An Irish Blessing on Valentine’s Day
May you know love
spark and flair of youth’s longing
May you know love
steady flame of the hearth
May you know love
glowing embers of age
May you know love
ever changing constant
May you know love
Happy Valentine’s Day. I’ve written this special blessing for Valentine’s Day. Whether you have a partner or are single this blessing applies to us all regardless of relationship status.
My partner, Tony Cuckson, and I have been interviewed by Cavan Community radio as part of a celebration of love during Valentine’s week. We have had the privilege to explore this subject for nearly three decades. We met at a Poetry Circle so we included many of our favourites as readings during the broadcast.
The second half of the programme includes Tony, who hails from Armagh, singing one of my favourites “My Lagan Love” as well as our own musings on how relationships go through cycles and experience rebirth. If you are a lover of Irish traditional songs be sure to listen to his rendition. I know I may be partial, but sometimes it just makes me shiver to hear him sing it.
It truly is a blessing to have been able to and to continue to journey on the greatest learning curve in life. Love also introduced me to Ireland and quite independently of any love for a man I also fell in love with this land, each contour, nook, cranny and cove of it.
An Irish Blessing for St. Brigit’s Feast Day
Brigit’s Mantle
Lay me down upon your cloak -
Swaddle me. Sing to me
your secrets of always enough.
Lay me down upon your cloak -
Wrap me snug. Tell me a story.
The miracle of always enough
Lay me down upon your cloak-
Rock me. Gently now lay me
down in the source of always enough
© Bee Smith, 2009. All rights reserved.
On this feast day of St. Brigit I offer this prayer poem in celebration of her most amazing spirit.
The prayer poem is based on the tale that St. Brigit asked a noble of Leinster for land to build her abbey. He laughed because it was very good land and he would be foolish to give it away. She then said, “Sir, if you would promise to give me only the land that my cloak will cover I would be satisfied.” He assented. Four of her nuns each took one corner of her cloak and walked east, south, west and north. Her cloak expanded and expanded and expanded as acre upon acre was covered with her cloak. In abject terror the lord ordered them to stop. They did. But the land that was covered by Brigit’s Mantle was deeded to her as the lord was a man of his word. And it was enough for her to establish her abbey Cill Dara (Cell of Oak) in what is modern day Kildare.
May you always know the source of always enough.
The Real Celtic Spring: The Festival of St. Brigit
Celtic spirituality evolved from pagan roots to a distinct form of Christianity influenced by Coptic monastics from Egypt. Ireland was notable in that there were no real ‘red martyrs’ in the conversion to Christianity. In the Ireland that venerated the triple goddess the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit could be accommodated without any stretch of the religious imagination. St. Patrick was the best known evangelist of Ireland although it is now thought that were other missionaries before him. However, he energetically advanced the spread of the new faith. The other two patron saints beloved by the Irish are St. Columcille and St. Brigit. St. Brigit is an interesting case for she took on all the associations of the pagan goddess of her own name.
An A-Z of Things to See in Ireland – Islands
In this series “An A-Z of Things to See in Ireland“ I am now forging towards the middle of the alphabet. If it is ‘I’ and you are thinking of things to see in Ireland than you’d be hard pushed to not consider islands. Here is my rationale for making a visit to one of Ireland’s off shore islands. But let us also not forget that Ireland has many islands inside the country, too.
Ireland is, of course, an island in itself. You have only to land in Ireland and there you are already on a very large island facing the North Atlantic to the west and the Irish and Celtic Seas to the east. Lawrence Durrell noted in Reflections on a Marine Venus that there are some people who suffer from islomania. He defines them as people who find islands “somehow irresistible”. These “little worlds surrounded by the sea” – or a lough – “fills them with indescribable intoxication.”
For spiritual tourists an island has an especial allure.
An A-Z of Things to See in Ireland: Holy Wells
In this article series of my A-Z of Things to See in Ireland H has got to stand for Holy Wells. For anyone interested in the spirituality of this island then you need to visit holy wells. The Celtic spiritual consciousness is deeply respectful of nature. Water is, of course, essential to our health and well being. Both pre-and early-Christian Celts knew that water – all water- was sacred. Before the conversion to Christianity the many springs were sacred to a local deity or goddess. With the coming of Christianity the matronage or patronage of the holy well passed from a god or goddess to a saint.
St. Brigid’s Holy Well, Kildare
Celtic Spirituality – Ireland’s True Spiritual Heritage
Celtic Spirituality is not about doctrine but spiritual experience and was a way of life practiced by many everyday mystics for centuries. It is very much a part of Irish spiritual heritage and was practiced right up until the 7th century. It is said that those early Irish monks with their Celtic spiritual practices saved western civilization. While Rome was being sacked by barbarians and the great classical libraries of Alexandria burned, Irish monasteries were busy copying all the manuscripts in the known world. The people practiced a unique form of Christianity known in the 21st century as Celtic spirituality. Perhaps in our fast and furiously paced world we rediscover a heritage to help us encounter the divine. Celtic Spirituality created a culture for all, whether those lived in monasteries, villages and towns or beehive huts, could hope to have an everyday mystical encounter with God.
Celtic Spirituality and the Beautiful Ireland Countryside
December Sunrise, Cuilcagh Mountain, County Cavan
To understand Celtic Spirituality we must suspend the normal way of looking at the world and ‘sense’ the other worlds around us.”
– Donald McKinney, Celtic Spirituality for the 21st Century
If you live, as I do, deep in the beautiful Irish countryside, with only the moon lighting the lane and a wide night sky with Venus glimmering brightly, with wind and weather your close allies, there is a shift in perception. It is easy to believe, nay, know that the fairies are your close neighbours. Even in the depths of midwinter the beauty of the Irish landscape leaves me gasping. In this context it is relatively easy to shift one’s perception and open all the senses to apprehend Celtic Spirituality.
The Holy Land of Ireland – Place of Living Light
And yet no other corner of this land
offers in shape and colour all I need
for sight to torch the mind with living light.
John Hewitt, 1907-1987, “The Glens”
I am blessed to live in the loveliest of places. The light here in this corner of the land of Ireland Is, as Hewitt writes, a living light that invites the experience of delight.
It is, I think, a place that will remain largely untouched by the rollercoaster of progress. It offers me its shape- the rolling hills and drumlins- and the colour – ever changing – for the insight I long to receive and express.
In folk tales of Ireland it is told that the magical people called the Tuatha de Danaan arrived on the mountain where I look out at each morning from our small cottage living room window. Slieve Anierin, or Iron Mountain, is a magical landscape, especially in the early morning when the mist rises from the earth as the sun moves to bless the land with warmth.
The Tuatha de Danaan were called the Shining Ones and the exemplify the living light in the land. As the legend tells us, after being defeated at Moytura they literally went to ground and live in the fairy forts and raths that are scattered over the Irish landscape. The legacy of their magical light which is heart felt is especially strong in this part of the world.
The purpose of taking a vacation, or holiday (holy day) as we call it in Ireland, is to connect with a sense of wholeness. A vacation or holiday offers the possibility to see the beauty within yourself. It occurs on a day when you feel whole and the shape and colours of your life are reflected all around you. I
The part of Ireland has the pervasive spirit of those Beautiful People the Tuatha de Danaan who were driven underground. That is a metaphor that resonates with many a person’s life story. Many people find that they lock away their own light. If you decide to have a wholistic holiday or vacation, the attitude one journeys with can become infused by the living light of this place, and inspire you with delight. Delight is a great souvenir.
The ability to see the living light requires that you receive your sight. The eye of the heart looks onto Creation and is said most aptly by American poet e.e. cummings:
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping green spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes.
e.e. cummings is looking through the experience of the living light. This moves from inside out. I requires a certain kind of stillness of mind and a certain kind of willingness to be colourful.
I invite you to come to this corner of Ireland so that it might offer you what you need. What we all need in these changing times is a kind of certainty. There can be certainty experienced within the journey to who we are as the wonder tale that is a living light.
This storyteller will tell you that this living light is all around you waiting for you to see it and feel it and be it. Some places invite your awareness of this living light more than others. Such is the corner of this island of Ireland where I live in awe of the amazing shapes and colours; all that is needed is for me to have the sight and allow that living light to touch my mind and delight my heart.
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