I am back. Determined to do more on this blog ,but still showing my age and struggling with technology! It has been a few months since I posted and I have been going through many shifts and extensions.
As a solitary walker of my path I find that I often go off on tangents
but that is an essential freedom for me. I have been learning about gnostic Christianity (and unrelated !)finding out more about the Irish Goddess Bride and her saint Bridget counterpart. This was triggered when I was in Glastonbury this Summer and visited St Bridget and St Patrick's chapel in the Abbey there
This is the painting on the chapel wall and at first sight it looks like the Goddess Bride(Whom many know as Brighid) but in fact is Saint Bridget who founded a community of nuns and was a scholar ,well known for her compassion to the poor and sick(including lepers)
Many years ago I did a ritual to see if there was a Goddess I should work with. I found myself writing down the name Bride ,which puzzled me as I only knew of Brighid. I found out later that Bride is her name in Scotland and more recently that Bride is a common name for her in Ireland where my mother was born. I am going to visit Bride's Well and other sacred wells in Kildare and Clare this Summer.
I have been trying to simplify and declutter my spiritual practices, but as a Druid I will always have a thirst for learning and exploring and finding links between all things .I seek to live my spirituality in my daily life. Involving myself quietly in animal and human rights causes, the environment and voluntary work. It also determines how I live and interact with people ,animals and the material world around me.
I am revisiting some of the wisdom I learned from Sandra Ingerman, with whom I studied many Shamanic skills, such as Soul Retrieval, death and Dying and Medicine for the Earth. I have heard people undermine core shamanism ,saying you can learn basic journeying in a weekend. You can learn the basics of tennis in a weekend but it won't make you a Wimbledon Champion!!!!What fascinates me about Sandra is how she has constantly evolved- exploring work with light and creating a web of light, transmutation of polluted water and healing.
I am just starting to redo exercises from her Shamanic Toolkit. May talk about that here, may wander off onto something else!
It has been a hard Autumn watching my mother slowly sink into dementia and other family members fighting for control of my parents' life and money.Angry at their difficult childhood.Yet I have compassion for my parents.I try to remember the little acts of kindness that did happen sometimes.y parents were very young when they married my father married at 21 and by the time he was 30 he had fathered 8 children including stillborn twin sons.He had no childhood as he he was boren in 1930 so World war 2 stole the best years of his childhood and then he had to go straight into National Service in Egypt and Malta.He enjoyed the experience .He had only known my mother for 3 months before they married.She became a lodger in the house next door to his parents's cornershop.they moved into the space above the shop and rented their house to two Irish girls.At the ime many landlords put signs in their windows ,my mother remembered,saying "No Irish,No Blacks"
My mother is Irish and had a hard childhood and I feel was born in the wrong time,She is intelligent and a free spirit but found herself trapped in the home based(no choice) life of the 1950's housewife,her life dominated by child bearing and rearing in a 2 up and 2 down house with no central heating, no bathroom or toilet or garden.Her Roman Catholic religion totally dominating and repressing her life and never having the money to go home and visit her parents save once 3 months after her marriageI was conceived in Ireland :) )and 17 years later when I went with her.I never my Irish grandfather as he died many years before.
I suspect she was envious of her daughters with their education and choices in life,though her father often sold his boots and went without so she could go to a boarding school at Spanish Point where she got the equivalent of A levels.They had hoped she would go to college.Mum was one of 9 children The second youngest ,the eldest was her only sister and there were 7 brothers.Her sister emigrated to America (as so many of her generation did) at 19 to help the family back home.There were dozens of relatives already out ther including almost all of my grandmother's siblings.Her father and sister raised her.My great Gtrandmother died just after giving to birth to my Grandmother so her 16 year old sister became her mother.My aunt went out to My Grandmother's sister.A whole generation before them had gone to New York to escape the Great Famine ,which was particularly severe in Co Clare.
My mother however was wild free spirit and at around 18 ran away to England where she wanted to work on the buses a she had seen this in a film Her eldest borther ,already living in England found her and persuaded to study Nursing.She was bored after a few years and left it.
Enough of that for today!
