A Ribbon for Brigid
from Time to Call Home
by Hugh O’Donnell
“It’s instinctive,” Teresa says. “You feel it in your blood. Earth stirs, shoots appear.” She’s talking about Brigit and the sense of her embodiment in the full bellied life fest of spring.
Goddess and national saint, girl and mother in a monastery garden, not meek and mild but shrewd and savvy. Seer and overseer, she gives protection to entrances and steppingstones, to poets and blacksmiths, animals and land.
She is neither to be contained in a monastery nor corralled by the state, this mystic of the natural world whom we celebrate in the ancient practice of weaving a sun-cross of rushes. By doing so, we are weaving together in her name all strands of wisdom from death-resurrection to the rhythm of seasons on our sun-shocked earth.
I call up Elizabeth for guidance. She describes how she celebrates the ritual for Brigid’s eve. At dusk, she leaves a length of ribbon outside so that as Brigid passes in the dewfall she will bless it. Afterwards, it will be cut into pieces and shared with neighbours who can apply the healing fabric to a body’s pain.
Imbolc, February 1, is the first day we invite her wise and wholesome presence into our lives. For those of us who have lived at a distance from the earth, it is still not too late to find our way home again in the company of Brigid as we take her hand and go play like children beneath the weeping birch where clumps of snowdrops shed their light.
