Celtic Wisdom Quotes

If you have been in the vicinity of the sacred - ever brushed against the holy - you retain it more in your bones than in your head; and if you haven’t, no description of the experience will ever be satisfactory.

In the kingdom of love there is no competition; there is no possessiveness or control. The more love you give away, the more love you will have. One remembers here Dante’s notion that the secret rhythm of the universe is the rhythm of love, which moves the stars and the planets. Love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.

Celtic mysticism recognizes that rather than trying to expose the soul or offer it our fragile care, we should let the soul find us and care for us.

IT IS STRANGE TO BE HERE. THE MYSTERY NEVER LEAVES YOU alone. Behind your image, below your words, above your thoughts, the silence of another world waits.

It is lovely to imagine that real divinity is the presence in which all beauty, unity, creativity, darkness, and negativity are harmonized.

The soul is always wiser than the mind, even though we are dependent on the mind to read the soul for us.

Three things which inspire the poet:An eye to see the world clearly A heart which feels sincerely And courage to render faithfully Little Book of Celtic Wisdom compiled by Giuletta Wood

To be holy is to be home, to be able to rest in the house of belonging that we call the soul.

We all have experiences, but as T. S. Eliot said, we had the experience but missed the meaning. Every human heart seeks meaning; for it is in meaning that our deepest shelter lies.

An old Celtic proverb boldly places death right at the center of life. ‘Death is the middle of a long life,’ they used to say. Ancient people did things like that; they put death at the center instead of casting it out of sight and leaving such an important subject until the last possible moment. Of course, they lived close to nature and couldn’t help but see how the forest grew from fallen trees and how death seemed to replenish life from fallen members. Only the unwise and the overly fearful think that death is the blind enemy of life.

Love is also a force of light and nurture that liberates you to inhabit to the full your own difference. There should be no imitation of each other; no need to be defensive or protective in each other’s presence. Love should encourage and free you fully into your full potential.

Sometimes, it is easy to be generous outward, to give and give and give and yet remain ungenerous to yourself. You lose the balance of your soul if you do not learn to take care of yourself. You need to be generous to yourself in order to receive the love that surrounds you.

One of the greatest conflicts in life is the conflict between the ego and the soul. The ego is threatened, competitive, and stressed, whereas the soul is drawn more toward surprise, spontaneity, the new and the fresh. Real soul has humor, irony, and no obsessive self-seriousness. It avoids what is weary, worn, or repetitive. The image of the well breaking out of the hard, crusted ground is an illuminating image for the freshness that can suddenly dawn within the heart that remains open to experience.

Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Guided by longing, belonging is the wisdom of rhythm. When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow and balance naturally. Every fragment does not have to be relocated, reordered; things cohere and fit according to their deeper impulse and instinct. Our modern hunger to belong is particularly intense. An increasing majority of people feel no belonging. We have fallen out of rhythm with life. The art of belonging is the recovery of the wisdom of rhythm.

We are sent into the world to live to the full everything that awakens within us and everything that comes toward us.

Meister Eckhart said that there is nothing in the world that resembles God so much as silence. Silence

On a farm you learn to respect nature, particularly for the wisdom of its dark underworld. When you sow things in the spring, you commit them to the darkness of the soil.

If you sin against your soul, it is always at great cost. Work can be an attractive way of sinning deeply against the wildness and creativity of your own soul.

If you keep shining the neon light of analysis and accountability on the tender tissue of your belonging, you make it parched and barren.

The deepest things that you need are not elsewhere. They are here and now in that circle of your own soul. Real friendship and holiness enable a person to frequently visit the hearth of his solitude;

In Celtic cultures, the young maiden was seen as the flower; the mother, the fruit; the elder woman, the seed. The seed is the part that contains the knowledge and potential of all the other parts within it.

I want to remind you that the forest is far more than a source of timber. It is our collective medicine cabinet. It is our lungs. It is the regulatory system for our climate and our oceans. It is the mantle of our planet. It is the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren. It is our sacred home. It is our salvation.

Kathleen Raine, a Scottish poet, says that unless you see a thing in the light of love, you do not see it at all. Love is the light in which we see light.

Life is incredibly contingent and unexpected.

When we love and allow ourselves to be loved, we begin more and more to inhabit the kingdom of the eternal. Fear changes into courage, emptiness becomes plentitude, and distance becomes intimacy.

The elders versed in the mores of the Celtic culture instructed me in the meaning of a special word, buíochas. It means, as best I can render it, tender gratitude. The buíochas should be very high in each person, like a glass that is full. Buíochas is also a self-protection. You should carry gratitude in your heart for everything inside and outside your life and all the small things that impinge on your consciousness. The feeling of buíochas is like a medicine of the mind that holds your life together. The old saying buíochas le Dia, thanks be to God, reminded the human family that life itself is the greatest gift and should therefore be treasured in yourself and in all others.

Television and the computer world are great empty shadow-lands. To look at something that can gaze back at you, or that has a reserve and depth, can heal your eyes and deepen your sense of vision.

To the Druidic mind, trees are sentient beings. Far from being unique to the Celts, this idea was shared by many of the ancient civilizations that lived in the vast virgin wildwoods of the past. The Celts believed a tree’s presence could be felt more keenly at night or after a heavy rain, and that certain people were more attuned to trees and better able to perceive them. There is a special word for this recognition of sentience, mothaitheacht. It was described as a feeling in the upper chest of some kind of energy or sound passing through you. It’s possible that mothaitheacht is an ancient expression of a concept that is relatively new to science: infrasound or “silent” sound. These are sounds pitched below the range of human hearing, which travel great distances by means of long, loping waves. They are produced by large animals, such as elephants, and by volcanoes. And these waves have been measured as they emanate from large trees.

The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together. The Celtic imagination articulates the inner friendship that embraces Nature, divinity, underworld, and human world as one.

The heart is the inner face of your life. The human journey strives to make this inner face beautiful. It is here that love gathers within you. Love is absolutely vital for a human life. For love alone can awaken what is divine within you.

There is the infinity of the microcosm: one little speck on the top of your thumb contains a whole inner cosmos, but it is so tiny that it is not visible to the human eye. The infinity in the microscopic is as dazzling as that of the cosmos. However, the infinity that haunts everyone and which no one can finally quell is the infinity of one’s own interiority

Trees don't simply maintain the conditions necessary for human and most animal life on earth, trees created these conditions through the community of forests. Trees paved the way for the human family. The debt we owe them is too big to ever repay.

Entering into and opening to our inherent spacious soul daily allows a natural liberation of our manifold self-identifications to occur, and it is then that we can truly rest in the sacredness and come to know our ground of being. The great Celtic writer John O’Donohue points to this when he says that “behind the façade of your life, there is something beautiful and eternal happening.

Mother trees have an effect on the oceans as well, as Katsuhiko Matsunaga and his team in Japan had confirmed. The leaves, when they fall in the autumn, contain a very large, complex acid called fulvic acid. When the leaves decompose, the fulvic acid dissolves into the moisture of the soil, enabling the acid to pick up iron. This process is called chelation. The heavy, iron-containing fulvic acid is now ready to travel, leaving the home ground of the mother tree and heading for the ocean. In the ocean it drops the iron. Hungry algae, like phytoplankton, eat it, then grow and divide; they need iron to activate a body-building enzyme called nitrogenase. This set of relationships is the feeding foundation of the ocean This is what feeds the fish and keeps the mammals of the sea, like the whale and the otter healthy.

Often all the possessions we have, the work we do, the beliefs we hold, are manic attempts to fill this opening, but they never stay in place. They always slip, and we are left more vulnerable and exposed than before. A time comes when you know that you can no longer wallpaper this void. Until you really listen to the call of this void, you will remain an inner fugitive, driven from refuge to refuge, always on the run with no place to call home.

The imagination is committed to the justice of wholeness. It will not choose one side in an inner conflict and repress or banish the other; it will endeavor to initiate a profound conversation between them in order that something original can be born. The imagination loves symbol because it recognizes that inner divinity can only find expression in symbolic form. The symbol never gives itself completely to the light. It invites thought precisely because it resides at the threshold of darkness.

The passionate heart never ages.

Guide my feet on my path, as I honor the old wisdom Guide my hands in offering, as I honor the old Gods Guide my heart in strength, as I honor the old ways.

the old Celtic saying tells us, “See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.

Scholarship was a hidey hole, a place where I could escape negative feelings. But as I learned more about the world, I realized that a life buried in books quite suited me.

The truth was right there, so simple, a child could grasp it. Trees were responsible for the most basic necessity of life, the air we breathe.

It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, his or her clay and your clay lay side by side.

The image of the Serpent, because of its association with life, rejuvenation, fertility, and regeneration, was a symbol of immortality. The coiled Serpent with its tail in its mouth was a circle of infinitude indicating omnipotence and omniscience. The Serpent, depicted in several successive rings, represented cyclical evolution and reincarnation. In ancient philosophy or mythological systems, creation and wisdom were closely bound together, and the Serpent was a potent symbol of both. It is in this capacity that the Serpent appears in the Babylonian and Sumerian mythologies, which contain elements akin to the Genesis story. The Serpent has the power to bestow immortality but also has the power to cheat humankind. In many of the ancient Near Eastern stories—for instance, the Gilgamesh Epic and myth of Adapa—the Serpent holds out the promise of immortality but then cheats man at the last minute.

People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.” It’s why the old Celtic saying tells us, “See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.

We put terrible pressure on our minds. When we tighten them or harden our views or beliefs, we lose all the softness and flexibility that makes for real shelter, belonging, and protection.

To our young selves, though, there is no difference between the small questions and the big ones. We follow our curiosity to the edge of our understanding and then ask whoever is around what lies beyond it. I have spent my adult life fighting to keep what I possessed as a child: the ability to see the biggest questions sitting inside the smallest ones and the willingness to try to answer them.

We need to have greater patience with our sense of inner contradiction in order to allow its different dimensions to come into conversation with us. There is a secret light and vital energy in contradiction.

Our work, rather, is to help reawaken the sense of the sacred that is already deep in the human soul, our primordial relationship with nature, our ancient mother love of the earth. We can be part of its rising again.

A Friendship Blessing May you be blessed with good friends. May you learn to be a good friend to yourself. May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness. May this change you. May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you. May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and affinity of belonging. May you treasure your friends. May you be good to them and may you be there for them; may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth, and light that you need for your journey. May you never be isolated. May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your anam ċara.

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your deepest belonging.

I wish I were so ‘Sequoiacal,’” he writes, “that I could descend from these mountains like a John the Baptist to preach the green-brown woods to all the juiceless world . . . crying, ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand.

Often people’s identities, that wild inner complexity of soul and color of spirit, become shrunken into their work identities. They become prisoners of their roles. They limit and reduce their lives. They become seduced by the practice of self-absence. They move further and further away from their own lives. They are forced backward into hidden areas on the ledges of their hearts. When you encounter them, you meet only the role. You look for the person, but you never meet him. To practice only the linear external side of your mind is very dangerous. Thus the corporate and work world now recognizes how desperately they need the turbulence, anarchy, and growth possibilities that come from the unpredictable world of the imagination. These are so vital for the passion and force of a person’s life. If you engage only the external side of yourself, and stay on this mechanical surface, you become secretly weary. Gradually, years of this practice make you desperate.

Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me. You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some vague presence as little moving as nothing. If beauty is not a gateway out of the net we were taken in at our birth, it will not long be beauty, and we will find it better to sit at home by the fire and fatten a lazy body or to run hither and thither in some foolish sport than to look at the finest show that light and shadow ever made among green leaves. I say to myself, when I am well out of that thicket of argument, that they are surely there, the divine people, for only we who have neither simplicity nor wisdom have denied them, and the simple of all times and the wise men of ancient times have seen them and even spoken to them.

O’ Cernunnos, with antler crown, you rid us all of the ungrateful kind with new life sown, amongst the moss, we’ve lain down to weep, diolch for the peace of mind, the pain you have (for centuries) known, hir yw pob ymaros, in wake and sleep, we knew you’d return to us!

I want to remind you that the forest is far more than a source of timber. It is our collective medicine cabinet. It is our lungs. It is the regulatory system for our climate and our oceans. It is the mantle of our planet. It is the health and well-being of our children and grandchildren. It is our sacred home.

You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meagre light of self analysis. The inner world never reveals itself cheaply. Perhaps analysis is the wrong way to approach our inner dark ... There is a healing for each of our wounds, but this healing is waiting in the indirect, oblique, and nonanalytic side of our nature.

Long ago, the Celtic god Dagda drew a veil between humans and the Fey Folk. In our time, the Goddess has charged me to help bring the Fey magic back through that veil so that we humans can be renewed by the starry-eyed mysticism of the Little People, by the passion and wisdom of the poet in love with the Goddess, and by the wild integrity of the dark and dangerous Faerie Folk.

The extent to which we faithfully address this issue will be the extent to which we either serve the world's well-being, by helping reawaken it to a sense of the sacred in all things, or continue to be irrelevant to the word's well-being, by inferring that sacredness is somehow the property only of certain people and certain places rather than the birthright and essence of all.

What most endangers us as an earth community today is that we have neglected our interrelationships - as countries, faiths, and races. The reality is that we need one another. We will be well to the extent that we all are well. We will be truly strong to the extent that we faithfully protect one another's well-being, not simply the well-being of our people, our community, or our species.

Wherever there is distance, there is longing. Yet there is some strange wisdom in the fact of distance. It is interesting to remember that the light that sustains life here on earth comes from elsewhere. Light is the mother of life. Yet the sun and the moon are not on the earth; they bless us with light across the vast distances. We are protected and blessed in our distance. Were we nearer to the sun, the earth would be consumed in its fire; it is the distance that makes the fire kind. Nothing in creation is ever totally at home in itself. No thing is ultimately at one with itself. Everything that is alive holds distance within itself. This is especially true of the human self. It is the deepest intimacy which is nevertheless infused with infinite distance. There is some strange sense in which distance and closeness are sisters, the two sides of the one experience. Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them: to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distant as intimate.

The Celtic mind was never drawn to the single line; it avoided ways of seeing and being that seek satisfaction in certainty. The Celtic mind had a wonderful respect for the mystery of the circle and the spiral. The circle is one of the oldest and most powerful symbols. The world is a circle; the sun and moon are too. Even time itself has a circular nature; the day and the year build to a circle. At its most intimate level so is the life of each individual. The circle never gives itself completely to the eye or to the mind but offers a trusting hospitality to that which is complex and mysterious; it embraces depth and height together. The circle never reduces the mystery to a single direction or preference. Patience with this reserve is one of the profound recognitions of the Celtic mind. The world of the soul is secret. The secret and the sacred are sisters. When the secret is not respected,

In Ireland, the rivers find their source in the Otherworld; specifically in an Otherworld well or spring which, bubbling up from the earth, is surrounded by trees of wisdom. Five streams, said to be the five senses, flow from the spring. Salmon swim in that spring and eat the hazelnuts which fall, occasionally, into the water.  To eat a salmon from this water is to receive poetic inspiration and to drink from the water itself, in ecological interpretation, is to enter into a way of being that is consonant with the underlying patterns of the cosmos.

The plants and animals and even our small children know, with a wisdom deeper than ours, that the Way is simply about growing and becoming whoever we really are, in the core of our being. It is about recognising the acorn in our hearts and trusting the process by which it will become an oak. It is about co-operating with that process of becoming, about keeping our feet on the earth of our own lived experience even as we reach out to the horizon beyond us. And it is about letting our own personal becoming be fully engaged with the evolution, physical, intellectual and spiritual, of the whole of creation.

THE love-affair of Enid Challenger and Edward Malone is not of the slightest interest to the reader, for the simple reason that it is not of the slightest interest to the writer. The unseen, unnoticed lure of the unborn babe is common to all youthful humanity. We deal in this chronicle with matters which are less common and of higher interest. It is only mentioned in order to explain those terms of frank and intimate comradeship which the narrative discloses. If the human race has obviously improved in anything —in Anglo-Celtic countries, at least —it is that the prim affectations and sly deceits of the past are lessened, and that young men and women can meet in an equality of clean and honest comradeship.

The dream says that underneath the cathedral there is a mysterious place, which in reality is not in tune with a Christian church. What is beneath a cathedral of that age? There is always the so-called under-church or crypt. You have probably seen the great crypt at Chartres; it gives a very good idea of the mysterious character of a crypt. The crypt at Chartres was previously an old sanctuary with a well, where the worship of a virgin was celebrated - not of the Virgin Mary, as is done now - but of a Celtic goddess. Under every Christian church of the Middle Ages there is a secret place where in old times the mysteries were celebrated... ...the serpent is not only the god of healing; it also has the quality of wisdom and prophecy.

There is, of course, a joy to finding confirmation of a suspicion you’ve carried around for half a century. But that satisfaction was tempered by the fact that Matsunaga’s research was sparked by more than just the desire to test an adage. He and his team hoped to explain the mystery behind the widespread collapse of marine ecosystems along the Japanese coast. They showed that clear-cutting on the island nation was what caused the devastation. Cutting so many trees led to a decline in the amount of fulvic acid, created by decomposing leaf fall in the forest, leaching into the groundwater that flows into the sea. This, in turn, reduced the quantity of iron in the island’s coastal waters. The lack of iron stopped the division and multiplication of microscopic marine life, which meant a famine for the sea creatures that depended on that life to survive. Cutting down trees, then, is not exclusively a suicidal act. It is homicidal as well.

Take time to get in touch with your shadow. Make a list of the things that most often make you angry with other people. This may give you clues as to your shadow’s feelings. Once you have been honest about your vices, make a conscious effort to replace each vice with its opposite virtue;

REFLECTION: SACRED SOUL WORDS OF AWARENESS You have been graced with the dignity of divine birth, says Pelagius. Live this dignity in your life, safeguard it in one another, and protect it in every human being. (Reflect for a brief time on the ways this wisdom applies to your life.) PRAYER OF AWARENESS Awake, O my soul, And know the sacred dignity of your being. Awake to it in every living soul this day. Honor it, defend it, In heart and mind, in word and deed.

temenos

Ironic, isn’t it? You’d think someone as powerful as Jack would have admirers far and wide among witch-kind. Unfortunately, he’s experienced quite the opposite. For Jack, the world couldn’t be any more of a lonely place.

Threshold or liminal places take us from one place to another, in our surroundings but also inside of ourselves. Just as the half-doors of Ireland can open in and out at the same time, our eyes navigate this inside-outside dynamic for our lives.

Fire, of course, is not the only diviner. Water can also show the future. Water and air are essential elements. The winds, however, come from four directions, and those directions each have a specific function. When the wind comes from the north it can mean death or change. An east wind indicates wisdom. A south wind is a powerful wind. A west wind is fertile and love-giving. And, finally, we come to earth. Earth is the embodiment of fertility. Think of it; we put a seed in the ground, it grows, from it springs food that allows us to live. To me, that is magic.

the Greek аnd Rоmаn stereоtype thаt the Celts were crude, viоlent, аnd "uncivilized" peоple is untrue. Rаther, this nаrrаtive served Julius Cаesаr аs а pretext tо аnnex severаl Celtic peоples under the rule оf Rоme in the Iberiаn аnd French prоvinces.

Never give up. Never, never give up. Never, never, never give up. the entire speech Winston Churchill gave at a school prize–giving

Lord of my heart, give me vision to inspire me that, working or resting, I may always think of you. Lord of my heart, give me light to guide me that, at home or abroad I may always walk in your way. Lord of my heart, give me wisdom to direct me that, thinking or acting, I may always discern right from wrong. Heart of my own heart, whatever befall me, rule over my thoughts and feelings, my words and actions. ancient Irish

Now robed in stillness in this quiet place, emptied of all I was, I bring all that I am your gift of shepherding to use and bless. Cuthbert’s Prayer, St. Aidan’s Chapel, Bradford Cathedral

Today is the autumnal equinox, when the hours of light and dark are in equal balance. This is a good day to take stock to make sure that we have a God-given equilibrium in our lives. This may seem a forlorn and frustrating task, until we realize that Christ, who is the perfect specimen of a balanced human being, can calm our agitated or overworked parts, heal our sick parts, and strengthen our weak parts. Gildas, who has been nicknamed the Jeremiah of the early British church because he was so critical of its lax members, believed in fasting and prayer—yet he was equally aware of the danger of going overboard and losing a sense of proportion. He wrote: There is no point in abstaining from bodily food if you do not have love in your heart. Those who do not fast much but who take great care to keep their heart pure (on which, as they know, their life ultimately depends) are better off than those who are vegetarian, or travel in carriages, and think they are therefore superior to everyone else. To these people death has entered through the window of their pride. Grant me the serenity— that comes from placing the different parts of my being under your harmonizing sway. Today may I grow in balance. SEPTEMBER

Teach us, good Lord, to serve you as you deserve, to give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to labor and not to ask for any reward except that of knowing that we do your will. Ignatius Loyola

At the doorway between faiths we can stand and bow, awakening to what the soul deeply knows, that wisdom is to be found and reverenced way beyond the boundaries of any one tradition. We need these many wisdom traditions. They are given not to compete with each other, but to complete each other.

We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught, and some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our society or religion has tried to teach us.

We live in a threshold moment. We are waking up to the earth again. We are awakening to the feminine and the desire to faithfully tend the interrelationship of all things. In this moment, politically, culturally, and religiously, we are witnessing the death throes of a shadow form of masculine power that has arrayed itself over against the earth and over against the sacredness of the feminine. This shadow form of power, however, has no ultimate future, for it is essentially false in its betrayal of the earth and the feminine. So in fear it is lashing out with unprecedented force. But it is not the deep spirit of this moment in time. Something else is trying to be born.

Evil can cause horrible suffering, but its very nature is self-destructive.

We are not called to be masters of the earth but lovers of the earth, harnessing what we have acquired in the development of our civilization and scientific knowledge to server her, not dominate her. Part of what we owe the earth right now is the space and time she needs to heal from the damage we have inflicted on her.

We now know too much about the interrelatedness of all life to pretend that well-being can be sought for one part alone and not for the whole, for only one religion, one nation, one species.

The poetry is already there, deep in the matter of the earth, even in its geological formations. It is in the stuff and interrelationship of the universe. Our role is to translate it into human speech and action, both individually and collectively.

To look for the flow of the divine in all things is not to disregard the external authorities of religion, nation or culture. But it is always to consult also the compass of the soul and our place of inner knowing. So often we have been given the impression that faith primarily means accepting doctrinal beliefs or precepts that have been dispensed from above. Religious leaders appeal to scripture or the prerogative of tradition, often forgetting that these outward authorities need to be read and appraised through the lens of our inner knowing and the deepest experiences of our lives in relation to the earth and one another.

In a sense we are all being invited to remember what at some level we knew in the innocence of our childhood, but have since forgotten or come to doubt, that light is woven through all things like a thread of gold.

Again, we need consciousness of soul, a waking up to the sacred interrelationship of all things, of every species and life-form, race and nation.

Celtic saying tells us, “See much, study much, suffer much, that is the path to wisdom.

The Celtic Sufi, Sonnet Oh, you take the fancy road, I'll take the lowly road, and I'll be in heartland, while you charge your phone, where me and my true heart never ever part ways, where me and my backbone, never bend in dismay, where me and my scruples never give in to convenience, where me and my fervent dream succumb to no pride of the dead, if you alight from your high horse, with a gleaming heart I wait for thee, join me one day for a cup of tea, on the bonnie loch of liberty.

In the wisdom of Celtic shamans, a profound truth resonates; nothing is ever truly lost but transforms, perpetuating the eternal circle of life. As water rises as vapor, it falls as rain. From flames of destruction, new growth emerges. Each essence intricately woven in an endless dance of reincarnation, where shape-shifting and transmutation are natural states of existence.

If we are to see a true reawakening to the sacredness of the earth and harness the deepest energies of our being to serve this awareness, we need a strong inner authority in our own souls to challenge the religious, political, and social systems that have recklessly ignored or denied this sacredness and are imperiling the very future of the world. Our capacity to know the flow of the divine in all things,

The Celts were a woodland people, their culture born from the deciduous rainforests that once covered much of the country. But as the English subjugated the Irish, they cut down these ancient woods. They cut them for the lumber needed in their naval yards and the charcoal to fuel industry. They cut them to empty the land of places like Lackavane, where the Irish could hide, regroup, plan and launch counterattacks. And they cut them to sever the most tangible link the Celts had to their culture and language.

It was then that Lugh Lámhfada, Lugh of the Long Arm, approached the battlefield. Now Lugh was the son of Cian, which means “Enduring One”, who was in turn son of Cainte, the god of speech. Now the council of the Children of Danu had forbidden him to come to the battle, for Lugh was all-wise and all-knowledgeable and it was thought that his life was too valuable to risk in battle, for his was the wisdom needed to serve humankind.

Thus it was that the words of wisdom spoken by the Druids were found to be true – that vengeance, though sweet at first, becomes a bitter cup and proves to be its own executioner. Therefore no vengeance is more estimable than one which is not taken.

mothaitheacht.

Minister and favorite of the Emperor Augustus. He was distinguished for the wisdom of his counsels, and his rare abilities as a statesman. Although himself an indifferent poet, he was still a patron of literature and literary men; Virgil, Horace, Ovid and other celebrated writers of the Augustan age, were among his most intimate friends. Such was the care with which Mæcenas sought out and rewarded every species of merit, that his name is proverbially used to denote a generous patron.

In its real sense, beauty is the illumination of your soul

When he let the loneliness flow, let the dam burst within, something shifted in his relation to his own loneliness.... He became free once he had met the depth of his loneliness, engaged and befriended it. It became a natural part of his life.

Spirituality becomes suspect if it is merely an anaesthetic to still one's spiritual hunger. Such spirituality is driven by the fear of loneliness. If you bring courage to you solitude, you learn that you do not need to be afraid.