In uncertain times, through periods of heavy experiences, when the world around us is in crisis, and life feels unrooted or stuck, inspiration might still stir under the surface. The fire of the creative soul needs tending – even during times of upheaval. The spark, the quiet healing, the desire to emerge, the poetic pulse in the dark; this is Brigid: goddess of inspiration from the Celtic tradition.
Brigid and the Sacred Spark
When an idea catches fire in your heart, or an art piece brings you to your knees, or in the midst of a grief storm, a poem births itself through your tears – that’s Brigid. She is inspiration itself. Rolling hills, rays of moonlight, budding plants before the Spring, words of wisdom that spin the tale of the moment in a different direction than expected – Brigid is the creative pulse that unfolds as a sacred land and a loving song.
Brigid is a Celtic goddess of poetry, smithcraft, and healing. She comes from Ireland, where spirits dwell in sacred wells, and poetry runs in the streams. She comes into focus when Winter anchors its roots into the depth of the earth, only to meet the stirring power of Spring – not yet seen, but bubbling with desire to rise, to emerge, to become.
Brigid and Inspiration as a Living Force
You might not recognize the importance of inspiration, especially when the world is falling apart around you. When the collective feels so chaotic, or when your personal life feels the direct effect of what is happening in our society and in the environment, it’s easy to forget how needed the creative spirit is. You might feel sometimes that following inspiration is a privilege.
While art is not a physical necessity the way that food is, it isn’t only necessary for our emotional and our psychological wellbeing. Our creativity is entwined with how we survived as a species.
On the one hand, our creativity moved our animal nature into cultivating culture. We’ve been using our imagination to develop; ideas, concepts, and who we are. Our creativity has moved us in some wonderful directions, such as art, and in horrible directions such as the destruction of our planet.
On the other hand, inspiration is a wild current.
When a poetic reflection moves through you, it often feels like feral force twinkling in the marrow of your bones. It’s alive. It doesn’t yield to your demands. Muse cannot be tamed. She comes and goes at her own time. Try to grasp her and she’s gone. Ignore her, and she might not come back for a while.
Brigid is inspiration itself. The goddess is the way that Muse flows through. She is the song that tickles the musician, breathing softly in her ears at 2am. She is the way a painter is pressed hard into the canvas by the way the news she hears twist and turn in the bones of her hand, turning the brush into a magic wand. She is the ideas bouncing off the walls in the Writers Room in Hollywood. She is the quiet, tender, hidden world inside the words of a poet.
Why Brigid Matters Now
Right now, art can give solace. It doesn’t mean we’re ignoring the problems, or bypassing the pain, or disengaging from what matters. Imagination allows us to see what else is possible. Again, this is part of what made our species survive. Expressing a human experience through words or paint or dance, gives voice to something in us that weaves us all together. The creative force becomes our guide.
Art doesn’t disconnect us from the injustice, the cruelty, the mess. It gives form to a feeling, an articulation to the emotion. It moves us, so that the energy of pain doesn’t get trapped in us. Art reflects to us different ways of seeing, and sparks in us possibilities we haven’t been aware of before.
It is important to go where your inspiration takes you. The food you make. The little temples of beauty you build with your children. The way you sculpt your life in relationship to shadow and light, to what’s happening around you, to how you feel. It matters. It matters a lot in these times of uncertainty.
Brigid is the Fire of Creativity
The spark of life starts the fire of existence. Deep in the belly of the earth, life begins to stir. Held in the womb of the Great Mother, an idea begins to grow. What starts as a spark of inspiration, finds a way to rise into flames.
Celtic goddess Brigid is one of the faces of the Great Mother. She is a triple goddess – mother, maiden, crone. She often comes as the maiden, born out of the old woman’s dissolution. The Callieach, who rules over the dark season, who scares animals into hiding, who howls in the darkness of a cold Winter night, and dies to make room for the maiden to be born.
Read more about the Cailleach here.
Brigid warms the land from within. She’s not the fertile energy of Spring. She’s the inner flame, not yet rising, but reaching from the inner realms, directing the power of the spark upwards, outwards.
She is the goddess of fire. The goddess of Smithcraft. There’s intensity in that, no doubt. In her fire you forge the tools you need.
Brigid’s fire is the kind that warms you up from inside, and nurtures your ideas, cares for the animal in you, and prepares you, rather than consumes you. Although as a deity of inspiration, she might feel like the energy that takes over and doesn’t let you sleep until you finish writing that poem.
Hug that paradox. Don’t try to solve it. The Keeper of the Sacred Fire (that’s one of Brigid’s names) is not a simple lady, ok? A goddess is a complex archetype and presence, woven of contradiction. Complexity fuels the fire of creativity.
In the initiatory fires in our lives, in moments of great difficulty, in times of upheaval and uncertainty, in the midst of intensity, our creativity is the strength that pulls us through. In the thresholds, on the precipice of rebirth, our creative fire – our imagination, our vision, our ideas – warms the parts of us that feel stuck, and gives us a sense of direction – not goals, but a pathway through the snow.
Inspiration Before Action
As a culture obsessed with forward motion, with productivity, with action, most of us are not trained to take our time with our inspiration. Brigid’s movement is spiralic. The message of the dominant culture is to either do something with the idea, or leave it. There’s no time to sit with it, to spiral with it, to breathe with it, to burn with it.
Sometimes though, we need to sit with the spark and let it grow. Slow. Blow on the ambers. Catch the glow. Let it mature before you move to the next stage.
The Quiet Work of the Dark
The sacred fire of inspiration needs tending. A spark may ignite and send a current of heat and excitement through you, turn you on and bring you to life, but to turn it into actual fire, to not let it die – it needs tending. It needs time.
Brigid, goddess of inspiration, arrives at the scene when the season of Winter reaches its peak. She brings with her the reminder that nourishment is coming. She is the life that quickens in the belly of the earth. She tends to all that is held in the womb of the mother, all that hasn’t yet emerged, all that needs care deep in the spaces of not yet.
In the Celtic tradition, Imbolc is a celebration of mid-Winter, and it’s also known as Brigid’s Feast Day. It marks the return of light, the return of life – within; when it’s not yet noticeable, when it’s not yet showing, when the shift is still a tender secret.
She’s the warmth of the bird sitting on her eggs. She’s the whisper of seeds moving from incubation to sprout. She’s the magic of gestation, of growing life inside the womb.
Sometimes the work needs quiet time – not productivity, or hustle, or pushing. Sometimes the warmth needs to slowly grow inside of us. Gentle. Quiet. Slow.
It’s not always easy to know when it’s time to actively stir, and when it’s time to rest and let something move at its own pace. Quiet participation often stays unnoticed. But sometimes it’s as meaningful as the big, loud actions.
When you don’t know yet – that’s the time of Brigid. There’s tenderness in this space. There’s vulnerability in this uncertainty. And there’s magic.
Sometimes what we need to do is to listen. Listen in the dark. Listen to the spark.
Brigid as Midwife of Death and Rebirth
Brigid is there when you find yourself needing to usher something out of the womb and into the world, when you journey into the birth of your becoming, when you feel the desire to rise, when you want to lick the flames of your awakening, and drink from the sacred well of your aliveness.
Brigid is a midwife. She’s known for bringing life back to the land and being present at the time when a mother grows a baby in her womb, and when it’s time to bring the baby out into the world.
Brigid is also there to usher in death, and to weave in the sacred art of grief.
Brigid, the Banshee, and the Sacred Work of Grief
When the natural world returns to light, but the inner world is grieving, the disconnect can feel alienating.
Brigid is a wisdom goddess, and midwife goddess, a visioninary goddess. She’s grief and growth, keening and caring, rising and rooting, inviting honesty as she thaws the frozen lakes, and encourages the rivers to flow.
Sometimes what flows are tears of grief. Sometimes what rises is the voice of the Banshee.
Brigid and the Banshees are woven under the earth. There’s a sad story about Brigid losing her son.
Pause. Take that in. Deep breath in. Slow exhale. This is deep, unimaginable sorrow.
In this story, Brigid’s grief is as deep as the sea, as wide as the sky, as intense as a dying star. She is said to invent keening, and to vocalize her grief over the death of her son on the battlefield. Wailing. Screaming. Singing. Lamenting.
In Irish folklore, her keening is sometimes said to be the origin of the Banshee; the fairy of grief, the spirit who wails and screams at the death of a loved one.
What We’re Growing, What We Are Grieving
Death and life are ever intertwined. Inspiration doesn’t live in isolation from loss.
We’re living through a time that asks us to hold both, inviting us to live a poetic life rooted in the complexity of growth and grief, to bring the magic of who we are out into the world, slowly, nourished by the delicate weaving of compost and creativity, the truth of sadness for what is gone and the strength of imagining what we want to bring forth from within.
Brigid is the goddess of inspiration, but she doesn’t forsake depression. She is the part of us that finds Muse even in the dark cave of deflation and discouragement.
In these times of collective upheaval, Brigid is the presence of warmth within the struggle, gentleness within the difficulties, and the art that rises from the dark.
If this exploration speaks to you, you’ll find muse medicine on my substack. I show up there every Monday with archetypal alchemy and mythic magic, and a deep commitment to inspiration as a guide.
If you need some inspiration to get moving again when feeling stuck, and you want to bring Brigid into the body, try this energy shifting practice.
And if you want to craft your own ritual to invoke inspiration – even in times of uncertainty and upheaval – get my free ritual guide for ideas and suggestions, and a sense of direction.
Thank you so much for reading and for being here.
Much love,
Hagar