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…
Well, here we are. Last stop on this walk through Brigid’s Path – Know Yourself, Reconcile the Past, Joy, Three Marks of a Poet, The Path Forward, and now the Cauldron. Six posts. Took me longer to walk it than to write about it, if I’m honest.
What the cauldron actually is
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?