Where do you go looking when your soul longs for a Mothering God? Do you find her in poetry? In ancient stories? in songs or rituals or art work or sacred dance? Do you look for wise and loving women who embody her? Do you seek her in your own wise and yearning heart? Or would you go out to explore the earth around you, seeking her in the beauty of spring flowers, in the grace of a flowing stream, in the tender presence of young birds in a nest? Would you look in wild places where the sea explodes into the rock face, pummels the cliffs, shapes stone into forms that resemble an ancient wise woman, a cailleach….

I am still processing the insights, inspiration and experiences of my days at the Brigid Festival in Ireland in 2018. It is not surprising that what I found was sourced in the lives, the words, the stories, the songs and poetry of the women I met there.  The Sacred Feminine is an embodied presence.

Yet of all that I learned, what stirs me most is the way that women spoke of seeking, finding and being found by the Sacred Feminine in the land: in her sea and shore, her grass and trees, her wells and rivers, her mountains and ancient stones, her golden light and eerie darkness, her wild winds and gentle rains.

I am captivated by this new understanding.

To honour the feminine presence, Wisdom Sophia, is to honour the planet which embodies her. From earliest days, from the time even before the arrival of the Celts, the people of Ireland honoured the goddess, whose ancient names include Aine or Anu. She was the one whose eyes held the light of the stars, whose hair rippled like the corn, flowed like the waves of the sea, whose body was the great earth barrows, her breasts the hills, called “the Paps of Anu”.

Before this recent visit to Ireland, I had thought these descriptors were lovely metaphors, a poetic honouring of the sacred presence.  Yet on this journey I met women for whom the land, the sea, the rocks and rivers somehow embodied the goddess herself. This is not pantheism, making gods of nature, but rather panentheism, recognizing that the holy is present within all that lives, as Teilhard de Chardin understood and taught.

Snowbound for days after I returned from Ireland, I sat by the fire reading Kate Fitzpatrick’s book. Kate spoke during the Brigid Festival of her years of  workshops, story-telling and powerful shamanic healing rituals, to help bring about peace in Northern Ireland. Her guide, counsellor and co-creative partner in this was Macha, the mythical Ulster Goddess.

In her book, Macha’s Twins: A Spiritual Journey with the Celtic Horse Goddess, (Immram Publishing, Inishowen, Donegal, Ireland 2017) Kate describes encounters with Macha, mediated by the land and sea. While living on the island of Inis M`or off the west coast of Ireland near Galway, Kate writes:

I am exhilarated with the vital power of this island. The shifting clouds, the showers of rain. What I love about it is the changing light in each hour of the day. The land is bleak and barren. Yet the play of light makes it so beautiful.

 

I begin to see that Macha is the Wild Mother here. Every day in the raw vitality of wind and rain and sea I find her. Like her wild spirit, all here is dynamic and powerful. Restless and free. Seeping right in to my bones. I move through autumn and winter beckoned by this force. Every day I see more of the power of the feminine in the sea, the waves, and the rock. (p. 67)

In the years that follow, Kate experiences a call to return home to Northern Ireland, to assist the Sacred Feminine presence in the work of bringing healing and peace to the soul of Ulster. Kate writes:

By early June, it is becoming clear to me that the rocks, trees, stones and rivers, along with the elements and the sheer beauty of this glen, have, together, become an alchemical vessel to hold a wider healing of the soul of Ulster.

The sea, as I look out at it this morning, is playing its part in the offering of light, the blue of its holding, the high vibration of its silver water, the wildness of its dance. There is a fierce power of transformation in the rolling waves. (p. 169)

Inis M’or

Kate tells of knowing Macha’s presence with her:

I breathe deeply as she shows me pictures of the town in County Antrim where I grew up in the 1960’s. ‘There are many towns in the North that need healing,’ Macha tells me. ‘This is a journey to bring the heart home, to bring back the kindness lost to everyone in the shadows of war. For you, Daughter, concern yourself only with this.’ (p.169)

Kate’s work, with the support of other women, led to a tangible presence of light and peace in the land. Two decades after her time on Inis M`or, Kate knew that “the old patterns are going now and light is coming in, bringing forgiveness, beauty and joy”.

Then she describes this experience:

  I sense a presence in the middle of the strand and when I look over, I see Macha walking in the shallow waters of puddles left on the sand. I see her bend down to pick up shells. As I walk towards her, she looks up, sees me and smiles….I sigh a deep breath and run towards her, power seeping into me from the very sand itself. As I approach her, she straightens up and, still holding the shells, opens her arms to welcome me. Her holding is of the ages. In the warmth and strength of her embrace, I weep. (pp. 237-8)

Macha’s Twins is available for online sales in Ireland, Europe, USA and and internationally.

KILDARE
Books.ie

http://www.books.ie/macha-s-twins-a-spiritual-journey-with-the-celtic-horse-goddess

 

GALWAY
Kennys Bookshop

https://www.kennys.ie/catalogsearch/result/?q=machas+twins