Part I
When you died you stood at the foot of my bed and suggested I,
“Work with the light.”
At this point I want to stop this story to explain how you’re not the only newly, deceased soul to stand at the foot of my bed and peer at me over the bedstead. Sleepy, muzzy-eyed, swaddled in sheets, sometimes I think the veil for willful souls detouring from their walk from this world into that Other one. They come with a mélange of messages, some uplifting, some downright mean. I’ve been told I’m a disappointment and received nuggets of wisdom.
Back to this story.
I thank your recently departed self for your wise and kind advice and try to explain to you that,
“People like me don’t work with the light. We work with the darkness.”
When you were living you glowed. You were the lightest, brightest, most radiant, golden-haired princess, a painter creating with light, holding your lantern, like Brigid does. Your spark lit all in your orbit, so much so we believed darkness couldn’t touch you. You were Venus de Milo, [Sandro Botticelli – The Birth of Venus] rising from a scallop shell, speaking in ‘roses’. Your life-scape was your canvas, an aquamarine seascape, sprinkled with adoration, love, perfume and petals.
I ask you to look at me sprawled across my mattress, really look at me.
“Do you see any light here?” I whisper.
My darkness is not one of solitude. I am not alone here. This mattress I cower on churns in the abyss of the dark night of the soul, adrift in a midnight sea as if it were the Raft of Medusa [Theodore Géricault]. Haunted by demons and turbulent flashbacks, waves of trauma lash at my sanity. Some nights I stay awake to avoid meeting my own wounding. This is a place of survival. Asleep or awake, the fear is the same. Night is always tempestuous.
I forgive you for suggesting I work with the light, when my reality is plunging the darkest depths of the churning subconscious because, even though your flame warms like a summer’s day, I know that a Black Dog walked beside you. I was the opposite. Even though my life was heavy and difficult, an angel always walked with me.
I was Medusa, Persephone and Nyx. You were Brigid, Theia and Venus. When a star (Venus) shone in my darkness she lit up my entire world and lifted me up. When the darkness (Nyx) came into your world she was too much for you. You crumbled. Anubis, cloak of dark, when the blackbird sang her holy poetry, soothing your soul, your Black Dog led you to your soft bed where you quietly swallowed poison.
Eclipse, shadow, staying sane, digging in, people like me hope someone someday will find empathy for those tangled in the roots of the trauma tree. Try not to shy from the detail of other people’s suffering. Let’s not shovel their trauma into the shadows, or fear their transformation when it happens. Their light is our healing.
Medusa, one aspect of the Divine, suffered unimaginable pain. Her hard won knowledge, so sharp and focused, the fire in her eyes turned men to stone. Her gorgon head, serpent wisdom burning bright, was stuffed in a sack and put to work on behalf of the patriarch, but Her spirit resides as an eye in the stars, watching, waiting. [Algol, the Demon Star, representing Medusa, is a trio of stars, within the Perseus constellation.]
So this Brigid who summons me now is the one who whistles for souls lost to the night. She is the meandrous, dewy Brigid who emerges as a serpent from a hoary mound, at Imbolc, the first day of Celtic spring.
“The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,” – Scottish Gaelic proverb.
Women who work with the dark ache for the arrival of She Who Spins, the Divine Female in perpetual celestial motion, shifting darkness to light, light to darkness. Watching from the stars, or biding time deep within Mother Earth, omnipotent, cyclical, cosmic and chthonic, She winters as the Queen Bee and flower bulb beneath the soil, in caves, in seeds, in rivers, in the depths of the sea, in the dark subconscious, waiting for spring. These weavers of justice, balance and destiny set change in motion when the celestial heavens move, shards of hope, as piercing as Medusa’s gaze, illuminating the lies and injustice of this age of treachery. This is when new ideas are born.
Reversal of all that went before is the power of the year wheel; Ursa Major spinning round the North Star; the nocturnal portals for working with star energy; lunar cycles cleansing the body and rivers in a powerful tidal surge of letting go; the precession of the equinoxes; the cogs of the Ages. This power is represented in the symbolism of simple things: a Cros Bhríde woven from reeds; a white feather fluttering on the sidewalk; an egg incubating life.
The etymology of ‘Imbolc’ varies. In modern Irish i mbolg means ‘in the belly of the mother’. In some mythologies Brigid is nourished by ewe’s milk, but this Brigid has swallowed bitter herbs and is pupating beneath a mound, moulded from fistfuls of autochthonous soils, resting, waiting, creative spirit kept alive by the idling pulse of a slumbering Mother Earth.
“Taste this tree, even if her elixir is to your distaste.” – Ulonda Faye [1].
This ritual was always about ‘over-wintering’ the bones in silent connection to the Earth as ‘living being’. When Brigid rises, in serpent form, through rupturing turf, halo of flames searing the raw February dawn, She is ritually reborn, cleansed, ecstatic and aware.
Now that, like Her, I have emerged squinting, from the dark, I ask Brigid,
“Should I work with the light?”
I ask because, as Emily Dickinson describes it, “I am out with lanterns looking for myself.”[2]
I yearn to bask in the light of ‘strong woman’ Brigid because She has been where I have been.
“One day,” She says, “you’ll look back and realize how hard it was to transmute through pain.”
References
[1] Ulonda, Faye. Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/22182668.Ulonda_Faye#:~:text=Taste%20this%20tree%2C%20even%20if,infinity%20of%20ecstasy%20and%20sanctity.
[2] Dickinson, Emily. Quotable Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/480709-i-am-out-with-lanterns-looking-for-myself
Part II
It is still cold here. Blue toes footprint the silvered grass. Brigid could have waited for equinox or for the frozen ground to thaw, yet here She is, emerging at the chiaroscuro moment of a February dawn, a zinc-white brushstroke slashing the canvas of the long brown night. Honoring both light and all our darknesses, She is present for all our awakenings.
“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” – Rumi.[3]
“Birth your own light from the fragments of your story.” She says to me, the despondent neurotic, waiting for the frost to thaw before I can live to full capacity.
The beauty of the Goddess is that She is adaptable. As shapeshifter She has navigated the bottomless abyss of obscurity and reinvented herself. There are as many versions of her as there are stars in the sky. How She manifests and what She means to me may be different to what She means to you. Unlike a monotheistic god who has two positions, top of the hierarchy and toppled, self-perpetuating ego finally smashed, Goddess is a matrix, a silken web bespangled with dew drops. Her myriad of avatars include beheaded and self-generating. All Her avatars are an aspect of the Divine and Mother Nature.
If consciousness creates reality what does the subconscious create?
A snake of lanterns undulates in the shadows. Meanwhile centre-stage, Brigid twirls flaming batons, in trance, alive, naked, oblivious to the chill, brown bite of this February dawn. A silhouette whirring in a halo of flames, She burns it all clean. Medusa is still with me, watching, waiting, eye as witness, from a cosmos in motion, whirring and buzzing, uncoiling neural pathways, sparking a breakthrough:
‘Creativity is the umbilical cord between consciousness and the subconscious.’
A shift is happening. I’m starting to realize nothing bad will happen if I watch innumerable sunsets or birth new versions of myself, over and over.
“I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.” – Virginia Woolf.[4]
So I’m starting a diary and dedicating it to Brigid.
Dear Brigid,
I’m dedicating this diary to you and my previous selves incase I revert to cowering on my mattress and need a path back to what I’m doing now, filling the holes in my reality.
Yours,
The girl on the mattress.
I’m filling those microscopic holes with Brigid’s eternal flame so I can navigate this voyage. Pockets bulging with pilfered pebbles and acorns, I’m embodying the creative spirit by connecting with nature. Sometimes I stand in the woods pretending to be a blackbird, just to sing how they sing and feel what they feel. My inner child wants some paint brushes so she can dabble in light and shade. My adult self wants to show off on stage, belching out flames.
When the light of this perpetual new dawn overwhelms I’ve told Brigid I’m doing duvet days with Medusa, Persephone and Nyx because Medusa says,
“Beware chasing change and fast results that lead to overwhelm. It’s slow revolutions of ‘being’ and ‘doing’ that construct new realities. Slow down to be with yourself.”
We’ve made a pact to occasionally retreat to the comfort zone of the mattress and the rejuvenating void of swaddling feathers and linen, for tempestuous conscious shaping, no longer triggering, just part of our psyche.
I’ve always loved roses, but the red and the white ones are too stark for my eyes. I find white roses quite shocking in their purity and the red ones are steeped in too much symbolism: blood red, pricked fingers, romantic love, menstrual shaming, notions of wickedness. I like the yellow and apricot ones, the middle of the road hues, unaffected by the drama of symbolic attachments.
The patriarchal infusions into mythology, that Brigid and Medusa survive, are steeped in nature’s starkest palette, distancing the primal, profound and putrefying from their regenerative wisdom. Brigid was apportioned the chase white lily, whilst scarlet coral represented Medusa’s petrified blood, inciting notions of fear, sin, slaughter and slut shaming. From pure to demonic, the polarization and simplification of the Divine Female rolled on as a technicolor grimoire. Yet both endure: Brigid’s rebirth metamorphosed from one of chthonic sustenance to one of purity and innocence, as She transitioned from Paganism to Christianity. Today Brigid shines Her rays upon those emerging from the long winter of patriarchal silencing, meanwhile Medusa has established Herself as a feminist icon for those disentangling themselves from patriarchal wounding.
I want to let all this go so I’m using the “MOH MOHIYA” mantra to shed my attachment to symbolic propagandas, so insidious they infiltrate all perceptions, including how we feel about flowers.
I’m reclaiming the joy of ALL flowers, including Brigid’s dandelions and cornflowers. I’m building a world where everyday is a different hue. I’m reclaiming my lineage to the precession of the umbilical cords, baton blazing with shades of wisdom passed from Goddess to Goddess, linking the inner constellations of the mind to the constellations of cosmic consciousness. I’m walking the path to the altar, once lost to hedges of thorns. There on the cold slab, I’ll shed my skin, gorge on nectar, eat poison apples and sing my poetry like a blackbird.
I’m reclaiming the elixir of dark, the elixir of light, my own darkness and my perpetual flame.
“Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.” – Maya Angelou.[5]
[Footnote: Medusa means “guardian”. Brigid means “exalted one”. Images of both Goddesses, Medusa’s severed head and Brigid’s woven cross, are used as symbols of protection.]
References
[3] Rumi. Suffering Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/suffering
[4] Woolf, Virginia. Quotable Quote. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4732-i-don-t-believe-in-aging-i-believe-in-forever-altering
[5] Angelou, Maya. Quotable Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/11615269-nothing-can-dim-the-light-that-shines-from-within-maya
Imbolc, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imbolc
(End of the Essay)