BRIGID’S DAY - Michelle LeBaron

Brigid is a Celtic Goddess and Christian saint who symbolizes poetry, healing and smithwork. Stories of Brigid tell of her mercy and wisdom, as well as her gift for peaceweaving. In one account, she caused warriors ready for battle the following day to fall asleep and dream that they had won. When they awoke, they went home feeling victorious, and war was averted.

 Brigid’s annual feast day, also known as Imbolc, was first declared a public holiday in Ireland in 2023. Observances of Brigid’s Day include setting a cloak outside overnight to gather the dew of mercy. In the morning, the cloak is brought inside amidst singing and celebration, and a piece of the cloak is given to each one gathered as a protective talisman for the year.

We are going to need laughter, she says.

What to do when you have advance notice of things falling apart? Do you dig tunnels, buy a bunker, build a treehouse, stockpile food? Find a cave and hunker down with boxes of candles and stacks of dried food? Do you convert all cash to gold? Too late.

 A year ago, this might have sounded like hyperbole. A year ago, we were saying surely wiser seeing will prevail. It did not prevail because people who are both frightened and entitled are a dangerous thing.

 So where are the better angels of our nature now that greed and selfishness prevail? Now that the patina of bravado has triumphed, and the bellicose proclaims its victory? As if the story were ‘just how things are’. But one story is never ‘just how things are’. Stories are always seen through particular eyes, always foldable and fungible. Stories envelope us if we do not consciously pry ourselves away. We register fear in our organs, and fear leads to more separation, and to thinner stories.

 Those better angels of our nature are not imposing types. They do not barge into our lives, demanding to save us from ourselves. They sit just above our shoulders, observing as we carry weighted stories that seem always to veer toward those we’ve heard too much about already. Never lighting on the lives of those on the edges.

 I cannot dwell in a too-small story. Too-small stories leave out too much. Bubbling up all around are signs and runes and quotidian wonders—the stuff of lived-in stories. Chekhov and Carver weren’t wrong. How to know which stories are the fruit of an artificial mind with a mission? How to discern when my phone broadcasts hoaxes and scams all day long? How to stand in sludge when solid ground feels like a memory glimpsed from the rearview mirror?

This is surely a time for stillness. For tethering ourselves forward and backward to the threads that weave us together in community, but do not bind. To Brigid’s cloak that warms and protects but never encumbers.

Brigid of the forge, receive us. Keep us near the fire that refines, and give us poetry that sustains us. Breath in us the beauty that we need to live, and see with us that it never left us.

Let true north remain fixed. Let the stars that hold our future keep lighting the way.

Whisper, Brigid, whisper through the dew-forming night. May your cloak of mercy filter our seeing and our hearing. May your spirit nudge us, even when we are tired, to look once more for the single lost sheep. For in the undulations there is shelter, and in the constellations, light. Always light.

Professor Michelle LeBaron is a scholar/practitioner of conflict transformation and a faculty member at the University of British Columbia Allard Law School. Originally from the prairies, she loves the alchemy of living near the sea. Michelle writes poetry, essays and journal articles, and is author of several books including Changing Our Worlds: Art as Transformative Practice, The Choreography of Resolution: Conflict, Movement and Neuroscience and Conflict Across Cultures: A New Approach for a Changing World.