Paddy Doyle

Why …

Happy New Year folks. Hope you had a peaceful Christmas and are enjoying the returning light of these clear, crisp days. In preparation for the coming of Spring, I am running a discount until the end of February. All online healing sessions/readings 50 euro. Message me here if you'd like to make a booking, or call 086 3150145. Wishing you joy and good things 🙏💖☘

Out of Darkness We are Born and Unto Darkness We Return

In our ancient worldview darkness preceded light; days began at sunset and the New Year began at Samhain, the beginning of winter. Caesar wrote that the Celts 'called themselves the sons of the god of night and defined the division of every season, not by the number of days, but of nights; their birthdays and the beginnings of months and years they observe in such order that day followed night.'
While this may seem strange to us, it is good to contemplate that life begins in the womb and that seeds sprout underground. Winter barley and wheat, for instance, are sown in October, germinate underground during the dark winter months, and send shoots over ground with the coming of spring (Imbolc).
These days we tend to view light and darkness in terms of bad and good, but in older times they were viewed more in cogitative perceptual terms, as in; what is clear and what is obscure, what is known and what is unknown. Darkness was the Great Mystery, the Primordial Womb from which all things arise and to which all things return.
So as well as being a time of honouring and connecting to loved ones who have gone before us, Samhain is a time of letting go of the old in preparation for the New, just as nature does, in the shedding of leaves and the dropping of seeds. It is a time to honour the darkness, the Great Mystery, and retreat underground, to the Cave of the Cailleach, to rest and to dream the world we will birth when life comes over ground again at Imbolc, in the guise of Brigid, goddess of new beginnings and of all that is green.

Samhain
BY ANNIE FINCH
(The Celtic Halloween)

In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother's mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
"Carry me." She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Annie Finch, "Samhain" from Eve, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Copyright © 1997 by Annie Finch.

Delighted to be launching my healing business page.
Due to Covid 19 restrictions I am only offering online Readings and Healing Sessions until further notice.
Healing Sessions usually last one hour.
Full hour and half hour Readings available.
As an introductory offer I am offering 3 Free Online Readings, to be drawn from the names of everyone who likes and shares my page over the next two weeks.
Thank You & Happy New Year🌹🌿🌺