Late February. In Ireland. The light pours pale yellow, daffodils in an icy breeze. The days flit between threatening snow, skies smudged dark and low and hours when you could believe summer was just around the corner, lunch outside in the china blue, jumpers suddenly too warm in that strong spring sun. The tug of war between winter and spring waging still.
The candle I keep for company flickers and chats as I write, whispering of ice. It will freeze here tonight, low in the valley as we are. The mists have come up from the river and the bog, tucking the house in close. That moon rises full in a clear sky, the stars cast wide from her light. Snow Moon, Ice Moon, Storm moon. And we’ve had plenty of each. But also, the Quickening Moon as we ebb into Spring. The trees bud and the garden is awash with cultivated flowers, interlopers from other climes but a splash of much needed colour after so many months of grey.
February alone has clawed back almost an hour and a half of daylight at this latitude, scraping away at the night in both directions. First light comes now before we wake, and the day lingers well past dinnertime. Yet I still find myself wandering in the darkness. My boy is woken with growing pains in the night, he’s sprouting with that light. He’s pushing at his bedtime like that light too, and so my days are askew. I’m awake in the wee hours to write, to find some quiet, my mind and nervous system needing hours to adjust after the wonderous wild chaos of our days. Painted rainbows and paint samples upon paint samples. Train rides and stick huts in the woods. Offerings to a goddess far older than the old ones, Cailleach old and demanding to be heard (more on her another time, when she and I are ready). Slugs and snails and the wag of the tail on an old dog addled with dementia, who howls bitterly when he can’t find my boy. Frogs and hedgehogs up from their winter sleep. A stampede of horses around the meadow at dawn, their ritual to greet the day. A brawl of blackbirds tumbling onto the doorstep, the door open to let that Spring air through the rooms. I separated them like squabbling siblings, and they sat stunned in their respective corners.
And I count my blessings again and again.
I’m awake in the wee hours too because this moon is also called the Hunger Moon in parts of indigenous America and I cannot fathom this world, how it has been allowed to get to this point. The tears still come, hot with rage as I hear my ancestors clamouring from this land. They scream with it, down through my blood, through this deep, dark soil. They scream of hunger, of love and of freedom. They know of starvation. Throw a rock here and chances are you will hit a mass grave, from either the great hunger forced upon the people of this land or the myriad of resistance to the cruelty inflicted here. Chances are you drive or walk past one daily, croppy pit, famine pit, a mass of bones screaming from the grave.
As we watch it happen again, an infliction of the same evil in another land, forced starvation of a people, a genocide, powerless to stop it my anger boils over. And there is a quickening in this too I think, the taking hold of a revolution. A resolution at the very least. To find another way.
I find myself attempting to explain to a four-year-old how concepts of colonialization, capitalist ownership and enclosure have destroyed our Earth and how no one can really own the land, we can only steward it for a time. He understands, as only a four-year-old could, “I protect it” he says, “it’s mine and my badgers!” And so, I resolve to protect it further. I resolve to set my will to love and freedom my whole life long. What this looks like I do not yet know but for now it feels like an ancient goddess of this land roaring alongside my ancestors, generations upon generations of freedom-fighters clamouring just beyond the hedgerow and in the wee hours the bounds don’t well hold. I want to tear a hole in the fabric of the universe, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop! I’ll stitch it back together once I’ve sucked the poison out. I’ll staunch it with comfrey and yarrow. I’ll wash it with water from the well. But tear it apart we must. We’ll weave something anew, in the circle round. Around and around in love, always love.
It feels like dreaming true and using the fullness of my voice. Gaeilge like honey on my tongue, slow but familiar and sweet. Screaming truth to power until they are forced to hear. Until they are so deeply in the dirt that they finally feel what we feel in our bones. It feels like pulling the cloak of my privilege around all those I can. Hands in the soil, rooted down deep. It feels like community, like putting the village back together. A circle of mothers, world-weavers against the dark. A deep slowing down, slower still.
And none of it feels enough. It feels like white hot anger and a necessary revolution. We must change everything. Not some romanticised return to days gone by, but a radical reimagining to move us forward.
Time feels liminal, perhaps it always is. To walk through this world as I do is to always be somewhat liminal, a tightrope walk along the hedgerow, but all days are a potential threshold. The late-night hours more so, here time is slippery, cast adrift between asleep and awake. And February, this year contains a liminal day. One in four, one day more. This year is a leap year, this month carries an extra day. Another mess of the Gregorian calendar. A day much maligned as unlucky. An eldritch day, appearing from the blue once every four years like some mythical kingdom from the mists. My suggestion, this year, is to lean into the liminality of it, feel into this threshold we are collectively in, this tipping point. And tell me, is there a revolution quickening in you?
Quickening refers to the first movements of life, in the year or in the womb. In the days before pregnancy tests and ultrasounds this was the first assurance of a viable pregnancy, those tiny first movements of the baby in the womb, strong enough for a mother to feel. Mine felt like small fluttering’s at first, the dart of a minnow in the bowl of my hips. They’d told me I wouldn’t be able to feel his movements until late in my pregnancy as my placenta was at the front. But I felt him early, earlier than most, and stronger still at seventeen weeks. I went to a concert, an Irish artist, his lyrics poetry despite his mainstream appeal. It was early summer, the evening stretching out like a yawn, as the music pulsed through the grass. Then my boy moved, and so I spent the entire concert with my hands on my belly, grinning with pure delight as he danced. Now we dance in the kitchen, he spins with my smile on his face.
Rowan is the quicken tree. Mountain Ash. Named so for its life-giving qualities. Its Irish name Caorthann comes from the word caor which means both berry and a blazing flame. This was the tree I prayed at throughout my pregnancy and a flame is how I saw and felt my boy before his true quickening. I would kneel in the mosses at this tree in the woods, a young one, no older than me, my forehead pressed to its cool silvered bark one hand on my belly, and I would pray. For every doctor to be wrong, for my boy to stay with me, to hold on tight. I would feel a heat under my hand and see a steady flame in my mind’s eye and I would know he was ok. Now he hugs this tree on our walks, he pets the bark and traces its roots across the path. So, I will plant a rowan over his placenta (saved in the freezer for just this act) when we move to our new home. So now I pray at this tree for the mothers of Palestine, where the rate of miscarriage is up 300% and new-borns die of starvation, their mothers too malnourished to feed them. I keep a flame lit, in my heart, blazing for love and for freedom.
In some indigenous American traditions this moon is also known as the Bear moon. Whilst it is not a colloquial name for this moon, I include it here because of its beauty and its power, and perhaps mostly due to my Twelfth Night omen... As I’ve written before, bears were extinct in Ireland before the arrival of the Celts and so they do not often appear in our folklore or mythology. However, bear figurines have been discovered at dig sites in Armagh and the old Irish word Art meaning god comes from the older word for bear. Indeed, many archaeologists have claimed that the bear is Europe’s oldest deity[1] and whilst we do not have much direct evidence of bear worship in Ireland, we know of several Bear cults throughout the Celtic regions and a continental Celtic bear goddess Artio surviving well into the Roman period. Artio is the goddess of spring and abundance, wildlife, and the hunt. Much akin to the indigenous American name for this moon, the bear appears with her cubs in early spring, blessing the land with fertility. Additionally, the legendary King Arthur is no doubt a remnant of a much older Celtic Bear-God, his Irish and Welsh mythology exposing his origins whilst, as we have seen, his name literally means both Bear and God in old Irish. His animalistic, divine nature is now perhaps firmly obscured behind layers of medieval Romanticism and Christianity.[2] But it is said that he will rise from his sleep in the hill when the world again has need of him, as the bear-goddess emerges from her winter sleep in the quickening of the year. We have need dear Art, too long have you slumbered, the wild woods are gone and the earth screams in blood. Come now our bear-hearted king, rise with us towards the light, rise in love and in freedom.
This month’s moon completes a full round of thirteen. I started last March although I owe you Decembers Oak. Next month, as per the vote on Twelfth Night, we will move to a new project of local tales and a rooting down through the land. Don’t worry, I will still keep you updated on the full moons, but the depth of the folklore will shift to those of my local landscape; magical swans, giants, gods, the Aós Sidhe, ghosts, seers and much, much more. Each month paid subscribers will receive a retelling of a tale alongside its geographical and historical positioning and then original fiction inspired by it. Thank you, as always for your time and continued support in this space. It means more than I can say.
I won’t keep you much longer today but keep a weather eye on your inbox in the in-between mid-week for the accompanying piece to this February full-moon lore, of snow and of bears, of love and freedom in the quickening of the year.
[1] See Grote, Philipp C. Ice Age Art and the Bear Cult (Ivan Morf Books 2015).
[2] See Pastoureau, Michel, King of the Beasts in “The Bear, History of a fallen king” (The Belknap Press of Harvard University 2011) pgs. [52-53]
I watched that same Bear Moon as it climbed high early this evening through the birch branches outside my kitchen window, and then prowled onward, up among the stars. I pray that it will bring with it the revolutionary power you speak of. In remembrance of the dead and for the benefit of those still clinging onto life in Gaza and wherever injustice, fear and persecution prevail.
Absolutely stunning. Thank you for sharing your knowledge of the moons and your beautiful story about your pregnancy and the Rowan tree. I was especially moved by this line — “A circle of mothers, world-weavers against the dark. A deep slowing down, slower still.” 🤍