Easter Blessings from Irish Blessings Tours
It’s been unseasonably cold in many places. It’s hard to believe that it is Easter! Here is Ireland the meteorologist say it’s the coldest in fifty years, but last Easter was balmy . Yet my sister-in-law can remember with the past fifteen years having a caravan holiday on the Antrim coast and waking up to snow! March can be a bit temperamental weather-wise.
Out in our garden I noticed that the mild winter had seemed to quell our hellebores. My ‘Christmas Rose’ has taken on a more North American identity and become a ‘Easter Rose’. It felt more like Spring in February.
The daffodils bravely shiver and trumpet the coming of spring. It has dawned sunny and cold but without a frost this morning. As I write you this Easter greeting I look out a winter onto our garden and notice that the willow trees have sent forth catkins.
Living in this corner of Northwest Ireland in West Cavan, close to the boundaries of Leitrim and Fermanagh is a great blessing. When Tony and I left England nearly thirteen years ago, leaving behind a business, job security and good friends, many thought we were mad, feckless or both. Yet we have never regretted it. To be able to live out in the country on a little acre of fertile peaty ground is like living on a diamond mine – but you rarely have to dig. The fairies just toss jewels at you left and right.
I am daily mesmerised by the every changing sky both day and night. It is just past the full moon. In the absence of street lighting the soft LED effect of moonlight makes you want to go out and moon bath. We have witnessed magenta sunrises over the Playbank on a winter dawn and equally spectacular sunsets in all seasons. In autumn we wake to see a bank of mist.
Before we moved here I came across a book by an Irishman called “ I Could Read the Sky.” It was about a passing culture or , more accurately, the effect of transplanting a countryman to an urban environment with its light pollution and tall buildings obscuring a good view of the sky. Over our time hear I’ve learned the meaning of interpreting the signs in the sky.
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When one feels blessed there is a deep connection to gratitude. I wake up each morning grateful to have been guided to this very special corner of Northwest Ireland. It doesn’t have a lot of interpretation centres, museums or heritage villages – a few – and many open their doors at Easter.
What Northwest Ireland does have is pristine land that you can walk and if you listen to the land and look up to the sky you will be blessed with the most wonderful insights, inspiration and profound awe for the marvel of this good earth who deserves our respect and devotion.
The Celts, both pagan and Christian, knew that Spirit speaks to us through nature. This is what is so distinctive about the Celtic Spiritual heritage. When I walk the glens and woodlands, the stony Cavan Burren, when I look into the Source at Shannon Pot, I am persuaded that Celtic Spirituality is a great legacy gift to us in our post-modern age of hurry and haste.
This Springtime may you be blessed with the promise of rebirth
where ever you are and whoever you may be.
May the birds carol and rejoice that we are all alive under one sky
May your spirit unfurl like a sunflower following the arc of light
And may we all feel the blessing of this good earth
Irish Blessings Wishes you a Happy Easter and a Joyful Springtime
Happy St. Patrick’s Day from Irish Blessings Tours
I’ve been pondering the word blessings lately. While Irish blessings are a form of well wishing and protection what crossed my mind was that phrase “Count your blessings.” If I were to count my Irish blessings this St. Patrick’s Day I can start with the break of day.
My first blessing is that cup of tea brought to me in bed by my partner. Then when we draw the curtains open on this sunny morning I feast my eyes on a panorama that begins in county Cavan. The next hillside is in Leitrim where my friend’s polytunnel is glimmering a reflection. On the far horizon I see the wind turbines on Arigna Mountain in County Roscommon. When I moved into the office to type this blog my eyes are drawn to the birds – finches, blue tits, siskins and robins – who are gathering at the bird feeder outside the office window. Then a red squirrel decides to get into the mix and skittishly scampers and leaps branches to get to the peanut feeder. When the red squirrel eats it looks like it is saying grace.
On Ireland’s national holiday we celebrate with parades full of traditional music and dancing, a bit of political satire and a Lenten let up. Virtually every every little town in Leitrim – from the county seat in Carrick on Shannon to Dromahair, Mohill to Manorhamilton and plenty of places in between- will be having a parade. The border towns of Blacklion in Cavan and Belcoo in Fermanagh will join forces on the bridge that is their boundary to celebrate the day. Enniskillen will have mummers. St. Patrick’s seat will be having a parade and a busking competition as well as the Bard of Armagh challenge.
I wish everyone well on this St. Patrick’s Day. Dance a bit, enjoy music, sing a song, revel is springtime whatever its manifestations wherever you live. Kick up you heels like the Eddie Fitz’s lambs down the road.
But in the midst of all this convivial craic I’m saying my Irish blessings like beads. Yeats call this island the “holy land of Ireland” and blessings recall all that is sacred. I’ll share this poem I wrote which is a way of counting the blessings I see from my own Irish front door. That door is always open and there is a welcome.
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
The heat of the sun warming stone
The milky glare at full moon
The vibrant glints of planet and star
As the plough furrows the night sky
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
One New Year’s morning I looked up
Called by the harsh honking of four
Bewick’s swans in formation
Gliding in to land on Lough Moneen
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
John O’Rourke’s cows now graze in
The flat fold of field Paddy’s sheep
Yielded as they moved from
Winter pasture to lambing barn
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
The willow quenches itself on our acre
Drinking deeply from sodden peat
An oak nurtured from an acorn now leafs tall
While the ash as usual is the last to peek
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
The cats scratch at the dandelions
The dogs doze in a patch of sun
The cuckoo immigrates each April
The bee feasts on the nectar of apple blossom
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
Gaudy gorse blazes on the hillside
Meadowsweet shrouds the acre in bridal lace
Lady’s mantle does her juju in the border
Blood from bramble thorn bears sweet berry
Standing on my door sill surrounded by the sacred
They call this ‘the briary place’
The root system curls around my ankles
So that now I enter into the world
Awake to this bounty and beauty
© Bee Smith 2011
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.
This poem appears in an anthology of writing on Brigit published by Goddess Ink. Editted by the late Patricia Monaghan and Michael McDermott Brigit: Sun of Womanhood offers a holistic view of Ireland’s matron goddess and saint.
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.
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