Imbolg is arriving quietly here. There is no drama to it, no obvious turning of the year that announces itself with surprise. The fields are still bare. The air still bites. Winter has not loosened its grip. Yet something has shifted. The days lengthen almost imperceptibly. Ewes begin to lactate. When I send my shovel into the ground, though hard on the surface, it is no longer inert. Imbolg marks not the end of winter but the moment when winter ceases to be total.
That distinction matters. We sometimes rush toward that reassurance that Imbolg means spring is here. Candles are lit as symbols of triumph. Altars bloom with premature flowers. The language is one of “renewal” and “rebirth,” as though the year were a self-help programme and February its first breakthrough. This might be comforting, but it is also evasive. Imbolg is not about victory. It has more to do with endurance. It’s a fragile threshold where survival is still uncertain.
In this sense, Imbolg carries a sort of responsibility. If life is going to return, someone, or something, has to tend the conditions that make its return possible. Fire must be kept. Animals must be watched. Tools must be mended. The future is not manifesting itself; it is being prepared for.
This is where Brigid enters, and why she resists easy modern translation. She is often flattened into an “energy” of creativity or healing, a benevolent glow one can tap into for personal transformation. But this language misses her severity. Brigid’s fire is not decorative. It is functional. It is the fire of the hearth that cannot be allowed to go out, the fire of the forge that repairs tools, the flame that cauterises the wound as well as warms the flesh.
In the old stories, Brigid stands at crossings: between winter and spring, between poetry and labour, between wound and cure. She presides over beginnings, yes, but beginnings understood as obligations. To begin something is to bind oneself to its continuation. Inspiration, under her gaze, is not a mood but a duty.
What makes Brigid difficult for the contemporary imagination is precisely this refusal to flatter the self. Much modern thinking is organised around affirmation. It seeks to reassure us that we are already aligned, already whole, already radiant. We may be all these things, but Brigid suggests something more: that alignment requires work, that wholeness is forged, and that radiance costs fuel. She is not the goddess who tells you that you are enough. She is the goddess who asks whether you will tend the fire anyway.
The Christianisation of Brigid did not erase this character. As St Brigid of Kildare, she becomes the keeper of an eternal flame, the founder of a community, a woman whose sanctity expresses itself through hospitality, discipline, and care. The continuity is striking. Pagan or Christian, Brigid remains a figure of maintenance. She does not abolish scarcity. She teaches how to live within it without surrendering to despair.
Imbolg, then, is a reminder that hope has a dynamic quality. It is an act, not a feeling. The light returning to the world is weak and unreliable. It will need protection. To honour Brigid is to accept that role, in however small a way.
At this time of year, our media strains to translate the symbols of Brigid into statements. She has been pressed into service as an emblem of power, resistance, or liberation. She is asked to speak our contemporary language fluently, to confirm what we already think about gender, authority, and identity. This is understandable, and also narrowing. It turns a figure whose meaning once lay in practice and obligation into a badge worn in debates she was never meant to settle.
What is lost in this translation is her indifference to spectacle. Brigid does not argue. She does not posture. She does not demand recognition. Her holiness is not a claim about who should rule, but a question about what will be kept alive. She belongs less to the drama of power than to the quieter economy of maintenance, where things endure only because someone shows up again and again.
To encounter her here is to be drawn away from the intoxication of symbols and back toward the discipline of care. She asks us to consider what we strive to sustain when no audience is watching. There is no promise of transformation without cost, no assurance that the work will feel meaningful in the moment. There isn’t even a hint that we will feel better. The gift, if it can be called that, is smaller and sterner: the dignity of tending what must not be allowed to fail.
This is not a message easily absorbed by our age, hungry as it is for affirmation and moral display. Yet it may be the oldest wisdom Imbolg carries: that life returns not because it is celebrated, but because it is quietly, stubbornly, and faithfully maintained.
A Poem for Brigid
Not the fire that leaps for joy,
but the one that waits,
banked low in the ash
while the mouse sleeps.
Not the fire that dazzles,
but the steadiness that keeps
milk warm, metal soft,
hands from stiffening in the cold.
You arrive when nothing looks changed,
when the fields still say no,
when hope would be premature
and despair too lazy.
You ask for attendance, not self.
For someone to notice
that the flame has thinned,
that the wind is turning.
Saint or goddess,
it hardly matters now.
You are the work itself,
the breath leaned close to the hearth,
the choice to feed what flickers
without applause,
trusting that a future
can be coaxed,
slowly,
by those willing
to stay.
Consilium 
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