• Tag Archives Bridgit
  • Imbolc 2011

    Imbolc                                                                              Waning Moon of the Cold Month

    This is the holy day of Bridgit, the triple goddess; she of the eternal fire at Kildare, a goddess who tends to the fire of creativity at home, for the poet and in the smithy, the place where things are made by hand.  As with so many things Celtic, the Roman Catholics appropriate her, given her a birth story.  Her father, the story goes, was a druid, her mother a good Catholic.  She became a Catholic woman known for good deeds and miracles.  After her death she became a saint.  Many Catholics know her only as St. Bridgit, but her origins as a religious figure had their beginnings and much larger compass within the ancient Celtic faith.

    It was the Celts who first tended the eternal fire at Kildare, devoting men and women to the task.  Later, in the days of the Celtic Christian church there was a double monastery there, men and women in separate units, abbot and abbess respectively.

    Imbolc itself means in-the-belly, referring, as I wrote a few days back, to the lamb in the belly of the ewes.  The quickening of the ewes meant fresh milk.  After at least three months + of stored food, little meat, and chill weather a small cup of milk or its use in cooking must have been a reason for great celebration.  The lambs also were a reminder that the rebirth of spring would come again, just as they had come.  Nature’s cycle could be trusted.

    We can buy green beans, strawberries, fresh fish, eggs, milk, butter, bread in a brightly lit store.  Aisles and aisles of food, so many versions of cereal, peanut butter, spices and salts, rice and pasta, beef, turkey, chicken, pork and, yes, even lamb.  In some vague way we know this food arrives at the grocery by truck, packed in cardboard boxes.  The workers remove and open the boxes, distributing the food to shelves, meat counters, produce bins, milk coolers.  We pick it up, put it in our carts, pay for it, then take it home and store it in cupboards, refrigerators, pantries. Until very recently there was not much attention given, at least by most of us, to the source of the food.

    The buy local movement has focused our attention especially on produce and meat.  Was the beef grass raised?  No antibiotics?  The eggs.  Were the chickens free range?  The leeks and the tomatoes, the lettuce.  Who grew it?  How far did it travel?  Is it organic?  Did the salmon come wild from Alaska or farm-raised from the Atlantic?

    As we once again allow the blurred image of our food sources to come into focus, I hope we will also allow the blurred images we have of the natural world to come into focus.  We may see that the sacred is not a notion found in texts, but in the world.  We might feel our way toward the vitality of the dog, the raven, the oak, the tulip, even ourselves, a vitality that emerges, has its day and then absorbs back into the world;  the universe represented here, for us, by our planet and its sun, by the web of life sustained by the inanimate, but also sacred world of rocks and water and air and fire.

    The Great Wheel, the cycle of solstices and equinoxes broken up the cross-quarter holydays of the Celts:  Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhain turn us not outward or upward, not away from ourselves and our world, but inward and downward, toward ourselves and our world.  These holydays root us in the changing world, that, paradoxically, changes back into the world of last year, each year.  In this sense time for the Great Wheel cycles and recycles, never moving into tomorrow, always returning to yesterday.  We need this reminder, the Great Wheel’s reminder, because we are so much in the grip of chronos, the swift moving river of time that sweeps us along towards the gulf of our mortality, a great dead zone at the end of this wonder we call life.

    The Great Wheel reminds us that while our life will end, life itself does not.  That as we die, a birth occurs.  As tears fall, laughter rings out.  After the winter, the ewes will freshen, there will be milk.  And flowers.


  • Emma’s Last Adventure

    Beltane                                                Waning Planting Moon

    Emma’s excursion yesterday gave her, as things turned out, her last chance to wander on her own, beyond the woods and backyard that have been her home for over fourteen years.  She died last night, in her crate.  It was probably an arrhythmia that did not convert like the one several weeks ago.

    Emma has been old for a couple of years.  I mean bow-legged, wobbly old.  Her hearing had diminished and she didn’t eat well.  Dogs though, and Emma was no exception, take their infirmities in stride, as part of the way things are.  Really, are they ever anything else?

    We got Emma and her sister Bridgit, dead now three years or so, from a breeder who had sought the perfect whippet.  Through line breeding, sort of the doggy equivalent of incest.  We didn’t know that at the time and were happy to have two new puppies.  Iris and Buck, our last whippet pair at that time, had both died.  We missed them.

    As they matured, though, Emma and Bridgit were both peculiar, shy and reclusive.  Emma, for years, and I mean, like 10 years, wouldn’t allow us to come near enough to pet her.  She flinched and ran away.  We’ve had dogs always and many dogs so we could see aberrant behavior and not blame ourselves.  It was just the way they were.

    Bridgit left us to live with Jon because he needed a companion.  In that one-to-one situation Bridgit took the turn toward a normal doggy life, running to you when you came and playing.  Emma, though, in a house with sometimes as many 6 dogs, didn’t get there until much later.

    Same of my fondest memories of Emma came when she was 5 or 6.  We had a bad storm that toppled a basswood, a giant maybe 60 feet high.  The trunk lay where it fell and it happened to land with a clear path on its side to the sun.  Emma took to running up that trunk and standing, head erect and surveying the property, maybe 10 feet off the ground.  She looked grand.

    The Wolfhound deaths, and I’ve seen 8, are wrenching, difficult because they die between 5 and 8 years old, in what seems like their prime.  Emma’s, and Iris’s too, are different.  These are deaths of old age, a life run its course.  I’m sad, of course, but not heart broken.

    Em was a regal and quiet dog, who kept her own counsel and lived life as she wanted.  Would most of us could say the same.


  • Litter Mates

    Fall                                       Waxing Dark Moon

    A word about litter mates.  Kate and I buy litter mates when we get puppies.  Once in a while we’ve gotten adult dogs given to us by a breeder and we did buy one solitary wolfhound, but otherwise litter mates.  Of our current pack all of the dogs were litter mates.  Hilo and Kona were born 8 years ago from a champion whippet bitch.  Emma and Bridgit (now deceased) we bought 14 years ago from a woman who was line breeding for really fast whippets.  They were both crazy, but they loved each other.

    Rigel and Vega don’t look like litter mates.  Rigel looks like a miniature Irish Wolfhound (miniature at 100 pounds, of vegarigel400course) and Vega looks like, well, Vega.  She’s a giant coon hound with a huge head and a lot of muscle.  Appearances in this case deceive.  These girls have been together since last December when they were born.

    Litter mates have mutual space.  They lie on each other, eat each other’s food, play together.  They retain the bond you might expect from animals who shared a womb, then a mother’s breasts.  The intimacy and trust they display toward each other is so sweet, so innocent and enduring.  We buy them just for this reason, so they will have a partner through life, one they can count on, one their own size in the case of Rigel and Vega.

    These relationships have been part of the magic for Kate and me over the years, an addition to the joy of knowing animals as friends and companions, we also know them as sisters.