted. It doesn’t care whether this is your first time back or your fiftieth. It just sits there, ready, whenever you’re ready to come back to it. The whole point is that it works regardless of how badly things have gone, which is precisely why it’s uncomfortable to plan for – you’re building something for a future version of yourself who’s failed, and building it well means genuinely believing that version of you deserves a way back too.
Missing one checkpoint is what let this particular drift go on as long as it did. I’m not going to pretend that’s a coincidence.
So, six posts later – where does that leave the whole walk?
I went into this round of Brigid’s Path because I needed to. Know Yourself, because I’d stopped. Reconcile the Past, because there was plenty to reconcile. Joy, because I’d let it go entirely. The three marks of a poet, because I’m still working out how much I trust what I know without proof. The path forward, because twenty years in, the path looks nothing like it did when I started, and that’s not a problem, that’s just what happens.
And now the cauldron, because none of the above holds if you don’t keep coming back to check.
I’ll be back at this again. Not because I failed at it this time, but because that’s what the path actually is – not a straight line you walk once, but something you keep returning to, checkpoint after checkpoint, for as long as you’re doing this work at all.
When’s your next checkpoint? Not someday – an actual date. Mine’s Samhain. What’s yours?
Twenty years on, the same core values look completely different in practice – a reflection on career pivots, nieces I don’t see enough, and why 70-hour weeks stopped being worth it.
Fifth stop on Brigid’s Path this round, and this one’s less about a single moment. The Path Forward is hugely important on Brigid’s Path. And I keep. On. Coming. Back. To it. (Step one, two, three, and four linked!) Not once, not twice – constantly. Life changes, so the path changes, so here we are again.
Yes I’m sad enough to have an outline of my week…. and yes the colours do mean things. Anyone working in a manufacturing envorinoment will recognise the signs of a tier system at play here! If you don’t – don’t worry. You’re not missing out.
What is a path, anyway?
A connection between two places or states. A search. A story. A call. A feeling.
And also – hard work. Bloody hard work. I say that because it’s true, and because it’s the bit that gets left out of most spiritual writing. Nobody puts “hard work” on the inspirational quote graphic, but there it is, plain as anything, sitting underneath every other definition. And we’re looking towards the path forward on Brigid’s Path, it nearly always contains hard work!
Why do I keep revisiting this bit?
Because I’m not the same person I was 20 years ago, and my path is looking different because of it.
A few years ago I couldn’t have thought about the thing I’m actually thinking about now – a pivot in my engineering career, away from day-to-day manufacturing support and towards more of a consultancy role, or something global. That wasn’t even a shape my ambition could take back then. But as I get older, I want different things from life.
Oh how myphysical body has changed! My emotional body has changed. My spiritual body has changed. The core values are the same – they haven’t moved – but how I express them definitely has.
I have two nieces I want to spend more time with. I have friends and family I don’t see enough of. Seventy-hour weeks are no longer appealing. Like, what the fuck? I’m only paid for 40. Why am I giving away an extra 75% for free?
Time is far more important now than money, fundamentally. And that’s reflected in the path I’m choosing for myself.
Guides, torchbearers, and pathfinders
These are job descriptions, not descriptions of a person or entity. They might be friends, teachers, authors, voices from the past, deities, saints, things beyond definition. Almost certainly, they will offer suggestions. They can show you the path they walked and how it might help you. They might shed light on a particular aspect of your spiritual path, or they might be extremely specific, or extremely general.
And, honestly, they might not always be what you need. That’s allowed too.
I know Mary, St Therese of Lisieux, Mary Magdalene and all the rest are there for me. But those relationships ebb and flow. There will be times when this work is the most important work you can be doing. And others when it’s really far down the list, because other things are more important. Most of us don’t have the need, want, or wherewithal to devote our entire lives to our spirituality. We find the spiritual in the mundane. And that’s ok as well. It’s always ok.
What is right for you?
Well. That’s for you to decide.
Some questions worth sitting with, if you want a starting point: What values and beliefs are most important to me now? What positive aspects of my previous experience do I want to carry forward? Am I afraid of changing direction, and how do I address that? What practices actually align with what I believe, rather than what I think I should believe?
You’ll notice some overlap with questions I’ve asked in earlier posts on this path. That’s fine. This is about revisiting them now that you’ve done more of the work.
How to keep yourself safe while you’re figuring this out
Set your boundaries. Pay attention to your internal and external feelings, not just one or the other. Know your own lore – the story you’ve already lived, not just the one you’re being sold. Ask questions, and actually assess the answers instead of accepting the first one that sounds nice. And ask the same question again and again until you’re actually happy with the answer, not just tired of asking it.
So where does my path forward actually go?
I don’t fully know yet, if I’m honest. But I know it’s away from where I’ve been standing for the last while, and towards more time, not more money. Away from the version of me that thought 70-hour weeks were just what committed people did, and towards a version that gets to see her nieces more.
That’s the path forward, as far as I can see it right now. It’ll probably look different again in another 20 years. Good.
The three marks of a poet in old Irish tradition – imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib – and what happens when you ignore the first one for two months.
Well, here we go. Back on Brigid’s Path, (after know myself, reconciling the past and joy) and this time it’s the Poet aspect I’m meant to be sitting with. I say “meant to” because I’ve been half-avoiding this one, cos poetry has never felt like mine to claim – I’m no poet, or so I’ve told myself for years.
But Brigid doesn’t just mean poet the way we mean it now, all verse and rhyme. In the old triads, the ones that list out threes of everything Gaelic culture thought was worth naming, there’s one that goes: three things that constitute a poet – knowledge that illumines, chewing of the marrow, and improvisation. In Irish: imbas forosnai, teinm laeda, dichetal do chennaib.
Three marks. Not three techniques you learn in a workshop – three ways of knowing.
Imbas forosnai – knowledge that illumines
For-osna. Lights up. Brings to light. Makes manifest.
This is the kind of knowing that arrives already lit, if that makes any sense at all. Not information you went looking for, but something that illuminates the second it lands – and you can’t unknow it afterwards.
I had a deep knowing from January this year that something was wrong. It took til March to take the drastic step of taking time off work. And even then I was hesitating about the amount of time I took. It took a few months after that before I could even hold a decent conversation at home.
We all have this deep knowing inside of us. We’ve just very often trained ourselves to ignore it. It’s not scientific, like? So how do it work? Well, I believe it’s our bodies and souls speaking to us. It’s the signs and indications our bodies and souls give us that we can’t put into a so called normal box, so we learn to ignore them. We can call it intuition, self-knowledge, all we want – but we all know things deep down that sometimes it suits us to ignore.
The old sources call imbas forosnai a gift of clairvoyance. I don’t think you need to believe in fortune-telling to recognise the shape of it. Are you telling the future, or creating it? I still don’t have an answer to that one. (Ask me again once I’ve chewed on it properly.) I just know that January me knew something March me eventually had to act on, and the gap between knowing and acting nearly cost me more than the knowing itself.
Teinm laeda – chewing of the marrow
This is the one I actually understand in my bones, cos it’s just rumination. Chewing the pith. I think of a cow working the same mouthful over and over, getting everything out of it slowly, no rush. Teinm laeda is knowledge you don’t get in a flash – you get it by staying with something long after everyone else has moved on. Turning it over. Turning it over again.
Really, this is most of what I do. Most of what any of us do, if we’re honest, when we’re actually working something out rather than performing having worked it out.
Dichetal do chennaib – improvisation, straight from the head
Now, this is the one that stops me in my tracks every time. Dichetal do chennaib literally means from the head – and it’s the mark of knowledge that arrives whole, spoken, in the moment, with no chewing at all. No illumination beforehand. Just composed, extemporaneously, because the moment demanded it.
The example I keep coming back to is Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, standing over her husband’s body, and the caoineadh – the keen – coming out of her already formed. Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire wasn’t drafted. It wasn’t chewed over for weeks. It came out of her, whole, because grief needed a shape and she gave it one on the spot.
That’s dichetal do chennaib. Not composure. The opposite of composure, actually – it’s what comes when there’s no time left to compose anything.
So where does that leave me, walking this bit of the path?
I’ve had my imbas forosnai moments this year – the deep knowing I sat on for far too long before I acted. I’ve definitely been chewing the marrow on some of it for months, cos that’s just how I process things, slowly, going back over the same ground until it gives something up.
What I haven’t done much of is the third one. Dichetal do chennaib asks you to trust that something whole can come out of you without being prepared first. I’m not sure I trust that yet.
But I am doing something about the imbas forosnai bit. I’ve gone back to my old practice of tuning into my body daily, actually asking it what it needs instead of overriding it and hoping it’ll sort itself out. I’ve even put a phone alarm on to remind me – which tells you everything about how easily I still talk myself out of it without one.
Yes, this is my alarm screen from last Friday so I remember to tune in!
That’s the practice underneath everything I teach in one of the courses I’m building for the school right now. More on that when it’s ready. For now, it’s just me, an alarm, and the discipline of actually listening.
So that’s the homework, really. Not to force an improvised moment, but to notice when one’s asking to happen and not talk myself out of it – and to keep checking in daily with the knowing that’s already there, so it doesn’t take til March next time. What’s the knowing you’ve been sitting on? I’d really love to hear it, if you feel like sharing.
Why joy isn’t something that just happens to you — the research behind planning for it, ten minutes a day on a trampoline, and Joy’s place as step three on Brigid’s Path.
After the depressing events of the last two weeks, this week I want to talk about Joy. Yes – ye are following me through this iteration of walking Brigid’s Path. I’d say sorry, but I’m really not. Sometimes you get the bad and the ugly before the good comes along.
I love trampolining. And ok, it requires some hefty underwear – an F cup could blacken my own eye if I’m not careful – but that’s beside the point. Once the damn thing was up (again, so sorry about that day, neighbours), it was a lot easier to go and play on it. But easier isn’t the same as easy.
I bet ye can all guess how my mind was working once I got that trampoline up. What a waste of money. Grown woman playing on a trampoline. What will people think. It’s not like it’s doing any good. And on, and on, and on. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But joy isn’t always about the immediate effects. And sometimes the shadow work isn’t about digging through what’s gone wrong – sometimes it’s about being disciplined enough to actually let joy into your life, instead of quietly ignoring it.
I have a firm belief that no matter what put us on this earth, or why we’re here, we don’t have to be bloody miserable all the time. There’s real research behind that too – Barbara Fredrickson’s “broaden-and-build” theory in psychology argues that positive emotions aren’t just pleasant, they actually build real psychological resources over time: resilience, creativity, the ability to problem-solve. Joy isn’t just a nice feeling. It’s functional. And one well-known long-running study of a group of nuns found that those who expressed more positive emotion in early adulthood went on to live measurably longer than their less expressive peers.
But somehow, along the way, we all got the notion that joy is childish, or immature, or just not part of daily life as an adult. And there are times I wonder who or what benefits from that. (No, no – not me buying into conspiracy theories about capitalism, particularly late-stage capitalism… of course not. Dopamine produced by spending money is just as good as any other kind.)
It’s a hard nut to crack for most of us. Even those deep into sport aren’t immune – the Mayo football team just won the All-Ireland after 75 years, a story big enough to make the New York Times (albeit behind a paywall, but seriously – loads of free stuff on the net about it), but that was 75 years of loss for the fans first. A curse, they called it. That’s all over now. So no, nothing – or hardly anything – is guaranteed to give us joy. But from reading the literature, I’ve found that building habits that lead to joy can.
This all ended in me actually being disciplined about joy. Sounds antithetical, right? But looking at the research – and trust me, I’ve looked at the research – there’s nothing that says joy is spontaneous. In fact, a lot of what’s suggested – a daily walk, noticing nature, watching comedy – kind of needs to be planned for most of us. So I had to plan this too.
I committed to ten minutes a day. Hail, rain, or shine – and honestly, even getting onto the damn thing in the rain is fun enough. Certainly it was for someone watching me. But I decided: ten minutes, usually in the morning, for joy. And ok, it wasn’t the trampoline every day – sometimes the rain really was too much, so I danced for ten minutes instead. (Yes. We’re back to Shakira again.)
I get it – joy and discipline don’t really mix in our modern world. But there’s joy in mastering a new skill, and mastery takes practice. Not to mention repetition. Going back to something I’ve mentioned before about food – there’s joy in producing my own food too. By which I mean buying it and cooking it, not growing it. Taking the time to put love into what goes into my belly. A homemade fajita isn’t the same as an authentic Mexican dish, and it’s not trying to be. But it means I’m valuing myself enough to actually feed myself properly.
We overlook joy far too often. And it’s so important, it’s step three on Brigid’s Path. It’s not about being constantly happy – it’s about getting regular injections of joy into our lives. And sometimes that means heading out on a cold morning to bounce around like an eejit for a few minutes, before putting on your serious face and heading into the world to adult.
The list, the new notebook, and the daily practice behind the reset — what actually changed after the twentieth night, one small thing at a time.
Last week I told ye about the twentieth night, and the moment I finally sat down and admitted things weren’t working. So, here’s what I actually did about it.
I made a list. All the little things that had been bothering me – the trampoline sitting in the front hall, the few bits of clothing that needed mending, the clutter that had built up in various corners and really only needed five or ten minutes each to tackle. You get the idea. I love a good list. I even got a new notebook, to make sure I KNEW I was serious. Cos, y’know, a new notebook solves everything. A special trip to Eason’s in town and all.
So I had a plan. And since Al was away, there was no one in the house to stop me doing things and leaving them the way I needed to leave them to pick back up easily. (Yeah. It’s not my first rodeo… unfortunately.)
Now, I knew this wasn’t all getting done before I went back to work. That wasn’t the point. The point was to make the list and commit to doing one thing on it each day. Putting the trampoline together took a few hours – and possibly the neighbours learnt some new words that day – while sewing on a button took a few minutes. But the important thing was, they were crossed off the list.
And yes, sometimes that meant at 9pm, begrudgingly, putting on a load of clothes, and even more begrudgingly hanging them out the next morning. But I’d promised myself. And those promises are the easiest, and the most dangerous, to break.
Y’see, breaking a promise to yourself is the easiest thing in the world – no one is going to hold you accountable. But it also means you stop trusting yourself. Because you don’t keep your word. And whether it’s psychologically right or wrong, I found that treating myself the way I’d treat a friend was the best way to go about it.
So the day I ended up coming home three hours late from work because of a car accident – not mine, but it held up traffic – I changed the plan from “fold the dry clothes” to “shelve the pile of five books by the living room door.” Practicality came into it.
And I slowly worked my way through the house, and my list. Bit by bit. Some things got added, and some got taken away – I decided to outsource and pay for the weeding, because dear gods, those weeds had a mind of their own. And yes, that is a structural thistle we have out the front. It might die of old age before I get to it. That’s ok.
My structural thistle. Yes, it is almost 4 foot high. And apparently roots almost as deep!
Throughout all of it, I could feel the other part of my brain coming out. “How could you let things get this bad?” “You know better than this.” “Oh my gods, what a failure you are.” Not the most supportive.
So I had to take myself by the hand and use my journal. (Yes – spoiler alert, this is the “Reconcile” part of Brigid’s Path.) Sitting down and journaling through a conversation in my head might seem a bit odd, but it works for me. It also forces my brain to slow down and actually think about what I’m saying to myself. A genuinely useful strategy, to be honest – one I use regularly, when I remember it.
I’m still working through the list, if I’m honest – and the more I do, the more I add to it. The chimney cleaning I’m trying to book. The clothes that just need to go to the charity bin in town. Working through the list adds to it, because clearing the house clears my head, and clearing my head shows me the next thing that needs clearing.
It’s not just about reconciling ourselves to what others have done to us. It’s the internal work too – the shadow work, the recognition that this is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done. I’ve always said my spirituality has to be practical, has to fit in with my actual life. And sometimes what I’m doing looks more like good psychology than spirituality. But I also know a cluttered home means a cluttered mind means a cluttered life. For me. Your mileage may vary.
But it’s worth sitting down. Lighting a candle. Taking a deep breath. And starting to write. See what comes out.
So, some of ye might have noticed I’ve been quieter here than usual – and when I did post, it maybe didn’t quite sound like me. Here’s the honest reason: I started asking AI to help optimise the posts for SEO, trying to get found in the searches. And that’s exactly what happened – they got optimised, and they stopped sounding like me. And I mostly think people come here to hear my voice, not the generic internet voice. That’s kinda the bloody point, isn’t it.
Bear with me – the candle will make sense!
But here’s the thing. I wasn’t well. For a lot of this year, I’ve been struggling. And while I don’t want to let the Forge slip – it’s not the day job, so it’s easier to let it slide when things get hard – I let so much more slip too. I really could have noticed a bit sooner. But I was half-assing things, because of the health stuff.
I knew something wasn’t right for a while before I actually did anything about it. Sleeping 8 hours a night but still needing a 3-hour nap during the day isn’t normal – even for me, and I love my sleep. I knew that having a week off and not wanting to do anything fun wasn’t right either. I didn’t want to leave my bed, never mind the couch. Woke up with a headache every morning and blamed it on having my coffee later than usual – but being brutally honest, I have one cup of coffee a day. Missing it shouldn’t cause that sort of pain.
And yes, wanting to sleep that much could have been depression – but it didn’t feel like that. I didn’t feel the brain fog.
But then, the husband and I went out to lunch one day.
He’d worked hard to persuade me to go out. I was like a toddler getting ready for a doctor’s visit – wasting time, asking loads of “what if” questions, you know the deal. Even on the way in I was anxious, picking at my choices, mumbling to myself, trembling. (I know. I’m brilliant at picking up on my own body’s signals. 🙄) I started feeling hot and shaky – could’ve been the weather, could’ve been that I hadn’t eaten properly, but I wasn’t picking up on that either.
We eat there a lot, so the menu was no surprise, and I’d already decided what I wanted before we got in – that part was easy. But I was edgy and tense the whole way through. I got through most of the food before my nose started bleeding. This was nosebleed number three that day, so I wasn’t expecting a big one. It was a big one.
I got through almost an entire roll of restaurant toilet paper trying to stop it. And I was so anxious about making a mess that I couldn’t mop it up before it dried, which made me panic about the mess, which meant more blood dropped instead of being caught – ye can see the spiral, right? I got it stopped eventually and cleaned myself up, though the husband pointed out a few drops when I got back to the table that I sorted out quickly. It took about 20 minutes. That’s a long nosebleed for me.
I still had to get to the pharmacy for meds afterwards. But I managed it – and even made it to the opticians to get my glasses straightened, which was great, because they had air con, and it felt wonderful.
After we got home, I – surprising absolutely no one at this point – got back into bed.
But the next day was the cruncher. I woke up and genuinely couldn’t remember what day it was. I felt hungover – the kind of hungover where you’ve had way too much to drink, plus a bad pint, plus food poisoning from the takeaway on the way home. Too bad to even consider drinking water. You need full-fat Coke, slightly flat but not completely flat. I felt awful. Too awful even for me to keep ignoring the signs.
So that afternoon, after the Coke and some toast and a shower, the husband and I sat down and had a talk. Things weren’t working. My anxiety was sky high. The headaches were probably more from grinding my teeth than caffeine – he could hear me at night. He’d had to wake me from nightmares a few times too, which isn’t the usual thing in our house – that’s normally my job with him.
We looked back at what I’d actually been doing. I hadn’t slipped back into the long 70-hour weeks. But I’d been living as if I had. A 40 to 45 hour week had been exhausting me the way a 70-hour one normally would. I was coming home and not doing anything fun. I wasn’t doing any of the things that support me to be happy – no fresh air, no movement, no fun. 100% focused on “easy,” but “easy” meant “not doing anything,” not “doing things that made me feel better.”
Because I do know what makes life better for me. Drinking enough water – that had been slipping. Eating food that tastes good and feels good – completely ignored, and to be honest, food had tasted like nothing for weeks at that point. Fresh air – abandoned, blamed on the weather. Moving regularly – ignored entirely. And good quality sleep. Well. We already know how that one worked out.
So we thought about a reset. That helps the two of us sometimes, and it feeds into how I try to live more generally – having a structure in place to support you. My husband had to go away for a few weeks around then, which turned out to be good timing – it meant I could focus on me, 100%.
I’ve never claimed to be perfect. But when I ignore my own advice, it backfires. Not immediately – a once-off rarely affects me. But once-offs lead to “rarely.” Rarely leads to “sometimes.” Sometimes leads to “often.” And often becomes the daily routine, without you ever deciding it should.
A year ago I had a good weekly movement habit going. Then something happened, I missed three sessions in a row, and that was that. I had a trampoline sitting in my front hall for about five months before I actually put it together and started using it. (Yes – that’s a sneak peek at what the reset looked like. More on that another time.)
Our bodies give us signs. Most of the time those signs are easy enough to recognise – we just have to be paying attention. If I’d paid attention when things first started slipping, I might not have had to let so much go, or let so many standards drop, before I noticed how far I’d drifted from where I wanted to be. I had to go back and revisit my own foundation – the core of what my values actually add up to, how I want my life and my work to run. Again.
The tradition is that we tend Brigid’s flame for nineteen nights, and she tends the twentieth herself. Nineteen nights of it being someone’s job to mind the fire – and on the twentieth, even she gets to just let it burn. I spend a lot of time helping other people tend theirs. And somewhere in the last while, I forgot I was allowed a twentieth night too.
So when I started asking AI to optimise posts for SEO and they stopped sounding anything like me, that should have been a sign too. And it was. I just didn’t pick up on it.
Here we go back to the first step on Brigid’s Path: Know Yourself. People like to skip over it, but honestly it’s the one I revisit most often – along with Joy. It’s so easy to skip. Like, how could we not know ourselves? I can’t be the only one that deludes themselves about this, right? Right?
So, maybe try learning from my mistakes. Spend a bit of time with yourself and figure out what’s working and what isn’t – and be honest with yourself. Otherwise you end up bleeding all over a restaurant floor for no good reason.
Feel free to tell me in the comments or via email – but don’t worry, next week, I’ll talk about the reset.
Lúnasa is four days away. August 1st – or the Sunday nearest to it, as our ancestors would have observed it – is almost here. (Well, let’s be honest – it’s always more of a season than a given day in Irish lore!) Given this, there is a plethora of posts around how to celebrate Lúnasa, or Lughnasadh if you’re using pre-Caighdeán Irish. So here’s my approach!
Over the last few weeks we’ve covered a lot of ground. Brigid’s water aspect in summer. The lore behind her. The figures of the Lúnasa season – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, Crom Cruach – and what they tell us about what our ancestors understood about harvest, sacrifice, and the cost of prosperity. Now it’s time to talk about what you can actually do.
A word about fire first
Lúnasa is primarily a fire festival. That’s along with Imbolc, Bealtaine, Samhain. And some people want to celebrate Lúnasa with a flame or a bonfire.
This year – and increasingly every year – I want to ask you to think carefully before you do that outdoors.
We have had one of the driest summers in recent memory in parts of Ireland and the UK. Across southern Europe, Australia, North America, and elsewhere, wildfires have caused devastation that is increasingly connected to climate change. The same Brigid who tends the sacred flame also – as we talked about earlier in this series – has deep roots in water, in wells, in the healing and patient work of rivers and the sea.
If you’re in an area with dry conditions, a fire risk, or a hosepipe ban, please don’t light an outdoor fire to mark Lúnasa. Light a candle indoors instead. She’ll find you just as easily.
A candle is just as good as a bonfire when you’re worried about wildfires!!
What Lúnasa actually asks of you
Putting the fire question aside, Lúnasa is fundamentally a festival of stocktaking. The harvest is beginning. What has come in? Has anything left? What did you plant in the spring – literally or metaphorically – and what has actually grown?
I use the four fire festival bank holidays in Ireland – Imbolc, Bealtaine, Lúnasa, and Samhain – as structured check-in points across the year. Lúnasa specifically is where I look at what I’m harvesting in relation to what I’ve sacrificed. Not in a punishing way. But honestly.
Am I sacrificing too much in some areas and ignoring others? What has grown that I didn’t expect? What did I plant with great intention that simply hasn’t come in – and do I need to let go of it, or keep tending it through the darker months ahead?
These are worth sitting with before the festival arrives, rather than on the day itself. Give yourself a few days to let the questions settle.
Practical ways to celebrate Lúnasa
You don’t need an elaborate ritual. You don’t need to be in Ireland, or on a hilltop, or in possession of any particular objects. Here are some things that are accessible, grounded, and genuinely connected to the tradition:
Go to the water. The seaside connection for Lúnasa is ancient and still very much alive – Irish people head to the coast on the August bank holiday without knowing quite why. Know why. Go deliberately. Wash your feet. Sit with the sea.
Put flowers in the house. Garland Sunday – the last Sunday of July – is part of the Lúnasa tradition. Flowers strewn, beauty acknowledged, the earth’s abundance honoured. A bunch of wildflowers or whatever is growing in your garden is enough.
Make or share food. The harvest festival was always communal. Cook something from scratch. Share a meal. Acknowledge that food comes from somewhere and from someone’s labour.
Do your stocktake. Sit down with your journal. Look honestly at the year so far. What has grown? Was something meant to grow but didn’t? What are you carrying into the second half of the year, and what needs to be set down?
Visit a well. If you’re in Ireland, there will be one near you. Most counties have multiple wells with Brigid associations. Visit one with intention.
Going deeper into the lore
If this series has sparked a genuine curiosity about the figures behind Lúnasa – Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach – the courses at Brigid’s Forge School are the next step. Celebrate Lúnasa with learning!
You can take each course individually at €37 each. Or, for the next week, you can get all three together as the Lúnasa Bundle for €97 – saving €14 on the individual prices. The bundle covers Tailtiu, Crom Dubh, and Crom Cruach in depth, drawing on the primary sources and sitting honestly with what we can and can’t know about figures this old.
If you’ve been reading along for the last nine weeks and the Lúnasa season has started to feel like something worth understanding properly – now is a good time.
Beannachtaí Lúnasa oraibh. Lúnasa blessings to you all.
How are you planning to mark Lúnasa this year? I’d genuinely love to hear – drop it in the comments.
Crom Cruach is the oldest and darkest Irish god in the mythological tradition. He predates the Tuatha De Danann. He predates the written record entirely – what we know of him comes from texts written centuries after his worship had officially ended, by Christian writers with their own reasons for framing him the way they did. And the only reason he comes to me for Lúnasa is because of his potential links to Crom Dubh.
That framing is worth keeping in mind. But it doesn’t make him less interesting.
The primary account of Crom Cruach comes from a 12th century dinnsenchas poem in the Book of Leinster. It describes his cult image – a central figure of gold surrounded by twelve figures of stone or bronze – standing on Magh Slécht, the Plain of Prostrations, in what is now County Cavan. The people would prostrate themselves before him. And they would offer him their first-born children in exchange for good yields of milk and grain.
The story of how this ended is one of the most dramatic in the Patrick legend. Patrick approaches the idol with his crozier raised. The central figure falls face down, the twelve surrounding figures sink into the earth, and the demon inhabiting the image is cast to hell. The imprint of the crozier remains in the stone. ( Although, Crom Cruach isn’t necessarily the only Irish god to be dealt with in this way by Patrick)
That’s the Christian telling. It’s worth noting that this particular story doesn’t appear in Patrick’s own writings, nor in the two earliest seventh-century biographies of him. It arrives later, when the narrative of Patrick as destroyer of paganism had become well established. The single Duchas entry on Crom Cruach – recorded in Leitrim in the 1930s from an 83-year-old teacher – places him a quarter of a mile north of the city of Fenagh, where the head college of the bards once stood. Twenty-five thousand of the leading men of Ireland, the account says, and the entry trails off there, the story continuing on the next page.
One singular entry on Duchas – compared to the multiple entries for Crom Dubh. That absence is telling. Crom Cruach was, perhaps, too dark, too old, too far outside living memory to survive easily in the folklore record.
The logic of first-born sacrifice
The first-born sacrifice is a motif that appears across many ancient cultures – it even surfaces in the Bible – and it’s easy to dismiss it as evidence of barbarism. But that reading misses what the practice was actually communicating. Crom Cruach is known as an “evil” Irish god because of the practice, and yet…
Our ancestors understood, in a way that modern life often obscures, that food and prosperity come with a cost. The harvest is not free. Something has to be given. Something has to be relinquished. The first-born – the most precious, the most full of promise – was the ultimate statement of that understanding. We give you our best. We hold nothing back. In return, let the harvest come in.
This is not a comfortable idea. It was never meant to be. But it is an honest one.
What it means now
We don’t sacrifice first-born children in modern Ireland. But the underlying logic – that prosperity requires sacrifice, that something must be given up for something else to grow – hasn’t gone anywhere. It plays out constantly, just in different forms.
Women are told, repeatedly, that we can have it all. Career and family and presence and ambition, all at once, with no conflicts and no costs. This is, as most women discover at some point, not quite true. You can have a great deal. You cannot have everything simultaneously, at full intensity, with no trade-offs.
The woman who maintains a steep career trajectory and is also the parent who is always available, who misses no school play and no important meeting, who gives fully to her partner and her friends and her own health and her creative work – she does not exist. Not because women aren’t capable, but because there are only twenty-four hours and certain things genuinely cannot occupy the same space at once.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is what our ancestors understood when they stood before Crom Cruach. You choose what you sacrifice. More importantly, you choose what you’re sacrificing it for. You make the offering consciously, with full knowledge of what it costs, rather than pretending the cost doesn’t exist.
That’s different from having things taken from you without your consent. That’s different from a system that demands sacrifice from women specifically while exempting others. But within the constraints of actual life, the question Crom Cruach asks is still a live one.
What are you offering? And what are you expecting in return?
The course
The Crom Cruach course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the sources in detail – the texts, the archaeology, the Patrick connection, and the question of what we can reasonably know about a figure this old and this contested.
Next week is the final post in this Lúnasa series – and it lands the week before the 1st of August itself.
What do you make of the sacrifice motif – ancient or modern? I’d genuinely like to know what lands for you in the comments.
Crom Dubh is one of those figures who appears at the edges of Irish tradition – not as central as the better-known Tuatha De Danann, not as dramatic as the Morrigan, but persistent. He keeps showing up in the folklore, particularly in connection with the last Sunday of July, in ways that suggest something older and more significant than his relatively sparse written record might imply.
I first came across him through Duchas.ie – the Irish Folklore Collection – and what I found there sent me down a very interesting path.
What Duchas tells us
One entry in particular stopped me. It describes Domhnach Crom Dubh – literally, Crom Dubh’s Sunday, anglicised as Garland Sunday by the English-speaking people of the area – and mentions a place called Altóir na Gréine, which translates roughly as the Altar of the Sun. This was a gathering place associated with Crom Dubh, where feasting, games, racing, hurling, dancing, and singing were held on this specific Sunday.
The entry offers an interpretation of the name worth quoting directly: that Chrom was a god, and that Dubh or Dua meant a sacrifice – making Crom Dubh, in this reading, something like “Crom’s Sacrifice.” (Dubh also means black, but this was the explanation given in the Dúchas entry) Whether that etymology holds up to scrutiny is a separate question, but the association between this figure, this day, and the idea of offering or sacrifice is consistent across multiple sources.
What happened to the Buaile na Gréine gathering? The priests and wise men of the surrounding parishes grew tired of it, according to the entry, and counselled the people to abandon the custom. They set up a patron at St Muchan’s in Ennistymon instead – a church gathering to replace the older hilltop one. The people, broadly, went.
This pattern – older gathering place replaced by a church-controlled alternative, the original customs gradually absorbed or redirected – is one of the most consistent threads in Irish folk practice. It’s worth recognising it for what it is, without bitterness and without romanticising what came before.
The Irish language connection
Something significant about the Crom Dubh entries on Duchas: the majority of them were recorded in Irish rather than English. This tells us something. These traditions were held more closely in Irish-speaking areas – in the west and south-west particularly, in communities where the older language and the older ways persisted longer together.
This matters for how we understand Crom Dubh. He is not a figure who survived primarily in the anglicised, more accessible parts of Irish tradition. He survived in the places where Irish was still the living language – which means the communities who remembered him were, in many cases, the communities most connected to the older ways of understanding the land and the year.
Who Crom Dubh might have been
The honest answer is that we don’t know with certainty. He appears in folk tradition as a figure associated with the harvest, with the hilltops, with the last Sunday of July. Some sources connect him to Crom Cruach – the darker, older figure I’ll be writing about next week – and suggest he may be a related or evolved form of the same deity. Others treat them as distinct.
What we can say is that he represents something genuine in Irish folk memory – a presence acknowledged at a specific time of year, in a specific way, by people who thought the acknowledgement mattered. The Crom Dubh course at Brigid’s Forge School (€37) goes into the sources in detail and sits with the uncertainty honestly rather than papering over it.
The tradition that survived
Here is what I find remarkable. In Ireland today, the August bank holiday weekend is still, for many families, a day trip to the seaside. The roads to coastal towns fill up. People walk seafronts and eat chips and let children run on beaches. The weather, as often as not, obliges.
Almost none of them are thinking about Crom Dubh. Almost none of them know that the impulse to go to the coast on this specific weekend has a name, or a history, or a figure associated with it that predates Christianity by an unknowable amount of time.
But the tradition survived anyway. The people kept going to the water. They kept gathering on the last Sunday of July. They kept doing, without knowing why, something their ancestors did with full awareness of why.
That persistence is its own kind of evidence.
Had you heard of Crom Dubh before this? Or Domhnach Crom Dubh? Drop a comment – I’m curious how widely known this is outside of Irish-speaking areas.
