During early Covid-17 lockdown I chose to bubble alone in Scotland, connecting online with dance groups (including Movement Medicine classes and Open Floor) and (in May 2020) an Earth-path shamanic group.

When I first started to offer Medicine Walks for friends or their dear ones, living or dead, I quickly realised that I was equally doing these healings for myself. That’s why I offer them free of charge (asking instead for donations to extend my grove at Trees for Life (UK), an ethical rewilding charity serving the community of living beings, inclusive of humans).

As an integral part of the rainbow infinity loop that, in my experience, embraces both giving and receiving, or the Each and Both in a partnership, I offer this by the name of ‘yellow petal touch’.

While I like to think this work is therapeutic, I am not a therapist, although I have undergone trainings in Reiki and Indian Head Massage.

I am simply human. Or rather, complicatedly human. And my meditation teacher Bodhipaksa often refers to “this difficult business of being human” in which we are each engaged.

But in my reflective practice, including my writing for wellbeing practice that I share elsewhere, this have I learned:

It is in digressing, wandering, erring, sidetracking, retreating, backtracking, idling, and Doing Things Differently, that we creatives, romantics, concept artists and Musers-and-Dreamers (and perhaps that’s all of us?) can tap into an underground river of full refreshment, which leaps forward at holy springs and gushes to restore fertility to the barren plains, the deserts that beset some, or most, of us at periods of our life.

Downtime can give access to deep time, the process time that throbs at the centre of the Earth and gives point to its inner compass.

And that too is the magnetism that draws me to the strand-line of the shore, the paths alongside the glacial formations (bincluding roches moutonées and eskers) that intersect the historic raised beaches near my home, and the lanes and roads that encompass the walk-space that has become my Medicine Mandala, incorporating about two square miles of my neighbourhood but not restricted to it.

Welcome to my holy ordinary, the commonplace that has claimed me, and which I have dedicated to Brighid the Triple Goddess. She’s in her Maiden aspect at Imbolc, 1 February, and also expands to bright light and springing life at Beltane (1 May) and matures towards the harvest richness of the Lammas ~ Lughnasadh ~ festival of 1 August.

Her celebration at Candlemas (the Christian saint-day into which the earlier Celtic festival was assimilated) is in 2023 to become the first bank holiday in the British Isles (in Eire/ Republic of Ireland) to be devoted to a woman, St Bridget, Brighid, Brighe.

This much am I beginning to find, about the gentle, kind goddess who called me into Circle as a “maiden” in February 2020, and whose further nature as Mother/Warrior and Crone/Hag I am beginning to explore with awe, respect, and curiosity.

The link in the previous paragraph takes you to a beautiful film poem about Imbolc, and demonstrates the reverence in which Brighid is held throughout the Gaelic world. Its images, and the poem written and read by Grace Wells, are cool and refreshing, and I trust that – during the fiery stormy summer – you can feel restored as you enjoy watching.

Blessings!

© Kathy Labrum McVittie 18 July 2022

Thanks to Grace Wells, and to the Source Arts Centre, County Tipperary, Ireland, for making this available.