The Luck of The Irish

Over the last two years I've been diving deep into my ancestors. Theres Irish blood on both my mother and father's side, and yet, the records show only English passage.

The more I dig, the more I uncover how often Irish families altered or concealed their identities to survive… to keep their heritage safe. So while I know my grandparents came from England, I also know the stories that lived in them. The quiet ways of keeping favour with the fairies. How to tend to and speak with the land. The celebration of days like Women’s Christmas (Nollaig na mBan). These aren’t English customs. They are ancestral memory.

And this is why St. Patrick’s Day has become, for me, a day of remembrance more than celebration.

On one hand, I feel deep respect for Ireland’s ongoing reclamation of its language, culture, and ancestral roots. There is something powerful about a people remembering who they are after generations of erasure. Even with speaking with people today and telling them Im learning Irish their reply is often "oh, so English?". No the Irish were colonized and their native language is Gaeilge.

And although St. Patrick is one small cog on the machine of that colonization he also represents the spread of Christianity into Ireland, and the symbolic “driving out of the snakes,” which many understand as the erasure of indigenous spiritual traditions, including the Druids. The stewardship of the land and the mistreatment of its people.

So today, I’m holding both.

The celebration… and the reclaimation, the pride and the grief and the many ghosts and unknown that walk within today's heritage.

As women devoted to truth, to embodiment, and to sovereignty, we don’t have to flatten history to make it comfortable. We get honour the hard truths and learn from them. We get honour our ancestors which includes the land and we get to honour the wisdom that existed long before it was renamed, reshaped, or silenced.

Happy St. Patrick's day, may the luck of the Irish be with you.

May it be so. 💚🐍🍀