May 2024
This feed provides some excerpts of my creative work for my community in May 2024.
1. Meet Your Future Self
This is one of my favourite creative practices to do. In this guided journey, you will travel to Áine’s lake at Lough Gur in Co. Limerick, to meet the archetypal image of this Goddess along with the image of your ‘future self’. This practice is not about fortune-telling or fate, each image we are gifted from our psyche, from our soul—or as I would see as from the Unconscious, the place where the Celtic Otherworld emerges from—represents a potentiality for our lives. Images are holy because they express the potential that we already hold within ourselves. They provide clues to what our soul is trying to communicate with us on our life’s path. We have become used to devaluing imagination as pure fabrication, a dreadful travesty of our excessive logos/‘logical’ times. Deep imagination is about bringing an image that emerges from the soul into form, there’s nothing unreal about that.
Dancing Fairies by August Malmström
2. Triple Goddess Ériu, Banba & Fódhla
As we are in Bealtaine bloom, for this month’s Creative Ancestor profile, it is the triple goddess Ériu (“Air-roo”), Banba (“Ban-va”) and Fódhla (“Foe-lah”) who we will bring into bloom in our hearts. In the founding member's Bealtaine retreat, we journeyed with Ériu, Banba and Fódhla and the potentiality for our lives that they express at this threshold time, so let’s have more from these three queens of Ireland…
Ériu, Banba and Fódhla are goddesses of sovereignty. Core to Irish mythology is the deep association of the feminine principle with the land. She is the personification of the land itself. In early Irish society, the basic territorial unit or where you lived with your community, was called a tuath, meaning ‘tribe’, or mini-kingdom. In order for a tuath to bloom, their king would symbolically marry the Sovereignty Goddess—the land—in a ritual called the banais ríghe. This enacted a sacred contract between people and nature, masculine and feminine expressions.
Today, we sometimes see the association of the feminine with nature as problematic because it has become gender-specific, excluding women and marginalised groups from the decision-making sphere of culture coded as masculine and, specifically, ‘male’. Early Ireland was no utopia for women but it was goddess-centric. The Sovereignty Goddess like Ériu, Banba and Fódhla, as this embodiment of the feminine was powerful and could influence the culture. She was respected, feared, life-giving, life-taking. She also shows us how the feminine could navigate three worlds—the mortal plain, the natural world, and the Otherworld—because all of these ‘places’ are connected. They are infused with the anima mundi, the feminine soul of the world.
3. Bealtaine Retreat
I feel that luminous bright yellow of gorse that shines across the land at this time, burst into bloom in my heart sensing into our first Áes Dána Retreat for Bealtaine next week.
As a side note, an epithet you see in Irish mythology especially linked to the many Eithne’s in our tales, is aitenchaetrach, meaning “with gorse-coloured pubic hair”. Eithne is a name associated with the old Sovereignty Goddesses of Ireland, the embodiment of the land itself. In this way, gorse is part of the landscape of the goddess’s body that spills across Éire, Ireland, in this season of Bealtaine.
Our Gathering
The moon itself will be ripening as we gather next week just before the full moon in Sagittarius (my own fiery sign).
Bealtaine in the mythology represents a time of arrival, of portals opening, of new consciousness emerging, so I will be drawing on these themes in our gathering. (There will be resonance here for whatever hemisphere you are in even if you’re heading for Samhain in the south).
What to Expect:
We will begin with a guided visualisation to arrive in our bodies and enliven our souls, so tend to your space beforehand if you can e.g. find a comfy space, bring a cosy blanket or whatever you need to drop into the timelessness and spaciousness of the Otherworld together
I will share teachings (some slides) on Bealtaine from an Irish mythological perspective and we can reflect together on what inspiration we can draw from our Creative Ancestors within these myths for our creative lives at this time
We will also engage in a creative ritual on the theme so please bring along your journal or some paper to draw on along with any mark-making tools you desire like colouring pencils, crayons, markers, chalks, or whatever you have handy
There’ll be space for sharing throughout and we’ll then close our container together energetically
Please know that you are so welcome to come in whatever season you feel like you are in… you don’t have to feel Bealtaine in your body to participate. Come as you are
