As a Brigidine, making this was a small offering to Herself, and to you my community. I am not Irish. The traditions of honoring Brighid are alive and well and deeply meaningful there and I encourage you to access content from those sources. I find they bring me a kind of quiet gladness when I … Continue reading Making a Cros Bríde
Author: ANGrnk
I am a clinician, a writer, and an educator who finds meaning in facilitating the healing and transformation of others. I am a Brigidine and a Druid practicing mostly within the framework of Ár nDraíocht Féin. Scholarship is important to me as one way of knowing, but it is not the only one that informs my life and work. Certainly, my devotional relationships and engagement with my ancestors, the persons (human and otherwise) who surround me, and my gods do as well, often in ways that can be difficult to articulate but which I value. I reside in Texas, a land whose beauty echoes in my blood and bones. I am a former foster youth, queer, and learning to live with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. My clinical and research work as a psychological professional focuses on trauma and its sequelae, on healing and post-traumatic growth for people and families and systems, and on working in ways that are Pagan and LGBTQ+ friendly. In my free time, I read voraciously, play tabletop games and DnD, enjoy classic cocktails, study herbalism and garden, and enjoy exploring my husband and pups.
Tender Mirror
Perhaps it is ok for me to be what I am, mixed up and striving, settled into root and soul, unfurling, sometimes frenzied, always profuse.I have so often been given to understand there is something slightly obscene in it, the way I moveand speak and sink back into silence to my own strange rhythms, never … Continue reading Tender Mirror
Ursa Major
I feel if I could touch my heart, my hand would come away bleedingA mighty claw hooked free that core of poison given as medicineBy ones who would have loved me if they couldIt did not want to come free so much so that I could not tellWhether I clung to it or it to … Continue reading Ursa Major
Barrow-wight
Some days I stand empty, silenced save for the ghosts wandering my halls running chill fingers through the dust layering heart and spleen and the edges of my eyelids. Some days it is hard not to linger, listening to the spidery whispers of all my wrongs recited like a litany of healing though the wounds … Continue reading Barrow-wight
On Sinking Back in Service of Flourishing
I've been thinking a lot about growth and growing in this season of our lives... We are in a time that involves many stressors, adverse conditions that reduce our access to the things that nourish us: relationships, physical contact with other living things/people, genuine leisure time, a sense of basic safety in our environment and … Continue reading On Sinking Back in Service of Flourishing
Prayer a Day- November 30
Ogma, I stand in the warmth of your honey-tongued illumination, seeking skillfulness. May your light wash through me, distilling, that my words may uplift and edify those who hear them.Noble sage, may your wisdom guide me to be a fit champion of the youth entrusting me with the stories of the hearts, adequate to their … Continue reading Prayer a Day- November 30
Prayer a Day- November 29
A prayer to Tulsi,with whom I am coming into relationship:Tulsi, blue-visaged herbmaking sacred the soil in which you root,teach me to consecrate the places I rootthat I and those with whom I share this spacemay flourish.Center of all pilgrimages, growing within yourselfthe sacred stories of all that could ever come to be,inspire in me the … Continue reading Prayer a Day- November 29
Prayer a Day- November 28
Weaver, your work glistens in sunrise like the stories in my mind,each strand holding fast to its anchor,moments in time spiralingcenteredlimned with tears like drops of dew.May I learn the carry in me threads enough to weave the warp and weft of a lifetime.May I learn to connect to whatever anchors this life affords.May the … Continue reading Prayer a Day- November 28
Prayer a Day- November 26
My heart speaks with words my tongue cannot yet shape, an earnest upwelling of Thanksgiving for the rich loam in which our lives are rooted,fecund with the blessing of the Ancestors,fed as well by the unacknowledged theft of lands yet unceded crying out for their stewards,a legacy it is ours to heal as so much … Continue reading Prayer a Day- November 26
Prayer a Day- November 25
A prayer on returning:I plant my feet a little more firmly, roots tunneling deep with easethrough old familiar channelsin the limestone,the sharp chill of flint,sudden wealth of watersdeep beneath.The earth,crumbled and cracked,soaks up the offering I pour,saying simplyHome.I am home.At last.Image of a chipped flint-like gray rock resting on it's side on duty Earth. Image … Continue reading Prayer a Day- November 25
