There is so much still to concatenate after experiencing an explosion of vision, interaction and realisation over the first weeks of the new wheel. Imbolc began with a day of frustration, where I drove myself to Bóann and surrendered to my beloved oak trees upon her bank. They whispered patience, assuring me that buds were forming amidst my Samhain slumber and I left with the feeling of being so viscerally pregnant with my Dán that a poem was born, as Brigid passed through me in a way she never had before.

The next gift was a loud message to travel to the Beara Peninsula in West Cork. I packed up and prepared for the long trip without hesitation though, after such a long period of illness and a sudden onset of extreme dizziness I felt unsure at one point if I would make it. The dizziness subsided at exactly 5pm, denoting change, and I set out into the dark.

This long night presented as my last moments of deep Samhain, like roaming the tunnels of the burrow I had dug for winter, before the light of emergence from its entrance appeared. The weather was stormy on the six hour drive and wind and rain battled my car as I glimpsed just a few feet ahead at a time. Now and then another car would pass in the opposite direction lighting a little more of my path, a metaphor for the message of the coming week, perhaps.

On the journey I listened to “Women Who Run with Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes and revelled in the story of La Loba. Singing over the bones she gathered of wolves until she placed the last tail bone and the skeleton became a fleshed and furred being, a wild woman who ran free. Something stirred within and I longed to find bones, I had rarely found one, let alone a whole skeleton.

I arrived in time to watch my cousin sing. Shaking off the rain and dashing into a dimly lit pub in Castletownbere, I felt the music of Brigid fill my ears and rejoiced in the recognition of her presence. Weary, we returned to my cousin’s little cottage a few hours later, to find it without light, the electricity lost to the weather. We lit the stove for heat and filled each nook with candles, joining two other souls in the front room to sit and bond in a ritual that only darkness can ignite. We spoke late into the witching hour as correlations were made between our paths and the guidance each of us had received to meet this faithful eve.

One visitor was familiar with ritual and had trained as a Priestess, taken part in coven and hailed from the part of native America with which I recently discovered I share DNA. We connected instantly and the experience strangely echoed my reading with the wonderful Regina de Búrca a week previous, as it had suggested teaching the mysteries in America at some point on my future journey both in ceremony and coven. An idea I had rejected but now saw standing eerily in front of me. The other resident of the cottage was a magical lone wolf with the hidden depths of Earths oceans emanating from his irises, a storm of peace and chaos in perfect libran balance backed by the slow growl of a lurking canine untamed.

I slept deeply and awakened early to a beaming morning sun kissing my pale wintered face after sixteen hours in the shadows. Squinting my eyes in adjustment I smiled, Imbolc, Brigid, the sun goddess was here. I climbed out of bed and wandered to the local shore eager to soak up the energy of rebirth, connecting with water and Earth as the sun shone upon us before the rest of the isle awoke.

The first vision came as I peered out the cottage window to see a black tower high up on the far hills. I made a mental note to ask my cousin about it as I was drawn there but when I asked, she explained there was no view of a tower from her cottage and leading her to the window to protest, I found it had vanished. Later that day I took a wrong turn in that shapeshifting landscape of the Cailleach and the Priestess and I ended up at the foot of a steep climb, with a black tower proudly above us. We pilgrimed to the tower, the ground sodden and sinking, lakes forming microclimates in its wake, dense fields that seemed to stretch and push us back the closer we came on the way up. Finally reaching the entrance to the tower, in the threshold of the doorway, I found a single shoulder bone and grinned with delight. We shrieked and cackled and sang across the land from that tower, the wind whipping and wailing with us, the other side a sheer drop to the sea. In glee we stirred the cauldron for all the wild women who went before us. The pure joy of connecting with this divine feminine stranger was something primal and indescribable, a memory I will cherish eternal.

On the descent from the tower we clambered through fields until suddenly, as if in a dream, I came upon a vertebral column. The spine, the hips, all laid out before us. Rib bones almost reclaimed by the Earth lay captured as long tufts of grass wrapped around them. I dropped to my knees and pulled rib after rib from the ground in disbelief. The Priestess traversed the area finding the bones of the jaw, teeth still intact. We gathered our skeletal system in unspoken ritual and joined hands in instinct to walk in circle and chant to La Loba. This magical moment I had craved not forty eight hours before, had made manifest and my wildness soared.

On the third day, I moved into the Buddhist Centre with plans to withdraw, reflect and mediate for the remainder of the trip. Source had other ideas! The hostel was occupied by two amazing teens, with such raw talent, hope and openness to share as well as the awkwardness of authenticity at that age. They reminded me of my own youth and of my son’s future and I adored and admired them as they read me their poetry and whispered their truths into twilight before I was whisked away for another social gathering in a tiny cabin. Reflecting upon the beauty of a simple life and the importance of community, we sat around a stove and sang to the guitar. I noticed my discomfort during interactions, awkward and out of practice, like the teens, I didn’t know how to be. Was this fear of persecution raising its head?

Midweek, I journeyed to the otherworld from an outdoor hot tub in Glengarriff. The journey began in a desert where I wore a white silk scarf over my head and face revealing only my eyes as it blew in the wind. I came to an oasis. A black pool of deep water, I gazed into it. I saw my face age and turn to dust. I then saw my son age and turn to dust and then my mother. I fell into the deep water and was grabbed by my mer guide, who pulled me out and left me at a red door. I opened the door to see landscape far and wide, hills and valleys, and a rock face I climbed behind a waterfall. This is where the serpent lives. I have visited before and expected a less than warm welcome which has been my previous experience but instead, I was greeted by a Goddess with a snake’s open jaw as her headdress. She ushered me into her cave “Come child” and handed me a vial to drink, “Drink my venom, learn my ways.” I downed the liquid and left, shifting into a snake slithering over the rocks on the climb down, smelling with my tongue.

Still dizzy with observation, I returned to the Buddhist Centre with my cousin where we were led to a love and kindness meditation at the temple. Here, I sent love to a stranger I had met outside, who was struggling with a similar inability to interact after a long cadence spent alone. Our conversation conveyed beautifully the mirroring of the collective and the individual shifting between community and self at this time. Each evening brought more gatherings and more discomfort as I recognised just how deeply I had journeyed inwards over the past decade and yet, each time I tried to retreat, loud noises, busy people, disturbances, followed me to push me back towards interaction. I laughed aloud at one point as I sat in my car in a quiet carpark to steal a moment of “peace” only to have a couple pull up behind me seconds later, step out of their car and converse loudly at my window. I noted the cosmic comedy and accepted its underlying message that I was not there for more isolation but rather for the opposite, and the minute I surrendered, the lone wolf brought me to the most isolated, serene and spectacular cliff face I could have wished for. What better way to be reminded that peace comes from within not without, and only when you let go of the attachment to “finding peace” and rather master BEING peace will your surroundings truly reflect it.

The Priestess and I travelled to Ardgroom on my final day and surrounded by corvids we sat in the Stone Circle and dropped into vision. My journey brought me to the circle in a different era, the sky a deep purple, the moon full. Men lined up behind each stone as far back as the eye could see, creating the image from above of a sun with its rays outstretched across the landscape. I watched as a Priestess with a Crescent moon headdress raised a cup or chalice and as it glinted in the moonlight the moons rays created a disc of light over the entire procession. On the walk back to car, over the same stepping stones we had taken on the way in, I found a single rib bone, waiting. I collected it this time, with permission, and left dazed and intrigued to find the truths within the vision.

As the trip came to an end a flood of exhaustion consumed me. I left for home in a trance of integration. For the drive back I scrolled through audio books and stopped at “The Grail” by Tanishka. A fan of her previous work “Goddess Wisdom” I pressed play. The Holy Grail has long been disputed and or appropriated as a cup, a code or an elixir. Tanishka described her own visions that led her to see the grail as the menses of a Priestess initiating the divine masculine into adulthood. A ceremony she believed originated with the Celts. A ceremony I had just witnessed? Why did I choose this book?

I am still conjuring and recovering from the week’s happenings but with a start to the year as packed and explosive as this one, I can already feel the magnitude of what is to come…