Tag: Transformation

Asleep and awake

Where have I been? I last wrote something in April this year, I was on a roll getting ideas and generally enjoying writing again and then I disappeared. Did An Mórrígan claim me when I went into Her cave never to return to the apparent world?

Unfortunately, no, nothing that exciting I’m afraid, I flatlined, energetically, physchologically and emotionally. I’ve spent the past few months feeling prone, prostrate and deflated with no inspiration to speak of. There has also been something bubbling along that has taken most of my mental capacity these past months that I won’t talk about right now but may explain soon.

I did however get my visit to Uaibh na gCat, the cave of the cats, the home of An Mórrígan. On the morning of the visit I was jangly, nervous and jittery, my nerves tap dancing in my brain and body. I’ve no idea why I was so strung out by the thought of the day ahead but there we go, the body does what it wants.

I enjoyed the tour of Rathcroghan given by the visitors centre https://www.rathcroghan.ie/ but I was there for the main event, a trip to the Otherworld. It was my pilgrimage for the year. I’ve been dying to go to Oweynagat for a long time but was never well enough to make the journey.

As we approached the cave all my jingle-jangle from earlier just dissolved away

A photo of a small cave entrance. It sits amongst Green trees and bushes.


I looked into the womb-like entrance and could not wait to enter. As I sat there waiting, there was a voice from somewhere deep in that cave, urging me to ‘come in, come in’. An affirmation of finally doing this at the right time, in the right headspace.


In small groups of 4 or 5 we began our descent into the home of An Mórrígan, some people turned back at the entrance, not yet ready to descend. I had an offering in my pocket of a small dram of whiskey (it would be rude to visit without a gift) and soon it was my turn to slide into the entrance. The floor was wet and thick with mud and the walls were glistening with moisture, it had that deep earthy smell that appears after a rainstorm. It got darker and darker as we descended and I got more and more comfortable in the dark, all enveloping environment.

The view of a ridged cave ceiling. It is solid rock and dark apart from the beam of torchlight that lights up the section on the photograph. There is a thick ridge running running along the centre of the ceiling that is almost pointed where it meets.


The metaphor of the cave is not lost on me, it reminded me of my transformation after trauma. I used to be scared of caves, the darkness in them always different to the dark of night. It is more solid and heavy somehow, more likely to have things creeping out of it to touch you on the shoulder. This time however, I had no fear, I have seen true darkness and spent my own recovery in the Hermit’s cave. I have sat in that darkness and embraced it, which enabled me to contain it within. It no longer scares me.

We reached the end (a rock fall prevented us going deeper) and stood in the cool darkness of the entrance to the Irish Otherworld.

This was the time for us all to turn off our torches. There we were for a minute or so, silent, bathed in that deep darkness. I tipped out my whiskey for An Mórrígan and ensured She knew how grateful I was and what a privilege it was to be in Her home.

Did I have a big revelation? Was I spoken to by An Mórrígan? Not that I’m consciously aware of. There was no Great Queen emerging from the darkness, no mystery breeze that blew through the cave. But as always with these things, they work away in the background, they slip through your subconscious and mould into something. Only months later when change has occurred in your life are you able to track it back to a ritual or a pilgrimage or that scrappy bit of throwaway magic you did off the cuff.

What I realise now is that my visit to the cave put me into hibernation again, to prepare me for what is to come. I am just rising again after months of waking sleep. My practice has evolved and become more tangible and consistent, I am getting ready for…something.

The Road to nowhere

When accident and trauma reduced the space I could exist in, it took something from me, something that I took for granted when I was abled and brave. The freedom to move, to trek and to wander. I could just get up in the morning and decide that I was going to lose myself somewhere and I didn’t have to think twice, now everything is done with careful measures of how much I have got in my battery, what I may need that energy for, how much I can spare? and how long will this keep me out of action if I do it? Is it worth the drain I will experience? It keeps my sphere of exploration very contained and very carefully managed – it is what it is, I can’t change it so I live with it but my word, it’s so annoying.

I recently sat down and did a little bit of brain dumping about my relationship to my body and nature since my accident and it made me really examine those thoughts and feelings that I honestly thought I’d mastered. I realised that the trust I lost in my body after my accident hasn’t really returned. I relied on my body to keep me moving, to be strong and fit and then it broke and I never really trusted it anymore. This affects how I move in the world and how much (or little) I physically push myself. I stopped appreciating my physicality, how powerful I can be even though I’m only small. I noted how little I look in the mirror since my accident, how I lost touch with my body and my outer shell because I felt that it was irrelevant and pointless in my smaller bubble where I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to see a person I no longer knew looking back at me.

I looked at my relationship to nature and how that has evolved. Don’t get me wrong, I love nature, I love being outside with the trees and the plants and the mountains but where nature had been a source of joy and adventure, especially when I was young, it was now ‘therapy’, a place I went to feel better and get a bit of exercise. How sterile this has made my friend. I appreciate everything nature contributed to my recovery but I have lost that abandon I used to feel in nature. The woods were a place to hide and climb and discover lost worlds, now they are a sensible stroll through and then back home before I get too tired. This is not how I want to exist in the outdoors, not at all.

I also find being outside confronts me, it reminds me what I lost, what I lack, so I don’t take the time to be ‘in’ it. How heartbreaking this is for me, for the child within who would wile away the hours wandering through pathways and along hedgerows, talking to birds and jumping across streams. It made me realise I need to find my magic again.

Whilst sitting wall staring through recovery I would often get notions, notions that were far beyond my capabilities. Notions were a blessing and a curse, they were a nod to hope, to rising again, but also a frustrating smack in the chops of my reality and how it was tying me down. I had a notion last year to do a pilgrimage, I wanted to just walk to some undefined location and see if I could find bits of me that I had lost along the way. The idea of setting off (like The Fool) with my rucksack, some sturdy boots and a map was one that enthralled me. Reality told me, I couldn’t just go for days and hope for the best, it had to be carefully planned, with lots of rest and time. There were lots of St Patrick walks around here but these hold no interest for me, I am not concerned with the cultural colonisation that St Patrick brought (why Ireland celebrate this terrible man I have no idea, but this is a whole other post for another time). I just couldn’t find what I was looking for, things were either too long, too far or too remote.

So that itch remained unscratched until I read ‘Listen to the land speak’ by Manchán Magan. In this book he has a chapter on Oweynagat where he talks about his yearning to undergo a rite of passage, a journey of inner discovery and he travelled as far as the Himalayas to find it, little knowing that on his own doorstep in Ireland there was such a place. I’ve known about Uaimh na gCat (Cave of the cats) for a while, the famed home of the mighty Morrigan, a place of spiritual and emotional transmutation and this is where I got excited, I’m going on holiday in June to Sligo and will be a mere half an hour away from Rathcrogan where the cave sits. So this will be my pilgrimage this year, I will be entering the cave to shed skin, to look into the abyss, to lose and find myself. I’m no longer afraid of the dark, it’s time to find the mirror and stare myself in the face again.

A black and white image of a the inside of a small cave

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.

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.