An Cailleach: Queen of Wintering

The Cailleach calls to us in the crisp winds of shedding. 

This wise crone sees beyond your masks and veils of protection, deep into the eternal fires of your soul. 

She promises to guide you there, if you surrender what calls to you from the darkened corners of your mind. She tells you “It is time to leave it behind.”

In the growing darkness of her season, she invites you to take a seat by the fireside and warm your hands in the hearth of your heart. 

She offers that you make space within the clay of your consciousness, to allow the seeds of your becoming to germinate. Much is happening in the slumber of your winter, for all life begins in the darkness.  

“For Someone Awakening to the Trauma of Their Past:

For everything under the sun there is a time,

This is the season of your awkward harvesting,

When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place

You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;

And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you

And whose branches your awakened hands

Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened

When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,

How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns

Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;

You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.

And your memory is ready to show you everything,

Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. 

You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering

And according to your readiness, everything will open. 

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide

Who can accompany you through the fear and grief

Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,

May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.

May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place, 

Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,

And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.”

- John O’Donohue

Art: Autumn Skye Art