April 2024
This feed provides some excerpts of my creative work for my community in April 2024.
The Druid Who Took My Eye
A Chairde, Friends,
I was cleaning up my website, going through old blogs when I came across a blog that I had named after a line in Irish poet, Paula Meehan’s poem, Well: “I know this path by magic not by sight”. The blog was written in the sticky tar of a dark night of the soul in early 2023. When I re-read it a year later, I could feel the swell of goosebumps chase across my back. I sifted through my dream journal recalling a “big” dream I had around this time, which as I discovered was a few weeks after the blog. I had never made the connection. The dream, in turn, was followed by a bewitching synchronicity five months later.
As I, future Jen, look back on this writing from past Jen, I am grateful that she stayed in the dark because it gifted her an otherworldly eye.
Let me recap the whole story… The blog, the dream, the synchronicity
2. Starting Your Day at Sunset
Hello, lovely Celtic Creatives,
Today, in the spirit of this solar eclipse portal, I share a ritual for your Celtic Creatives Toolkit to start your day at sunset. But before I do, below you’ll see a photo of a +5,000-year-old carved stone in Cairn L on Sliabh na Calliagh, the Cailleach or ‘Witch’s Mountain’ at Loughcrew in Ireland. How wondrous are these mysterious carvings? Some say together these symbols conjure the world’s earliest known recording of a solar eclipse. This is hotly debated by scholars but sure it’s an excuse to share rare and exquisite Megalithic art.
Now on to the ritual… This is a practice that I love to do but often don’t get the opportunity. I have two young boys, 4 and 8 years old. My littlest fella still falls asleep in our bed at night before being moved to his own room, and from there in a drunken slumber, will often home himself back under the parental duvet. Space in the evening is challenging for me, to compensate I tend to rise early, I’m a cockcrow kind of person anyway. However, whenever I can, I relish in starting my day at sunset.
Photo by Frank Prendergast
3. Weaving the Bones
A Chairde, Friends,
I open this week with a story that weaves the mythic feminine across several ancient cultures. I was enlivened to perform this as part of a storytelling crescendo with the Anima Mundi School where I’ve been studying for the past couple of years reclaiming the mythology of the feminine through a post-Jungian lens.
The story is told through the voice of the Cailleach in her Great Mother and grandmother form in the Gaelic tradition as she remembers her time as the goddess. It knits multiple expressions of the goddess in Ireland with her Sisters from across the world. The words spoken are from the original myths and poems themselves.
The archetypes I share in this tale all emerge from the same place - from the collective unconscious - from our psyche, our soul, fite fuaite (which means inextricably linked or interwoven in Irish Gaelic) with the anima mundi, the soul of the world. Each culture clothes the goddess in its own unique way, but the message is so often the same.
“The feminine
is always on the side of life.
Loves life.
Loves”.
Marion Woodman, Coming Home to Myself
4. Manannán Mac Lir, Son of the Sea
Hello lovelies,
I begin this Creative Ancestor Profile by admitting that I don’t have a plan, a neat little spreadsheet of Creative Ancestors scheduled for you. It’s more like standing at the threshold of a door and seeing who knocks, who is eager to walk through from the Otherworld into our consciousness. Manannán Mac Lir has been knocking on my door for what in hindsight seems like an eternity, but I never heard his rap until recently. Today, the door is ajar…
Son of the Sea
Manannán Mac Lir is a god of salty waters, the son of the obscure sea god, Lir. The Isle of Man is said to be named after him or in the reverse, he is named after the island, ‘A renowned trader who dwelt in the Isle of Man. The best pilot in the West of Europe.’1 He is often compared to the Welsh, Manawydan fab Llŷr who appears in the Mabinogi. Besides his name, Manawydan holds no deep association with the sea but he does with magic, an art his Gaelic fellow, Manannán, is a master of.
Some of Manannán’s familial ties (he has many!) include his wife Fand, an avian shapeshifter, her name is thought to mean, ‘tear’ or ‘teardrop of beauty’. He is also said to be the husband of An Chailleach Bhéara, ‘The Hag of Beara’, who to this day in her rock form, gazes out to sea awaiting his homecoming, for what could mean a return of our otherworldly consciousness, a turning of the tide. “Ebbtide to me as to the sea,” she laments across the waves. Mannanán is sometimes the husband or in other tales, father of the old sun goddess and fairy queen Áine, as well as father to Niamh Cinn-Óir, ‘Niamh of the Golden Head/Hair’, a protagonist in one of Ireland’s most well-known tales. He is foster-father to the shining God Lugh whom he raises in the Otherworld, gifting Lugh the mystical knowledge he needs to fulfil his destiny before facilitating his return to Ireland.
Art by Valerie Hammond
