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The Rite and the Ritual

It’s cold. Friggin’ baltic as we say over here. It feels like Winter proper. A welcome feeling because the past few Winters have been too warm, making us feel season-less and lost.

Winter Solstice, Alban Arthan is approaching. A time I have grown to love as I evolved from my immature, pre-trauma, sun lover into an appreciator of dark and The Shadow. Solstice is a time of beginnings as the Sun returns to us again. The longest night, a time of stillness and silence before the wheel tips once more into lengthening light. I’m choosing this years Solstice to mark my Irish Citizenship with a ritual. Usually, there is an official ceremony in Ireland where you receive your certificate and take an oath of fidelity, but due to COVID-19 my acceptance came with a bit of a quiet whimper. A brown envelope in the post in December 2021 and a quick photo in front of the fire.

Black and white photo of a smiling woman, holding up a piece of paper in one hand and giving a thumbs up sign with the other. She is in a living room in a house with a large picture on the wall behind her and a lit fire in the fireplace.
Hooray!

This suited my Hermit tendencies, a couple of days away with hundreds of other people at a formal ceremony is not my thing at all, but what it has done is make my transition into my Irish identity feel lacking somehow. My Irish roots are very important to me, my family, the O’Donnells from Donegal fled the Gorta Mor (Great Hunger) and ended up in Scotland and then sometime later Northern England. I subconsciously found my way back to Ireland and it is now my beloved home. I feel rooted here, reconnected to my ancestors whose trauma and subsequent uprooting is in my DNA. I have never felt ‘English’ and always like a fish out of water when I was there. I have journeyed to meet my ancestors and they are glad I am back, I am home and healing the relationship they had with the land.

This brings me to the importance of ritual and how in Western Society in general we have lost the ability to mark rites of passage in any meaningful way. We look at transitions as yearly birthdays and New Year. They get celebrated but usually in a pretty perfunctory way. Yet there are so many transitions and rites of passage in our lives, childhood to adulthood, old house to new house, a change of relationship or job, deaths, births, traumas, illness, the stages of menopause and transitions in our sexuality and gender identity. The ability to look deeply at these events and to mark them is something, I feel, that is fundamental to our psyche. We too easily let things pass and wash over us without marking and processing, that it becomes part of the soup that sits in our subconscious begging to be acknowledged and when we don’t, we can become overwhelmed and over wrought.

I love ritual, my spiritual practices over the years have allowed me to look at ritual and it’s importance. Ritual for me, is a charging of the batteries, it focuses energy and I always feel fabulous after I’ve taken the time to craft a solo ritual and then perform it. Ritual doesn’t have to be complicated or involve lots of trinkets and gee gaws, or be held in a sacred well or inside an ancient cave. It can be done quickly indoors or in the shower and sometimes all you need is some paper and a pencil or a single candle and some alone time to sit and journey and process

What delights we uncover when we enter our internal landscape and explore. We are not confined by our existence on the material plane, we can meet whatever or whomever we want and ask questions, listen to wisdom and enter places not possible with our solid, lumpy human bodies.

So, here we are thinking about my ritual for the Solstice, a time where I’ll enter the liminal space to bond with the land I call home and thank it for its beauty and its acceptance, where I hope to hear the voices of generations past who have lived, loved and struggled here, who will hopefully receive and welcome the tie to their home I have now created.

Creating meaningful ritual is the way of the Hermit. It is a door to a deeper sense of self that we miss and is sorely needed. Try it.

A wide black and white photo of a woman in la long cotton robe standing in the middle of a garden in front of a small standing stone. Surrounding the garden is a vast expanse of sky and undulating fields and hedges.
A ritual from this Summer. I’m lucky to be surrounded by this beauty.

The Fool is calling

I mentioned in a previous post (The transition is not smooth) how I’d been feeling the pull of ‘something’. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It was calling me none-the-less. That feeling has intensified, there’s an internal bubbling that is unsettling and urgent. The Fool is calling me onward

The Fool tarot card from the Rider Waite Smith deck.
The Fool from the RWS tarot

See the Fool there all ready to jump, a bag full of belongings and a doggy familiar to help guide. Full of innocence and expectation, confident that the leap will be held and supported. We have many instances when the Fool shows up in our lives, the Fools Journey is not linear and also not a one shot thing. I have had Fools journeys that brought joy and clarity but others that brought pain, my latest Fools journey when I stepped off the cliff into the abyss of Shadow brought me to fully embodying The Hermit. I adore The Hermit, I have gained peace and wisdom from them, I have also found that my place in this world is alone but not lonely.

Every Hermit must at times step back out into the world and this is when The Fool begins to call. This time though my Fool is an older, wiser one, one who knows that sometimes you have to look over the cliff edge before you step off it. Where my baggage has been thoroughly sorted and I only pack and carry what nurtures me.

I have been healing for ten years, ten whole years! Recovery is not quick despite what we are told. I have taken the time I have needed to grow my scar tissue. Some of the things that I have been doing in this period to help me, now feel like they no longer serve me. This is where things become scary. I don’t know what to step into. My downtime has been spent following threads of interest, things that in the grind of the ‘real world’ I could never have persued. I’ve learnt about herbalism, psychology, horticulture, garden design, celebrancy, Druidry, death work, tarot, grief counselling and horticultural therapy. I’ve wandered the woods searching for the ‘Other’ and spoken to trees and ancient stones (yes they do speak back). I’ve found good medicine in the energy of the sea and the wind. I’ve stepped beyond what is ‘normal’ into the supernatural and found a big whole wide world of things beyond our realm. A Jack of all trades. My curiosity never ending. A depth and breadth of stuff, some of which is seen as frivolous or weird by a tired and overworked populace who no longer look for magic.

The problem is, what on earth do I DO with all of this? How do I show up in the world again? What cliff do I jump off? My Hermit self is not au fait with the ways of society, I don’t like grind culture, I refuse to become part of that again. How do I meld the peace of The Hermit with the desire of The Fool? I don’t think I’ve ever really known what I wanted ‘to be’ and I’m certainly no clearer now.

It is also hard to find a way when everything seems so fractured, is it not just easier to stay hidden in the woods? In truth, I’m not entirely sure I’m made for these times. I want a life of wonderment and creativity and freedom but everything just feels so squeezed and tight at the moment. Or is now the perfect time to find and inject wonderment, creativity and freedom, just when we need it the most?

I have no answers, I’m hoping they come, until then I’m sitting in the liminal, uncomfortable ‘not-quite-there but I need to leap’ space and maybe The Hermit will become The Fool (with ample Hermit-ing time) once again.

A photo of a path made up of large stones and boulders leading upwards into a forest of pines.
A magical place near my house.

Jeff Buckley is magical

Today is Jeff Buckley’s birthday, he would have been 56 years old today. This time of year is always a time when I get deep with my remembrance of Jeff, it’s Samhain season a time of death and purging, so it’s apt that Jeff as a Scorpio is always at the forefront of my life during November.

For those who don’t know him, Jeff was a musician who came to some prominence during the 90’s. His first and only studio album Grace was released in 1994 and he sadly died by accidental drowning in 1997 at just 30 years old. I found Jeff in the Summer of 1995 and he has travelled with me ever since. I think of all the ‘famous deaths’ of people I admired, Jeff is the one that lingers and cuts most deeply.

I have a very otherworldly relationship with Jeff and I think he had a very otherworldly relationship with the earth and its inhabitants. Jeff has a place on my death altar, he has become part of the pantheon of ‘other’ that I work with magically. The archetypes he embodies for me (The Lover, The magician, The creative, The artist and The Revolutionary) are extremely powerful and can be used magically to invoke and transform aspects of myself that I’d like to bring forward.

I light my Jeff idol candle and speak to him often. I love how magic can be so flexible, it doesn’t have to involve prescribed Gods and Godessess and fifty million trinkets. If it moves you, use it. With Jeff it’s easy, his music is the ritual. It contains light and darkness, it transcends just being a nice tune with a hook. It is incredibly healing and cathartic. I have released love, rage, frustration and a myriad of other emotion with his music alone. His voice and how he used it, made it a conduit, a wailing banshee of pure feeling, it feels like being baptised by chaos and fire and light.

I truly believe that Jeff was one of those magical beings that transcended mere ‘human-ness’ I see him as an Undine, a water elemental, he just poured that watery emotional energy into the world. As sad as his death was, it was time to go home and the waters reclaimed him.

Today on his birthday, I’m listening to his music (although listening is maybe not the correct word for it) I’m absorbing it in some kind of mystical osmosis and allowing it, like a river, to wash through me. Jeff also reminds me that sometimes humans are magical and beautiful creatures and that we are capable of wonderful things. A useful reminder that fosters hope. A sigh of relief when things feel heavy. He is the lighthouse to which I sometimes need to steer my boat.

I can’t really adequately express what my internal voice is trying to say because I can’t find the words that do it justice, whenever I put words to paper regarding Jeff I always get these half baked water metaphors (as seen throughout this post) but maybe that’s how it needs to be, Undine Jeff infiltrating with his watery medicine.

Happy Birthday Jeff Buckley. You marvellous wizard. You are missed.

Shedding Skin

In my previous life before the initiation, I was not very honest with myself. Or rather, I let who I was, be extinguished and then moulded by voices of bitterness and bullying. Voices that wanted me, a smart, independent young girl with a free spirit be bowed and subdued by a scared and resentful toxic male.

I carried this heavy and biting energy with me throughout most of my life. A fire of potential and purpose dampened to smoke. My heart desired creativity and the catharsis of sharing art and putting my heart into the world, but as a young girl of 7 until I was a teenager and able to exercise some sovereignty over where and with who I spent my time (alas by then the damage was done), I was receiving messages that I was not ‘good enough’, that my pursuit of the things that made my heart joyful were “not a way to earn a living”, that my desires were “silliness” and women like me who were “too clever” should be “seen and not heard”.

Drilled into small-ness and rendered invisible by an insecure narcissist. As a result of this I always jumped around from job to job, never quite scratching the itch inside me, not really knowing what was missing. Jobs that made me depressed and retreat further into myself. This reflected in my relationships, either being too closed off by walls or too needy for acceptance and love. I tried many ways to find who I was, to find the missing piece of my complicated inner puzzle. Some more successful than others. Learning and teaching Brazilian percussion being a particular high note, getting lost in the rhythm, removing my logical Air brain and those dissenting voices gave me a peace I’m still sorry I walked away from. But I’d always get to a stage where I was just getting good and I’d shut off the tap. The fear of success and/or failure, of not being ‘good enough’ steadily dancing through all my endeavours.

Now I’m here ten years since being reborn, I’ve used my fallow time of being buried to dip my toe in a few directions and it always comes back to being creative, giving of myself into something and putting it out into the world. Gardening became my outlet, creating life and beauty that no one ever saw because I couldn’t ‘people’. I needed solitude, I needed to gather. For eight years I wrote a blog about my accident, trauma and recovery, I retired it when it reached a natural end but also because I thought it was bad, I was reaching out into the void and no one was reaching back, so I concluded it was because I was ‘lacking’ somehow.

As I hit the ten year anniversary of my accident I began to feel that familiar feeling again, something welling up inside me that wants to be let out. A desperate urge to now ‘do something’ after 10 years in much needed limbo. A burning desire to take what I’ve learnt and make something with it. I’m feeling ‘out of sorts’, restless and impatient. It brings me back here, to writing, a place that feels comfortable for me. I have a need to be heard, to hear others and to share with those who understand, how after such a rite of passage, you are never quite the same again.

It scares me to try again, to invest energy into something that I abandon just as it finds its feet, but this time I’m coming armoured. This time I don’t care about being good, I care about being authentic and indulging the part of me that wants to write. The voice that smothered me for so long no longer has any power. I want to test myself, my ‘silliness’. I want to see how I can grow not just plants, but community and love, using words. To finally satisfy my longing for creativity and to let that little girl in the picture below know that what she has to say is important, that her voice can be heard, that she, in her robust and courageous little body, is enough.

Photo from the 1980’s of a young girl wearing blue trousers and a blue top and grey boots. She has a handbag over her right shoulder and is stood on brown patterned carpet in a room with a brown table and a brown cabinet with bottles of alcohol on it.
Me sometime in the 80’s. Surrounded by a sea of brown decor.

on being buried

Content warning: themes of death and dying.

It’s Samhain here in the Northern hemisphere. Everything is dark, cold and damp. The high energy and heat of Summer feels long gone. I love this time of year, the Celtic new year, the beginning of Winter when all is slow and quiet.

I feel in many ways my own life runs parallel to this time of year, the alchemy of trauma catapulted me into my Autumn years much sooner than I anticipated, adding the change of Perimenopause to that just beds it in deeper.

I used to personify Summer, all frantic and full of go go go. A lot of that was masking, trying to avoid staring into myself so I wouldn’t have to be alone and in the stillness with my feelings and thoughts. That was a place I did not want to visit, it was vast and deep and scary.

I was also terrified of death when I was younger, the thought of it used to create a rush of adrenaline up through my body that made me want to run and hide in a place where I could escape it. I couldn’t and wouldn’t entertain it. Combine that with our reluctance in the West to even talk about it or acknowledge it and to pretend that it won’t affect us and it’s a pretty potent mix. So Summer was safe, it was bright, it represented life. The dark half of the year was barely tolerated and I dragged myself through it every year just waiting for the first touch of Spring.

Then Autumn swept in, or rather it cannoned in, exploding the lid off my neatly boxed emotions. Everything shot out and left me breathless and spinning. I was completely shattered, shards of who I was, the walls I’d created and what I thought I ‘should’ be all went pinging off into the aether. My efforts in the early days after my accident to gather it all back in and shut the lid were in vain, there was absolutely no way that person was returning.

Then came the burying,

my first era gone. A ghost of a person floating around the earth, floating around the house. Not in my body, just observing from the in-between. The pain of losing myself so raw and heart wrenching. Everything I was, just lost. The grief of this time was all encompassing, a distressing and harrowing place where I was isolated but also completely at a loss to what was happening and how to stop myself from fracturing more and more into the abyss.

Being so unprepared due to my earlier reluctance to tolerate uncertainty and tolerate myself meant that I could not cope, I could not escape into masking by ‘doing’, my accident had taken my energy, my physicality. All I had left was inertia and wall staring and this meant I was finally facing myself. It was overwhelming. I had no capacity to contain this wild wolf that had been unleashed.

I wanted to die.

After a few gut wrenching, distressing years of this is when my relationship with Death started to change, for a while it was only the death of sleep that gave me comfort. The pause of the coma-like state that helped me endure being alive but not alive. It was around four or five years post accident that the fight I’d been putting up to ‘just get better’ was spent and it was then I started to release my resistance to being ‘ultra-alive’ (to stave off Death and Shadow) and slowly fell into the entombment that the darkness offered.

It was here I began to walk alongside Death, I began to talk to it, to understand it. I realised that honouring the archetype of Death allowed me to accept my second epoch, the new me that was forming from the long arduous labour of rebirth. Death has enabled acceptance of self, ALL of it. My spiritual work now involves Death, I embody the Hermit, the Cailleach in her wild elder self is a teacher. I look to Death when things get tough. Nature is imbued with Death, it is everywhere. I am not love and light, I do not spiritually bypass any longer. Life is gritty and earthy and dirty and has Shadow, we deny ourselves such roundness and richness when we push it away.

I’m lucky because I got to die to myself and I came back. This has given the gift of clarity and a rootedness I never had. You don’t go through the initiation and come back the same person. So welcome Shadow, welcome Death my greatest teachers. Without whom I would not have such strong boundaries or compassion or courage.

Am I still scared of death? Sometimes it can still grip me in the dead of night but what is more scary was my first life where I gave away my power and didn’t honour myself.

The Transition is not smooth

I’m 45, not old but not young. A weird in-between place made even weirder by trauma and near death. I’ve spent the past 10 years since my accident, pulling the threads of myself and trying to weave them into some sort of coherent cloth. A cloth that serves to honour who I am now but also allows me to be ‘out there’ in the world.

Have I been successful? Well that depends on when you ask me. I may have found myself and learnt to love and respect myself but the bit about functioning in the world is not something I think I’ve figured out yet. Or maybe I have and most others are doing it wrong?

Just when I’d righted the ship and learnt to have balance in amongst the turmoil of heavy grief and post traumatic stress I am once again being thrown into the initiation of change with Perimenopause.

I’m suddenly lost in the woods again.

The feelings that are getting unearthed are a throwback to those early days of trauma, a mixture of feeling aimless, hopeless and alone. I’m not sure I’m ready for another rite of passage through the fire. The last one was so hard and so hollowing. Am I full enough to be emptied again?

There are moments of clarity where I know that this is another transition from one state to another, an induction to my elderhood and like all initiations it will not be easy. I would like to walk this path without treating it like a disease to be medicated and bypassed, instead letting it power through me and take me to those corners of myself that still need revealing.

Things feel so full of paradox right now, I find I’m craving community, to talk with wiser souls than mine about what is to come but I’m also longing for solitude, for the cave walls to shut me in and free me when I’m ready to unfold. I know myself yet so unsure of who I am at the same time. Happy standing still but yearning to move forward to something.

The pull of The Hermit making me root down and the call of Cailleach pushing me to shed another skin and inhabit the body of the wise woman who I still can’t quite find.

So here I go again, becoming an edgewalker once more. Neither here nor there. Setting off through the trees, the Fools journey, tentative, unknowing and vulnerable.