Brigid Tosses More Wood Upon The Hearth, and Laughs

An Imbolc Tale

There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, that I’ve needed to tell, but I haven’t known how to begin. It’s the story of how I came to be where I am, how I came to be who I am.

That tale explains how a rather lost and confused agnostic anarchist who believed in little became a devoted druid writing about belief. That tale—if I can ever tell it—also explains how an urban punk living in a house with seven others now finds himself in a large house in a tiny village on another continent.

That tale would explain everything, but I don’t know how to tell it. But I know it starts with Brigid.

I.

It was 2011, I think. Winter, staring out the window of a bus, on my way to visit my boyfriend. My eyes focused on nothing and everything, trying to find distraction from my thoughts, but failing. I was tired, working too much at a job I hated, starting a relationship with a man I adored but sensed wouldn’t work well. Hardest of all, though, were the dreams and visions, glimpses caught especially before sleep but sometimes also while wide awake: a woman, tending a fire, tossing more wood upon it, and laughing.

I felt myself going mad, insane perhaps. I tried intensely not to think on it all, to avoid the nagging fear that I was schizophrenic like my mother was. She heard voices, and now sometimes so did I. She saw things that weren’t really there, and now, increasingly, did I, too.

I stared out the window, desperate to take my mind from all this. It helped a bit, and then suddenly didn’t at all. In the distance, near where a large forested park met the university campus, a white tower made of moonlight loomed, circled by dark birds.

“Fuck,” I said aloud, not caring I’d disturbed nearby passengers.

II.

I did everything I could to stop the visions I was having. I tried drinking more, and not drinking, sleeping more, and sleeping less. I asked my closest friend and he merely said, “cool.” I asked a friend I knew to be wise, and he smiled wryly. I told my boyfriend, and he merely shrugged.

I was going crazy, but I couldn’t convince anyone of it. This made me feel even more crazy. Except, well, I knew “crazy,” was surrounded by it. My mother was schizophrenic. I was a social worker for mentally-ill people. I’d had a lover who was severely bi-polar. And as much as tried to think otherwise, I was nothing like them. They couldn’t function without medications and therapy, needed constant interventions to keep them from self-harm or worse. None of them could hold down jobs, let alone work overtime as I often did.

I considered going to therapy, which wouldn’t be covered by my insurance. Still, it seemed worth paying money to keep me from going insane. Around that time, I wrote in my journal something about how afraid I was. I worried that the dreams and visions meant something bad despite how calm and often kind they seemed. In fact, it was that matter more than anything that really worried me: there was nothing terrifying or even disturbing about their content. I actually liked them, and especially liked the woman who’d appear.

That was the real problem for me. What was happening wasn’t disrupting my life in any way—in fact, it often seemed to make things a little better. My fear wasn’t about what I was seeing or even that they occurred at all. Instead, I was afraid it all meant something much, much bigger and more profound than I was ready to accept.

III.

Early February, 2013. Imbolc, I later came to know it as. I’m deeply sad, and had been sad for months. The relationship I knew wouldn’t work well did not, and I’m alone, depressed. I’m crippled by a sense that I’m too broken to know how to love, too fragile to try again.

I sleep. I dream;

A very light, almost imperceptible drizzle, like mist, is falling on me. I’m standing in a large crowd outside a towering building of reflective glass. It feels like a skyscraper, or some massive administrative complex, but I know by then this is my mind trying to make sense of something larger, hanging the familiar onto something too strange to comprehend.

I’m in a throng, not quite lining up but certainly in some inscrutable order, each of us awaiting our turn to enter. I cannot at first see the line of guards at the doors, but when I am closer I see them. They are unarmed and faceless, yet nevertheless impossible to overcome. They seem neither hostile nor friendly, guardians, rather than just guards.

Closer now, I watch people entering the doors, one by one. I can see they are giving some sort of password or code at the door, and then they enter through, unhindered. I strain to see and hear what they are using, but it is impossible to discern.

I panic. I don’t know the key to enter. No one told me, nor did I even know I would need one. I’ll never get in.

A man next to me sees my distress. “What’s wrong?” He asks.

“I don’t know the word to get in!” I say, and then look at him. He’s roguishly beautiful in a strange trickster way, his features constantly changing. I recognize him, but not from waking. He was someone else once, a woman in a dream 12 years before this one.

In that older dream, I got my name. I stood in another throng, inside a massive stone hall. People called out a word I didn’t understand, and then they waited. Then, a woman pulled my shirt sleeve gently, asking why I wasn’t responding to their call.

“What?” I had asked in that dream. “I don’t know what they’re saying.”

“They’re calling your name,” she had said.

“That’s not…that’s not my name.”

She had stood there, thinking, then replied, smiling. “Oh. You don’t know your name yet! Well, ‘Rhyd’ is what we all call you later.”

In this later dream, it’s her again, but she’s a he. He’s smiling again like she had, meeting my confusion with gentle laughter.

“Ah,” he says, with deep kindness. “It’s Brigid. You can tell by how the rain is falling, and what’s in-between the rain.”

I speak her name at the door, and then I enter, and I’m in another place altogether. It’s a massive temple open to the sky, filled with people from every nation and every time before and after us.

I feel home.

IV.

The Brigid of the Gaels is also the Brigantia of the mainland Celts, and I understood now who it was tending the fire in my dreams and visions, laughing. She laughed as she threw more wood upon it, mirthful, joyous laughter which never seemed mocking.

She knew something I didn’t yet know, something it took years for her to teach me.

In Irish lore, there are many Brigids, just as in First Nations’ tales there are many Coyotes. They are all the same and yet not at all the same, a beautiful paradox much easier to hold if you don’t believe in universal, singular truth. We have great difficulty with such things now, insisting everything have one-to-one correspondence, that a thing or a person or a god be only one thing and not other things. We must know how a thing “really” is, reduced to its constituent parts. But to dissect a thing, you must first kill it, and thus it is with all we moderns touch.

There are many Brigids, and even a Christian one. That Brigid has a sacred flame in Kildare, one tended even before the Christians came to that land. That Brigid also has sacred wells, just as the other Brigids did. That Brigid, along with the older Brigids, are accompanied by other ones with their wells and their sacred flames across the sea, bearing a slightly different name, Brigantia.

The mystery of gods is that they are many things, just as we humans are many things. I am a brother, a son, a son-in-law, a cousin, a nephew, a husband, an uncle: there are many of me, and I am not the same thing to every person. And there are many brothers, many sons, many sons-in-law, many cousins, many nephews, many husbands, many uncles: we are not the same, either, though we are also the same “things.”

So, who Brigid or Brigantia “really is” is not the right question, just as who I “really am” is unanswerable.

V.

Everything changed after that dream. Or, rather, I changed.

I stopped fighting what I saw, stopped worrying that it meant I was going mad. That was never a real fear, anyway, only an excuse I’d come up with into which I could retreat from the visions. It was my way of resisting something I learned I’d deeply wanted, getting in my own way as I’d done for so many other things in my life.

What followed is another, much longer story, one still unfolding and thus difficult to tell. I started talking to her, asking things of her, learning things from her. Because I no longer tried to look away from what I would see, I saw more, and others. Another god appeared, and then another, and then suddenly my world was full of gods.

I started chasing what I’d see, a reckless and beautiful habit which led me that year to the top of an old druid mount in Finistère. I sold everything I couldn’t carry in my rucksack, trekked alone for weeks in a land I didn’t know, in order to be in a place I’d seen in a dream. I slept in a cornfield under the stars near where an ancient fountain to Brigantia had been found and later re-christened. I fell asleep gazing at stars through the glistening filament of a fresh-spun web. Then, I dreamed, meeting a frustrated woman who chastised me for not knowing yet how to do the rituals and magic she needed me to do. I apologised, and then she sighed and said, “okay. I’ll teach you, but you need to learn fast.”

Another night on the pilgrimage, camping, I shared strong tea with an Irish couple, as their camping stove didn’t work and mine did. The husband said something to me I couldn’t shake from my head, that I absolutely must go to Newgrange. It sounded less like a recommendation and more like a command, and his voice lingered in my mind for weeks afterward.

It happened, as he insisted it must, the next year. In some stories, Brigid is the daughter of The Dagda, whose home is the passage tomb of Newgrange. Someone had put my name into the lottery to be there during the winter solstice, a thing he’d done after waking visions of seeing me in Dublin. I was selected, and then I was there, just as that man at the campsite had insisted I must be.

VI.

Much more than this has happened, and keeps happening. What any of it means, I cannot tell you.

But that’s anyway the wrong question.

What I can tell you is what I came to understand from the laughing woman, tending a fire. I’d see and hear—or sometimes just hear—her whenever I was most losing hope and most unsure of myself. I’d also hear her each time I was about to fall in love and wondered whether I still had it in me to try.

There’s something I say to close friends when, after long periods of despair, an unexpected joy awakens. I say it to them at such times, because I also say it to myself in such moments, too:

Gaelic and Celtic rites to Brigid and Brigantia—including their continuations into Christianity, are most associated with the spring. The day called Imbolc in Ireland became Candlemass in England, La Chandeleur in France, Lostage in Germany, and Liichtmëssdag here. A day of reforged candles and rekindled hearths, the awakening of spring, the end of despair.

Regardless the religious framework, the day is the same, and so is the meaning.

Though the hearth and the heart come from different roots, they are both the core (coeur) of the home, of life, of friendship, and of love. Therein is a flame that can never truly die, even if smothered and allowed to grow cold. The hearth and the heart can always be rekindled, joy and love can always return, and the light of our life—even in death—can only ever be dimmed, never truly extinguished.

Brigid tosses more wood upon the hearth, and laughs.

Happy Imbolc.