This is for many of us the season of Imbolc, of celebrating the Home and the Hearthfire, and to honor Brighid, Lady of Inspiration, Healing, and Smithcraft, as she walks the land to wakefulness. I was privileged to celebrate Imbolc, and Brighid, with my beloved MAGpies of Mountain Ancestors Grove this year and to be part of the ordination of our new priest, Rev. Zacchaeus Murphy. The following is an expansion upon the invitation to Brighid in that rite and a musing about what has arisen since: 

This season is, for many, a time of great need. Cupboards grow bare and the worst of winter’s storms arrive, as storms often do in times of transition. Much of the world around us subtly- or not so subtly- encourages us to seek the shelter of our hearths. Indeed, the day of this ritual, we shifted our own plans as a Grove in response to the snow and ice that began to fall that morning, continuing steadily as the day unfurled. That snow kept us home, literally at the Prairie Home (as the Revs. Ashton’s residence is affectionately known) where we had been roosting together for our Board Retreat the prior two days. It was the kind of change, ostensibly in response to the world outside us, that illustrates how true it is that our hunger is not only for our physical needs like warmth and shelter. In ritual I spoke of the ways we root into comfort as we can; our choice seemed to settle in each of us as coherent with our experience as a kind of retreat into a togetherness that carried its own ebb and flow of connecting and separating again, responsive to our own rhythms. Our bodies and spirits know these rhythms of changing light, of rest and renewal, and seek what we find in the nourishing flame of our homes- both physically and metaphorically in the companionship of our loved ones. 

Too, this is a season of burgeoning hope in those first stirrings of spring. We feel that stirring much as the ground, the trees, the animals with whom we share this Earth, our Mother, feel it: a bit of restlessness; thoughts of warmer days; gratitude for the aching beauty of a changing sky. Our hungers shift ever so gradually from the comforts of home to what we know is coming. This festival is the pause at the height of our inhale, the moment of transition from drawing inward to releasing outward. And it is a release. It is softening our bellies, allowing ourselves to be in this world we are of, which happens both in what we allow expression and in those shadows cast by what we do not. Hope and hunger are so intimately entwined in our humanness… A hope not simply for a desired outcome, but the hope that lives in the acts of our hands, the flavor of our words, the fire of our hearts. It is a hope that arises from knowing our own hungers, from honoring that which nourishes us as blazes on the path of our own lives, signposts orienting us to kith, kin, and community, and to self. 

It is not uncommon for rituals at this time to bless the tools we use for our work in the worlds, often with references to plowshares and hammers and pens. These are the representations of our active ways of enacting ourselves that we emphasize heavily in our culture. Whether in healing or transforming, inspiring or creating, we focus so much on stories like the Hero’s Journey, on battling our pain, on efforting our way into being. What would it be like to soften? To make the space in which virtue may happen- a space we might call Grace*? When we step out into the world, rather than pushing our will (or Will), we can engage with the reciprocity on which our ritual structure, our way of ordering the cosmos, is based. When we act effortfully, it can arise as part of a continuous process of receiving- information, nourishment, aid, care- from others, our ecology, and ourselves as the soil in which what we give- what we do and who we are- germinates and, eventually, flourishes. 

That is perhaps the most valuable seed I carry from this experience of Retreat, of ritual: in softening, in allowing our action to be truly inspired by the stirrings we experience in response to the waking of the world, we allow ourselves to notice what our hungers tell us of what matters most. We allow our own action, effortful or otherwise, to be generative such that what nourishes us becomes nourishment for all around us. And in so doing, we shape a world that looks like our Hopes as we do the next right thing, the thing that comes to us, that arises within us, as necessary and right and true to who we are. 

In this way, Hunger and Hope are so much a part of what we find in our Homes, at our Hearthfires, and in our releasing back into the worlds. They are, too, so much of what our Lady Brighid stirs in us even as her footsteps stir the land to wakefulness. And so, as we did that Imbolc eve, I call out to her to join us at the sacred fire that burns within us all: 

Brighid, Bright Lady, 
Flame of the hearth at the center of our homes, sheltering us, 
Flame of the hearts at the center of our lives, feeding us, 
As we renew the fires which comfort and nourish us, 
We invite you near. 

Brighid, Exalted One, 
May your waters also flow through us, washing away the ashes of our regrets, 
Making soil of griefs and grievances that healing and renewal may grow. 
As we prepare for the coming Spring, 
We feel your cloak upon us. 

Brighid, Triple Blessed, 
May we carry these your blessings in the burning inspiration in our heads, 
The flowing compassion in our hearts, the hope-filled work with which we answer hunger. 
As you flame and flow in us, inspire and nurture us, shape and shield us, We honor you. 

Brighid, we thank you.

*with gratitude to the Grove discussion on Grace and Humility which was beautifully summed up in this idea by my fellow MAGpie Axel Y. as “Grace is the space in which we virtue.”