The Season of Imbolc
ACTIVE LIFE IN THE IRISH COUNTRYSIDE explodes (something of an oxymoron in a nation renowned for its laid-back approach to life and living) after St. Patrick’s Day, on March 17, and that old Gaelic greeting once again celebrates the arrival of spring—Céad Míle Faílte—“a hundred thousand welcomes.”
When the wild and pagan-tinged Imbolc and Brigid’s Feast festivities are over (much to the relief of the local Catholic clergy), and the shamrocks drooping from buttonholes have finally wilted—the year unveils itself again, and the rush of new life truly begins.
The three incarnations of St. Brigid are revitalized—the inspired poet and keeper of ancient traditions; her creative strength of the blacksmith; and her nurturing hands of a healer and midwife. The spirit of Taispeach—the great fertility and fresh-life romp—surges across the land. The fields and the ribboned roadside hedgerows St. Brigid see their first flush of color, the daffodil. The winter winds have abated, the land is warming up, giving way to budding foliage and swathes of primroses that carpet the ditches with creamy yellows and the softest of greens. Even the bare boglands and the humpbacked mountains behind them and the cozy white cottages and the dark fortifications of old peat turf-mounds that seem like the flame-blackened ruins of once mighty forts—all these are now sprinkled with glittering Seurat-like pointillisms of sun-flecked color and the bouncing white dots of newborn lambs.
Curlews and cuckoos call, and ravens replenish their nests. The blackthorn blossoms powder the field edges, followed in mid-May by high flurried walls of white thorn and hawthorn and all their explosions of berries, devoured in their billions by the field birds. Gorse blooms fresh-golden on the moors and bluebells carpet the small woodlands. At this time of the year the air is heavy with heady aromas—not the turfy smoke of winter but rather the life-stirring fragrance of fresh growth following sudden short April showers. And the ocean too. That aroma too is different—particularly the first earth-breath of morning rolling in with the vast Atlantic undulating under a huge pearlescent sky. And along the water’s edge, tiny dunlin and sanderlings skitter in hyperactive clusters and village children play in the rock pools and, way out there, on the horizon’s edge, and along the beautiful Allihies beach, the great colonies of kittiwakes, razorbills, guillemots, and gannets regain and aggressively retain their precarious perches on Little Skellig and other offshore sanctuaries.
And we smile. The bone-chill and blackness of winter are gone. The days are warmer, longer, and full of fresh beauty and hope. And we’re moving in…
Sláinte!