Over the years I have made hundreds of prayer beads for people, but I’ve only ever made two sets for myself.

The first is a green jade set dedicated to Brighid with a small wooden Brighid’s cross made from Irish bog oak. The second is a set with my favourite rutilated quartz beads, which are clear and white quartz with long thin needles of jet black crisscrossing the bead. This set is dedicated to the Cailleach, the old woman of the land I live on. The pendant is the tip of an antler I was gifted while visiting the Shrine of the Cailleach. This was a rather special gift as the red deer are the Cailleach’s fairy cattle. (You can read that story via the link at the bottom of the page).

Each morning when my fingers begin their journey around these prayer beads the three round silver beads always feel satisfyingly weighty. These are the step beads and whatever state of mind I find myself in they are a wonderful invitation to take three steps into sacred space.

This might be a pause of three breaths, or imagining one or more sacred sites where my feet might have walked on holy ground. More often than not, I recall my visit to Tigh nam Bodach, the House of the Old Man - the Cailleach’s Shrine.

The Shrine of the Cailleach, Glen Cailleach, Perthshire, Scotland

On mornings when I choose this glen to visit through the step beads, the greenery of late spring and early summer comes into view, as well as the fast-flowing waters of Allt Cailleach (stream of the Cailleach) which rushes down the side of the remote glen.

In folklore, deer are referred to as the Cailleach’s fairy cattle, and you’ll find many deer in the neighbouring Glen Lyon, due to the landowners who encourage them to stay close by feeding them, ensuring they have a good selection when they take the wealthy visitors off to shoot deer for an afternoon of sporting entertainment.

After the step beads are another set of three beads, relating to birth, life, and death. The first speaks to being born into this world, then your fingers will feel the different pointed texture of the mystery bead, generally a star-shaped quartz bead, which is there to acknowledge the great mystery of life, and the divine spark that is present in all living things (from rocks to mountains, comic nebulae to worms, trees, and humans).

The bead after the mystery bead is the death bead, to acknowledge with birth comes death, something none of us can escape. Set slightly outside this run of beads is the bead that represents our life and free will, for it is our choice of what we engage with in life and what we carry in our hearts. How we engage with the world and whether we engage with the divine spark within and around us.

What does it mean when prayer beads break, varying traditions have different insights – from rebirth to an ending, and to some a sign to repair your beads. And this is exactly what happened to my set around the summer solstice. Of all the hundreds of sets I’ve made I only experienced one person who reported her set breaking, this happened as she held the beads in her hands at the bedside of a beloved, the silk thread breaking at the same time her beloved died.

My beads broke one day just as I touched them. They weren’t being stretched or taught – the silk cord seemed to just disintegrate in one place. As I was due to take a retreat the next week, I ordered some black silk thread and brought them with me.

The Loch of the Big Women, Isle of Eigg

I felt drawn to bring the beads with me as we headed up to one of the highest points of the island, Loch Nam Ban Mora, the Loch of the Big Woman, on this isle, Eilean Nam Ban Mora – the Island of the Big Women.

Loch Eilean Nam Ban Mora (Loch of the Big Women), heather. Looking over to the Sgurr

It was a warm day with a strong breeze and each of the women found their own spot to sit by and around the loch. I was cooried (a Scots word meaning to crouch in, or nestle) in among the heather, the photo above looks south to the great rock feature of the Sgurr (a Gaelic word for jagged peak).

Washing the antler tip and the beads in the loch waters

Rutilated quartz beads, silver spiral threshold beads, and silver step beads

While the beads are hard stone and not woven cloth, there was still a deep symbolism in washing them in the waters of the loch. An island whose name and loch are named after mythical big women. No one can really pinpoint who the ese big women were – but I like to think of big as meaning looked up to, and respected. Throughout the western isles are stories of big women – such as Scathatch on the neighbouring isle of Skye.

This washing was a purification ritual, a ritual of renewal, for both the beads and myself. I am reminded of the task set by Baba Yaga in which Vasalisa is required to wash Baba Yaga’s clothes:

‘To wash something is a timeless purification ritual. It not only means to purify, it also means - like baptism from the Latin baptise - to drench, to permeate with a spiritual numen and mystery. In the tale [of Vasilisa visiting Baba Yaga] the washing is the first task. It means to make taut again that which has become slackened from wearing. The clothes are like us, words and worn until out ideas and values are slackened by the passing of time. The renewal, the reviving, takes place in the water, in the re-discovering of what we really hold to be true, what we really hope sacred.’

– CLARRISSA PINKOLA ESTES. WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES. NOSING OUT THE FACTS: THE RETRIEVAL OF INTUITION AS INITIATION

To sit by the loch was a ritual of cleansing and purification of the entire being of the psyche. The new black silk cord on which the beads will be strung will bring them into a new order, for the old pattern can no longer be replicated, even if I wanted to. It’s now an impossible task. The meaning behind such happenings often takes time and writing. A sifting out of what you think it might represent and a letting go before the actual meaning appears. Just now it’s the life, death, and rebirth beads much like the life, death, life mothers Estes speaks of. What needs to be carded out and what shall be woven in, what must die and what must live.

It also requires a deep listening, of what images come to mind, and then reappear again, as if demanding your attention.

Click on the image above to check out the Keening Prayer Beads in the shop

There is another story for Bealltainn, the story of Cee-al, a woman whose life was woven with the tides.

Mesolithic Shell Middens on the Hebridean Isle of Oronsay, with Jura in the distance (and me sitting on top of one)

There's a field in the Isle of Eigg (another Hebridean island to the north) that gets plowed up every few years, and hundreds of Mesolithic arrowheads are unearthed. In the past people thought these were fairy arrowheads belonging to the Sidhe.

I have sat on the same white sandy beaches those folks might well have cut their arrows, imagining these people’s lives, as they moved from island to island, wondering what deities they might have given thanks to for fresh water, for fish. Whose hands did they see at play in bringing in great sweeping clouds of rain that came in from the Atlantic?

What stories did they tell when they saw the salmon return, or a large dorsal fin of an Orca break the surface of the water?

No one is really sure to the function of shell middens; some suggest that they are nothing more than great mounds of rubbish (their being fully natural compared to ours).

Was theirs purposely built and perhaps used as a ritual focus. The first time I heard of these man-made middens they strangely struck a chord in me, like an old memory resurfacing - I knew I had to visit them!

The shell mounds are made up from mainly of limpet shells, but an array of other items has been found, including pierced cowrie shells, bone pins and the remains of a seal, otter, red deer, pig and dolphin - used for food, clothing and no doubt all manner of tools.

The bones of cormorant, shag, goose, shelduck, water rail, ringed plover, tern, gull, razorbill, guillemot and red-breasted merganser were found in the middens. Most exciting of all, eight bones of the now extinct great auk were discovered.

The most interesting aspect I read about the shell middens on Oronsay was the discovery of the bones of a seal’s flipper with the bones of a human hand. I can only imagine the ritual gesture of the woman whose body was perhaps buried in the midden, or perhaps even body parts.

Sealskin Soulskin

Cee-al’s life was interwoven with tides and seals. While the selkie stories that have been handed down to use are terribly patriarchal but what has always stayed with me is the longing of the women, the longing to return to the sea, the longing to go home. We all feel that at some point, to go home and yet sometimes we might not know where home is.

In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes speaks to the Jungian view of the theft of one's soulskin:

'The pelt (sealskin) in this story is not so much an article as the representation of a feeling state and a state of being - one that is cohesive, soulful, and of the wildish female nature. When a woman is in this state, she feels entire in and of herself instead of our of herself and wondering if she is doing right, acting right, thinking well. Through this state of being 'in one's self' is one she occasionally loses touch with, the time she has previously spent there sustains her while she is about her work in the world. The return to the wildish state periodically is what replenishes her psychic reserves for her projects, family, relationships, and the creative life in the topside world'. Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Loss of a woman's soulskin comes about through the theft of a woman's resources and of her time. How many times are we last on our own list of things to do, people to take care of. The amazing thing is we don't have to go anywhere we just need to make time, make space to feed yourself with those things we love - time in the garden, a walk with the dog or to sit in circle with other women. And yet without those things that feed our soul over the years, it can take its toll so much until we are feeling complete 'burnout' which Estes explains is more like a starving soul.

Listen below to a story about Cee-al, a journey to meet her and sit on the shore, as she wraps you i your selkie skin.

Check out this podcast where I joined Hilary Campbell of the Antlered Path who shares musings from the sea, who invited me for a chat on selkies.

The Antlered Path Podcast. The Sacred Sea 2.7

Click on the options below to listen:

Check out this podcast where I joined Hilary Campbell of the Antlered Path who shares musings from the sea, who invited me for a chat on selkies.

Zoom gathering for Monday 4th My - details below for paid subscribers

• Bealltainn need fires

• A story from the Shrine of the Cailleach

• Something to consider from the current Reclaiming Grief series

• Bring some paper and pens, to write some insights

Read more

Last night I took the dog out a walk under the last light of twilight. Venus was shining bright over Carman Hill, my favourite hill.

I’ve known this hill since before I could walk, as my parents took me when I was still in a pram. My earliest memories I can recall are from around ten, when my dad would take us kids walking in the hills around Loch Lomond.

The Hare & the Well - A story from the Well at the bottom of Carman Hill (link at bottom of the page)

At the top of this small hill, although it took a big walk to get there - I always felt a sense of coming home. Yet this place felt different, it sounded different - while there was a drone of traffic from the roads below (depending on the wind direction), this place swooped you up in invisible arms and wrapped you in a silent embrace.

Not Carman - but a good illustration of an Iron Age hillfort. This one is Pendinas, Cardigan Bay, Wales. Click on image for source.

Around 2,000 years ago an Iron Age Fort existed at the top of this hill. People busy with their daily lives, births, lives and deaths and everything between. Celebrating what needed to be marked from small things to festivals, to deaths and honouring that last journey home.

When I was wee I was utterly convinced that all layers of time still exist and if you we're quiet enough at just the right moon phrase, or time of day - you could see these people still going on with their lives.

Sitting atop Carman Hill looking down to the reservoir, and the sliver of the River Clyde in the distance

The first piece of writing that I remember being really proud of was when I was around 14 or so and wrote an essay in English class about falling asleep on the hill around twilight. On waking I was sitting around a fire, surprised to be in the in company of others. Most folks gazing into the fire, some poking it with sticks and as they did the flames jumping into life from the embers. No one seemed to notice me, and so I did the same staring and daydreaming into he fire.

Carman Hill in the centre of the photo - during a winter cloud conversion

Last night, as I walked between two of the blocks of flats, I saw the most beautiful scene that brought me straight back to my 14 year old self. Venus was high in the sky, a seamless twilight sky with an orange glow above the outline of the hill.

I felt if I squinted hard, I’d be able to see a fire at the top of the hill, the one which the old ones were gathered around.

This is the magic of twilight, which grows as the evenings become longer.

My dad tells me stories of remembering Beltane fires lit atop hills near Galway where he grew up. There is a possibility that Carman once held Beltane fires. Our local mountain is Ben Lomond, on the banks of Loch Lomond, and although its Gaelic name is beacon mountain - I think that store due to it’s familiar shape, and Scotlands most southerly Monroe, rather than a site known for actual sacred fires.

Tigh nam Bodach (Shrine of the Cailleach)

Là Bealltainn has changed for me over the decades, I experience it very differently now in my 50’s from how I celebrated as a teenager, or in my 20’s or 30’s. Fire has always been central, with mask making, drinking and much dancing. Now I’d rather have these wee moments of reflection that brings me into a stillness, a place in twilight - a very much stepping from this world and into a different realm.

Beltane is the time when the stones of the Shrine of the Cailleach, Tigh nam Bodach, are removed from their winter sheiling and come back into the glen again, back into the world - marking our gradual shift from a time of the small sun into a time of the big sun.

Sadly that transition now means wild fires, and the unpredictable weather of climate breakdown and the start of annual weather events, which were once only once in a hundred years weather events.

It’s the time when the Cailleach spreads her old plaid down on the earth, and as she does it becomes green again, to match the land. Was the land changing with her cloak, or her cloak changing with the land? The old crone rebirths the greening. All winter she has been striking life down dead, ensuring death takes place, for without death there can be no rebirth - and no green at Là Bealltainn.

The Hare & the Well - A story from the Well at the bottom of Carman Hill (link at bottom of the page) Click image to read a tale about the Well, not far from the skirts of Carman

Click on the above for the paper doll template

Zoom gathering details below for paid subscribers

• Bealltainn need fires

• A story from the Shrine of the Cailleach

• Something to consider from the current Reclaiming Grief series

• Bring some paper and pens, to write some insights

• Download the Paper Doll template - click image above

Read more

Three Keeners gather, remembering those who were forcibly removed from the land in the Highland clearances.

This writing was originally published under the name ‘Death is an Old Woman’ in the Girl God anthology ‘Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess'.

Click below to hear me reading it, the text is below.

Gather the Keeners

Death is an old woman sitting quietly at the edge of the bed of your beloved.

Some recognise her presence in the weeks before death, taking her place among the gathered ancestors.

She lovingly tends to the dying fox, badger, hawk and deer, as their ancestor’s circle around them, ready for their journey home.

There is a deep comfort to picture a loving grandmother there to receive our beloveds, and when our time comes, to be wrapped up in soft wings, and carried home.

Keening doll by Jude Lally

It’s often women’s job to tend to the dying and the dead. The sacred role of preparing bodies, rituals to be performed and the role of lamenting the great loss.

The Keening woman is known by many names in cultures around the world, leading the community through their grief, and guiding the soul home.

Throughout the highlands and islands of Scotland and Ireland, there were the women who stepped into the role of the keening women. Liminal figures, pulling their black shawls tight around them they stepped between the worlds and let their voices express the grief of all those gathered.

Keening Doll by Jude Lally

She held her own grief tight breathing through it and into the words she sang, her voice breaking, cracking, melodies splintering into shards of grief. Those present were invited to join her together in expressing their loss, despair and deep grief.

In her liminal place, between the worlds, behind her stood all the keening woman who had every lamented, each ancestor who mourned, back, thousands of generations. With the power of all that accumulated anger, and despair the keening woman cries, roars and grieves. She keens for all the mothers, fathers and for all injustices and every wrongdoing against women and children, four leggeds and wingeds, grasslands, seas, forests and mountains.

Keening doll by Judge Lally

We too are invited into the circle, to feel our grief and let our voices speak, for it is only through grief that we can weave ourself back to life and become truly alive again. It offers a resilience, a rebirth for an uncertain future.

Within the keen, there is a word of magic to keep the soul safe, as it moves from this world to the next. Let us utter the word and keep woman safe, keep deer and otter, salmon, seal and orca safe. Keep mountain, loch and ancient forest safe, keep standing stone and corrie safe. Let us embody the word so that our dancing and lamenting weaves protection.

Gather the keeners, for we need new rituals. We need each other, we need the tears, laughter and love, we need the magic and lamenting as the world unravels.

Click here for the introduction post

This is a series which explores taking the inspiration from old and traditional practices and creatively exploring them to bring new and meaningful layers into modern funerals and memorials.

With each main post in this series I am allowing additional posts to explore what comes up around these topics. This post explores creating a shroud for a doll as a way of wrapping, covering and holding our grief - I a world where there often doesn’t seem space to explore it.

There are also details of our next Zoom gathering - Sunday 3rd May. Which will be a conversation for whatever comes up around what experiences we have had with creative expressions at the end of life, or those we would wish to have for others or our end of life plans. With:

• Creative exercise

• Story of the Ancestral Mothers for Beltane - Shrine of the Cailleach

When my mum died, as I’ve mentioned here in a previous post, the one thing that I found both surprising and overbearing was the all consuming role of organising things. From finding the original paperwork from 1902 with the name of my great uncle, when he bought the original lair for his mother who had just died. In that small moment it brought us together in a a way. Through time I felt that connection of us both tending to things at the death of our mothers. A sense of him came alive, rather than just a name on a piece of paper.

Read more

In the first post in this series I discussed shrouds, and ways of creating a fabric that can go onto the coffin and be hidden, not necessarily seen if there is an open coffin.

Whatever I am writing about I sometimes make something as a way of exploring an idea, or to try and make sense of something.

I thoughts about the fabric being used as a shroud, or as a panel which is buried with the body and having remnants of that fabric left over. Much like when someone has died, you know they are dead but at the same time wondering where they are - then there is the juxtaposition of having their things, the things they used, wore, worked with - all left behind.

This is an obvious thing but also something so moving and upsetting.

While considering ways to use fabric and shrouds I felt the need to explore that space - the space between those of us still living and the dead. How can we measure that space? The doll is a way to try and represent that space, a space that both separates us and yet a space we are still connected through.

On reflection looking at this doll, she reminds me of the shore - the place the pieces of slate came from, the beads representing shoe and beach combing and the shell. Beaches and shores are liminal spaces, sometimes land and at other times they are underwater. This ebb and flow is much like grief, washing over us only to retreat, and yet some days we can feel we are completely submerged.

The long pieces of fabric remind me of seaweed, and if I were to lay this doll on the shore she might be taken out by the tide. Sooner or later the stitching would probably come apart and the fabric would dissolve over time with all parts returning the earth, much like our bodies do in death.

This doll was a way of reflecting what’s going on in a grief process, and on reflection I appreciate this mirroring of nature, of being tired to the ebb and flow of grief.

If you’d like to map this space, a form to explore colour, shape or write - click on the image below for a paper doll template.

Sign up if you’d like to support my work and join me on this series of reimagining death rituals - ancient practices for modern mourning.

I’ll be sharing some doll making instructions as well as a Zoom gathering

Subscribe now

Click here for the introduction post

This is a series which explores taking the inspiration from old and traditional practices and creatively exploring them to bring new and meaningful layers into modern funerals and memorials.

As we go through each post new things will emerge, as is the way with writing and making.

This post is mainly about shrouds, from making your own shroud with inspiration from some wonderful makers in the Uk and Europe. Of course, doll making came up, as for me it’s a great way to explore these ideas.

The doll in this post was once which invited me to think about and map the space that’s left, the space that’s left when someone dies, as well as the space that exists between you and the person who died - there’s many ways of looking at it - and there's a creative project here for you to explore that should you wish to.

Another doll idea which came up was in creating a shroud for a doll - what in your life might you want to mark the ending, or transforming of, or perhaps it’s a project you’d like to use to consider your own death (details on this project will come in later int he series.

This is a series for paid subscribers, so if you’d like to join us on this journey or exploration, some creative projects and a Zoom gathering (or two), please considering supporting my work and become a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Read more

When my mum died the best advice I got was when my sister said turn off your phone. I hadn’t even thought of doing that. I didn’t need to talk to anyone as my family were here. I din’t need to be telling anyone, for all that could wait. All I needed to do was be here.

My mum died in hospice. That is what hospice is, it’s a place for people at the end of their lives. Sometimes folks might get better, go home. But in general it’s a place where people come at the very end of their lives.

We sat in a room with my mum in bed. Someone brought in a tea trolley. The rattle of cups and saucers made me think of my grandmothers wake. She was in a coffin in her bedroom and it was mainly her elderly female friends and neighbour who sat around her, some rosary beads in hands, with stories of my gran admit the comforting sound of cups rattling on saucers. And sandwiches, even though it was a small gathering, what is a wake without sandwiches!

We each took turns of sitting in the room with my mum. The silence was comforting for there were no machines beeping, no wires, no blinking lights, no one rushing around, no alarms. It was quiet. Hospice proves a calm and quite environmentally. The family is left alone, for as long as they want.

A few days later when my sister and I went to sign some paperwork, we were asked if we wished to sit with my mum who was now in a small chapel of rest. I had thought it was enough to have sat with her in her room - but this little chapel was beituful, stained glass windows. There might have been a slight amount of make up, and someone had done something to her hair. It made her look a little more like she had when she was alive, for the face changes in death.

I remember how different my gran looked when she dies. I was in my early twenties and had never seen a dead person. My gran had quite a big nose, and it somehow looked a little deflated, and the make up - well she never wore make up so that was a bit odd. Many a person will say - ‘Oh, doesn’t she look like herself’, and I had been thinking who else is she going to look like? But she didn’t look like herself at all.

Bu there was a comfort in these other elderly women all sharing stories about my gran, all the while touching her hair and stoking her face - like she really was just asleep.

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I’m grateful for the hospice environment, otherwise the story was a possible 24 hour wait in an ambulance for a local hospital who had several wards shut down due to a viral outbreak. It made me think of all the people who has relatives and friends die during Covid and weren’t able to see or be with them.

I’m grateful we were able to be with my mum, immediately after death and honour her wishes within the framework of her catholic faith.

She was very open about death and dying, having been diagnosed with oesophageal cancer a few years before. Considering all she was going through in these years, and the constant difficulty of eating, she lives life as she normally had - full of art exhibitions, plays, and concerts and singing in a choir. It was only The last month and a half where the cancer determined her life. She talked about her death openly, even encouraging us to attend a funeral at her church so we knew the parts and the roles each of us would be performing.

What I hadn’t expected was how all consuming arranging the funeral, caterers etc would be. Who would have thoughts I would have needed to find the hand written receipt of my Great Uncle Daniels that he was given when purchasing a lair in the St Kentigerns cemetery in Glasgow in 1902. A Lair purchased for his mother, who died a couple of years after my gran was born.

Turning a long story short, who knew that when the lair was originally purchased it was with the condition that four bodies could be buried within in it. But now in the 124 years years later, and with the land changing hands into Glasgow city Council those rules have changes to only three bodies being able to be interred. The grave depth then had to be tested, and thankfully there was enough room since the last burial, of my Gran in 1992 that my mother could be buried with her mother, father, and grandmother.

My family are more Irish than Scottish, it is only my mum and us kids that were born in Scotland, the majority living in Galway. In Ireland funerals take place three days after someone has died. I’m pretty sure if you were Catholic this used to be the case here, but not any more.

It took almost three weeks to arrange this funeral and all the other things that are required. never mind when I tried to order flowers,, not realising the next week was mothers days and so no florist could take my order. But a quick visit to the local supermarket and two bunches of white flowers, some Lillies (which thankfully hadn’t opened as both my mother and myself take a reaction to their scenes, although in this case only one of us would be effected) and some greenery and with referencing a few photos online I made an arrangement for the coffin. I made quite an impressive displace at a cost of £28, which saved me £142, had I chosen the funeral directors flowers. Plus it was more meaningful to make the flowers, and think of my mum as I arranged them.

While I had read the bidding prayers at mass, helped carry the coffin and made the flowers - was glad to do these things as this was what my mum wanted. In her last d=few days, she had joked, but in that same way of being sincere when she said - no keeners and no bagpipes.

I needed my own way of expressing my grief, which I did on the day she dies, when me and my sister visited my sisters favourite beach. there as the rain streamed down my face, I cried tmuch needed tears as I sang and old chant, here bu the edge of the mouth of the River Clyde, whose waters flowed south then west into the Irish Sea.

It was a gesture it didn’t need to be perfect, I didn’t quite know the words- but I played a part in singing. my mother’s soul home.

Even thought I work with keening, with arranging the funeral and now a mountain of paperwork and online enquiries I don’t have space for some of my grief, and so I’ve bundled some of it up and in several weeks I will bring it to my annual grief Pilgrimage. Many insights and ideas have come from this grief pilgrimage so that it will be both strange and comforting and I know unexpected to do all the rituals we do there - from walking the coffin road, to keening circles and have this new bundle of grief with me.

On reflection, even although it’s barely been a month since my mum died, and although there is that holiness within the three days after someone dies - it is never too late to express any grief ritual. It’s never too late to make art, hold memorials, rituals all those ways we have to honour our dead. In fact these things are ongoing to help us heal and express grief.

Reimagine Death Rituals is a course for incorporating traditiopnalal elements, and their inspiration into modern day funerals and memorials. There will be Zoom gatherings so we can share ideas and hear one another’s stories. It’s about recalling aspects of funerals so that we can engage with death, reclaiming rituals around dying and take an active role.

When my mum died, and we gathered around the coffin eight of us holding the cords as her body was lowered into the ground. It was raining and big black umbrellas - after everyone had walked away, I place a doll into the grave. It was a doll I made, a doll I made when I first found out she had cancer and attended one of her first chemo sessions. A doll I thought would be full of gried=f and dark - but turned out to be a doll with lichen and lightness to her, a doll who told me she was called joy. I didn’t really want to part with this doll, but was told (by ancestral figures or the doll - I’m not really sure) but it was made clear that this was the doll which was to go into the grave.

Clothing the Departed

• Clothing the dead

• Shrouds and decorated fabric

• Other meaningful items - from letters to prayer beads

Lamentation and farewell

• History of bagpipers and keeners at the grave

• Use of Scottish laments, many of which are hundreds of years old

Gifts for the Journey

• Historical practice of grave goods

• Dolls to accompany the dead

• Hebridean Iron Age Ritual - burying the dead with ancestral bones

The Wake Reimagined

• A traditional wake - in the presence of the dead

• Your own memorial with a keening circle

Walking the Last Road

• In Scotland it was traditional to carry the body on coffin roads to the cemetery where they would be buried. In Ireland they walk behind the hearse to the Church, some even walking many miles from their home to the Church, sometimes barefoot.

• How to create a pilgrimage memorial walk

There will also be a Zoom call with this course for conversations around the topics and a place to share ideas.

This is an offering for paid subscribers - so I extend an invitation if you’d like to join me for this exploration for Reimagining Death Rituals - ancient practices for modern mourning.

Hi folks,

Many thanks to everyone who got in touch after my mums death.

I had to step back from everything for a while, and to be truthful I didn’t know where to start about writing about this.

But I’m returning to Substack next week and I’ll share details of a new course I’ll be offering, much of this from my own experience of organising a funeral.

There will also be Zoom gatherings where we can share our thoughts, ideas and experiences.

Wishing you an inspired weekend,

Jude x

Painting by Jude Lally - Ancestral Beings

Somewhere along the way in life I was introduced to Judith Deurk’s book A circle of Stones, a book written around the central question of ‘How might your life have been different’. The stories explore just how you life ight the idea of women how indeed might our life be different if you had grown up supported by a circle of older and wiser women in community.

This inspired me to write my own story, based around this question.

Painting by Jude Lally - Amanita

What if we still raised the keen when grief flooded in

And that when one of our beloveds died we cared for them with our own hands

Gently washing the bodies, anointing them in oils

All the while singing songs that have been sung were sung for generations

What if we wrapped our beloved dead in shrouds that each of us had created when they were alive

Gatherings where stories were shared and tea poured

Each piece of fabric made with symbols and images meaningful to us

Each stitch a prayer, each colour a story

Connecting us in a long lineage of generations of women who did this before us, and those still to come, knowing they will carry out the same ritual

What if we still had within our midst keening women who carried the songs and the bardic poems

The women who were able to gauge the room and bring the ceremony each of us needed

And all the while she navigating this space and the otherworld

Stepped between the worlds, guiding the soul home

What if we greeted the gathering ancestors

Awaiting on the other side to welcome the dead home

What if we truly believed with heart and soul that death was simply a step away,

Just a breath away and our beloveds always close,

How then might our lives be different?

This piece was written by the inspiration of the question ‘How might your life have been different’ a central question in Judith Duerk’s book.

I am in the middle of arranging my mother’s funeral. There are odd requests of having to find the name of the original person who purchased the lair in 1900, which required much detective work. There’s death certificates and flower choices, does the church hall have an urn and how many gluten-free vegetarian sandwiches do we need.

How many people carry the coffin - can I do it? What hymns, what’s the weather, what colour of flowers - all the usual stuff. And among it all I’m happy to know that these things were all my mums wishes.

This is my mother’s choices within her faith. A church lead by a priest who knew her well and met her passion for social justice. I’m glad he knew her well - her dark sense of humour, turning up to meetings that sprouted great grassroots projects.

My question is how will I honour my mother? An inspiration is in Björk’s tribute to her own mother.

Björk salutes her late mother Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir on her new song “Ancestress,” the third pre-release track from her upcoming album Fossora. In the Andrew Thomas Huang-directed video, Björk, in a flowing red dress and black, beak-like headpiece, walks amid mountains and caves in tandem with dancers and musicians playing gongs and violins.

Björk’s son Sindri Eldon sings on the track, which she says represents her mother’s “story seen from my point of view” and was written just after her funeral. “It is written in chronological order. The first verse is my childhood and so on. Only recently did I discover that this song is probably somehow inspired by an Icelandic song, ‘Grafskrift,’ which is somehow a very direct and patriarchial account of someone’s life. I probably wanted to approach this in a more feminine way — her biological and emotional story, not her professions, partners or dates of birth and death.”

Björk goes on to explain why she hasn’t been able to attend funerals for 20 years, “as something in them rubbed me the wrong way. Possibly a big part of it is after having lived a life of thousand concerts, I probably have too strong ideas on how a ritual should be, what kinda sound, musical structure [and] words. It took me all this time to discover that for me all funerals should be outside. Probably what was offending me most was how can one set off the spirit in such a claustrophobic environment as a church? When the soul sets off, it needs to be outside so there is room for how enormous it becomes when it merges with the elements.” (Click here for source)

I particularly like this thought of the soul needing to be outside - and in my previous post I shared about helping sing my mothers soul home

How might you like to honour your mother, or how have you?

Eileen Patricia Lally 1944 - 2026

I imagined I’d be absolutely devastated when my mum died, so it was a surprise to find myself in a deep sense of calm.

I know this will change, perhaps somewhere in the moments I reach for the phone to ask her something, or a song makes me catch my breath.

Perhaps there’s something about the fact that I’ve considered her death for years. We talked about death a lot, she was very clear about how she wanted the end of her life to be. Her last days weren’t easy, but within the district nurse visits and ambulances, my sister and I remained calm, and somehow, against all the odds, she got a bed in the hospice she wanted to be at end of her life.

Peace

I hadn’t realised what hospices offer. They gave us the gift of space, and time. There was no rushing, no hurrying. There was no beeping machines, no tubes or drips and no harsh lighting. They gave us a reassuring quiet at 4 am in the morning, when we arrived just after she had died. Peace and calm walk their carpeted corridors.

This was my mother’s death, and how she wanted to die. There was a comfort to know what she wanted, where she wanted to be, the hymns that will be sung at the church she attended and the place she will be returned to the earth.

The best advice someone gave me was silence my phone. I hadn’t even thought I could do this, and just take time. No commitments, not ‘have’ to speak to anyone, to exist in a little bubble as you try to manage through the day. I knew only too soon we’d be rushed into funeral arrangements. This is a space many don’t get, so I appreciated it all the more.

I’ve thought about this woman’s death every days for countless years and so I am surprised I haven’t been bowled over by a great wave of despair. I know this feeling of calm won’t last, it will change and maybe at some I will wail and cry - but that wave will crash and won’t last. I noted my mother saying in my direction - no keeners or pipers - once both were equally important in Scottish death rituals.

Already I’ve picked up my phone several times to tell her this or that, and while I’ve felt a pang of sadness, I’ve also thought that she now already knows what I was going to tell her. I have this added sense of her with me, that I can do things for both of us.

There are of course questions I didn’t ask, information I didn’t write down but in the sphere of things these things don’t matter.

The day she died I did glance at my phone to check the time, and in those split seconds I saw a post that really spoke to my heart and soul. has the most wonderful series in honouring the tidal saints by praying with the tides. As February is the month of Brighid, she was praying with St Bride of the Isles Tides. For 24 hours they gathered online at the high and low tides, aligned with the tidal ebb and flow of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

Reading this brought me back into focus, while concentrating on my mums beliefs and wishes, seeing this reminded me to root back into mine. To the robin that was singing in the predawn chorus. To the Oystercatcher, piping over the houses, whose night song often thought of as the keening woman.

The day she died my sister and I managed to get to a a favourite beach. It was good to let the tears stream, as my face was washed with the rain. Standing at the edge of the water I sang an old chant to sing the soul home within the three days after death.

My voice was met with the quick ebb and flow of a a rain battered sea, taking my song out over the waves, travelling with her soul as she began her journey home.

Links:

Jacqueline Durban Linktree. Praying with tidal saints, every 2nd Thursday of the Month. Next date, praying the St Cuthmann Tides, Thursday 12th march 2026.

This is a post from the archives

It’s 17 years since my brother died. I find each anniversary my feelings are often mirrored by the weather. There are years when my grief felt like a restless wind, pulled by invisible hands, unable to control it.

Then there are days of bright sunshine, yet growing clouds on the horizon, give signs of a storm building, thunder rumbling with the grief that could no longer be held back.

Today there is a heavy sky of muted grey. The air hangs damp, the sky unable to hold its grief. I rather like these days, for there is a softness to them, inviting a turning inwards, to tend to what needs to be expressed.

The mist obscures the tops of the hills, swims through the trees, like the ragged skirt hems of the great crone the Cailleach walking the land.

I take my grief to the hills, wailing out to the wind, my voice lifting up and over the crest, to tumble down the other side, perhaps startling a hare or pheasant.

Rooting grief

Tears join the rain falling in horizontal sheets. Grief brings me to my knees, bent over facing down into the peaty earth. It’s down here that I scratch the surface with my fingernails, down among the roots of the bracken and heather, and white threads of mycelium - here in these little soft pockets that I bury grief.

This isn’t a ritual to rid myself of grief, it’s to connect myself to grief - so that the rain knows the story and the skies join in with their tears. The grief goes underground connecting to the roots, and the bones of the long gone dead.

The wind raises the keen, and the ancestors crowd around supportingly.

This is why I bring my grief to the hills, and bury it in the soil - to join in with the stories of this place, layer upon layer, just as the peat it builds up in layers over eons.

To root grief is to plant it, to give it over to the natural rhythms, to let it ebb and flow. To let it die back into the bone, and then grow again anew in the spring, but taking a different form. Ebb, flow, grief never leaves us, it just changes form.

There will be days like today when it moves in like a storm, catches you in the grip of a sudden downpour, only to leave again with the clouds parting and the sun shining.

Digital art made with a photo of the actual salmon bones - image / English Heritage

1,100 years ago a man was buried in Lindisfarne, a small island off the north east of land which was once known as Engla land (land of the Angles), which is only accessible at low tide.

While salmon vertebrae have a naturally occurring hole in the centre it had been observed that the bones has been widened, either deliberately to help with threading or perhaps by years of use. What this collection of salmon beads are, is the oldest known set of prayer beads found in the UK.

Similar beads made from modified fish bones have been found at the medieval chapel at Chevington, also in Northumberland. These were made from Atlantic cod, among other fish, and dated from the 13th or 14th century, making this discovery of the salmon bone set at Lindisfarne significantly older.

Lindisfarne

As someone who makes prayer beads, my mind reaches back to a time when this man was alive. Lindisfarne has always held a threshold quality, the journey requiring the navigating of tides. I imagine the beads being held between finger and thumb as prayers were uttered in the pre-dawn, the tide still covering the causeway, perhaps leaving the island feeling cut off from the rest of the world.

The beads were made from salmon vertebrae, small hollow bones, once part of a living being. These fish hatch from eggs which would have been laid in local streams. As they develop they adapt to salt water and answer the call of a great migration which will take them thousands of miles out to sea. They live out at sea for almost seven years until they feel the call again, to return to their place of birth.

There is something holy about making prayer beads from a fish whose entire life is a call of pilgrimage. I wonder who gathered the bones and cleaned them? Did they come from a dead salmon at the end of their journey, or perhaps the bones were gifted?

As someone who makes prayer beads, I like to consider when he might have used the beads, reaching for them for comfort but also in times of fear, perhaps when someone shouted in terror that they could see Viking longboats approaching.

How did this person engage with the land around them. Did they honor the great journey of the salmon. Living in a costal area, you rely and survive on fish. These people were shaped by the land around them, the ebb and flow of the tide, and the movement of shoals of fish.

When I string beads using stone or bone, wood or shell, much like doll making, I feel part of a long linage, of people who made these sacred tools.

These beads have had a long journey of pilgrimage, from stream to ocean, and then returning home. Bone gathered, held in prayer, from burial to excavation - a long story of salmon prayer.

Click here to check my new prayer beads in the Shop

Links

Britain’s oldest prayer beads—buried more than 1,000 years ago—to be displayed in new museum on remote island

Amazing Artefacts: Britain’s earliest medieval prayer beads are made from fish bone

Earliest prayer beads in Britain made of salmon vertebrae

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Hi folks,

Apologies I have to postpone tonight’s Keening Circle until tomorrow (Tuesday 3rd February).

I have been working on my mums end of life plans (she’s still with us, but wishes to get all the details organised). I hadn’t realised how emotionally overwhelming all of this can be.

This is my life, a little unpredictable, I’m sure you’ll understand.

Hope you are able to join me tomorrow.

Tomorrow I have planned:

• Discussion around ‘Imbolc vows’

• A guided story with women in the Hebrides welcoming in Brighid on Imbolc Eve

• Musical journey - an opportunity to sit, dance, or to lie down with your grief

Feel free to bring some paper and coloured pencils, pens, to write your insights and intentions for Imbolc, which you can then turn into a paper cross.

Everyone is welcome tomorrow, the old link has been updated and will still work - but here it is again:

Time: Tuesday Feb 3, 2026 07:00 PM UK

Click here for a time convertor

Click here to join the Zoom Meeting

Direct URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83017133550?pwd=7xbP8X8cF7CQ8HNndy5XmbnNP3dIkh.1

Meeting ID: 830 1713 3550

Passcode: Imbolc26*

Check out our grief pilgrimages

Brighid’s crosses, also called Brighid’s wheels, are symbols of protection. Traditionally placed above the thresholds of the house, such as doorways and windows, offering protection to those living in the house as well as offering protection to the physical structure of the house.

Crosses were traditionally made on Imbolc eve (the eve of Brighid’s festival) using rushes or straw. At each Imbolc, the new cross was often hung in the rafters of the kitchen offering protection throughout the year. The old cross was either left in its place or taken outside and buried or burnt. Sean O Duinn (The Rites of Brigid: Goddess and Saint) explains it wasn’t unusual to come across houses with around 50 crosses in the rafters.

The cross is similar to the swastika with four protruding arms suggesting the symbol is in motion - which makes 'wheel' a good description. The Sanskrit meaning behind the swastika is symbol good fortune or well being. Variations on this sacred symbol can be found in many cultures, possibly originating in the Neolithic and found within Mayan, Native American, Hindu, Buddhist, Jainism, and Norse beliefs.

Making Your Own Cross

A Brighid’s cross can be made throughout the year for whatever your personal need. They can make them out of varying materials such as corn husks, wool, fabric, pipe cleaners, raffia, or even paper. Your cross will also look effective with just one round the material you are using. Try using black paper and draw on the cross with colored pastels.

A cross made from a magazine cover. As the strips of paper are folder over to make this single round cross - hidden prayers of symbols can be written on the inside of the paper of card.

A cross made from a woolen scarf with sewn on beads.

Charm for Bringing Peace to Palestine (Inspired by a Charm of the Sprain, Carmina Gadelica Hymn/Incantation #13)

Last Imbolc I had adapted this traditional (and international) charm to extend out to those in Gaza. I repeat it this year

Cut some strips from an A4 piece of paper or card

Fold the paper strips in half

Place the paper strips with the fold facing the direction of the arrow

Pace the folded middle edge in the direction of the arrow

The last strip is the fiddliest - with the end of the white strip fitting between the blue peice

Imbolc keening circle details below. Aa offering for paid subscribers

Ancestral Mothers of Scotland & Gather the Keeners is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Imbolc keening circle takes place on Monday 2nd Feb 7.00- 8.00 PM UK, 2 - 3 PM US Eastern

• Guided story

• An opportunity to sit with your grief

• Plus time to share with others gathered

Zoom Link:

Imbolc Gathering, Mon Feb 2, 2025 7 PM UK

Click here for a time convertor

Click here to join the Zoom Meeting

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83531152963?pwd=ma009xkXs13cjGoGu2gbbMSxja2iwi.1

Meeting ID: 835 3115 2963. Passcode: Imbolc7!

Is there anyone not feeling a heavy grief for all that’s unfolding in the world.

So far January has felt three months long, while really we are still finding our footing in this new year. For those of you who might find this helpful here are three ideas for three healing circles.

This is a post for paid subscribers which covers:

1. Caim - how to invoke a circle of protection around you

2. Sinking into a meditative circle of prayer

3. Using the inspiration of an old ritual - using a circle of fire to protect

Standing Stone felted weaving - at Loch Lomond. A weaving of protection and prayer

1 Caim. Invoking a circle of protection

I often use the caim in prayer, in my mind it is cast out far and wide, just like Brighid’s cloak when the King of Leinster said she could have as much land as her cloak could cover (for her convent) she spread her cloak out over the land it miraculously grew and grew until it covered many acres.

A calm is an evoking prayer, one that is cast out and around you, much like the edge of a cloak as it’s picked up and thrown around your shoulders. It acts by offering a circle of protection.

…make the caim in fear, danger or distress...the suppliant stretches out the right hand with the forefinger extended, and outstretched finger while invoking the desired protection. The circle encloses the suppliant and accompanies him as he walks onward, safeguarding from all evil without or within’. - -

- Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica

Read more

Images: (Top right) Joe McGowan, Sligo Heritage. Others - Jude Lally

It’s a cold morning, with clear skies, the grass coated with dew. The rising sun highlights the top of Ben Lomond and the surrounding mountains with a brush of brilliant bright pink and orange highlights.

Jackdaws take flight off the roof, tumbling and playing, their cheery popping calls as a small flock of pigeons race by swerving and dipping reveling in flight and each other’s company. 

We are deep in winter, cycling towards Imbolc and Brighid’s return to the world. I love the above photo of a woman putting out her brat. Laid out on Imbolc eve, the cloth would have out sat overnight so as Brighid returned to the world the cloth would soak up her blessing.

The woman has on her best coat for the photo, and in these cold temperatures, it would have been laid out over the bedcovers for added warmth. I love how carefully she places the cloth. It reminds me that although many of my ancestors would have done this, I particularly think of my Great Aunt Mary who lived had a small farm in Dungannon, in Northern Ireland where she kept a few cows and chickens. She never married and pretty much bartered for everything she needed.

Mary walked with a limp, I think she had one leg slightly shorter than the other, so it was assumed that Mary would never marry. And she didn’t. I recall meeting her when she came to visit her sister (my gran) in Scotland, but I didn’t ever visit her on the farm. Years later my mum recalls going back to visit and the house was now a cow byre, with Mary’s furniture stored up in the rafters. The house has long gone but I’d still like to go back and see and feel the lay of the land.

I always picture Mary putting out her brat, perhaps the same piece of cloth she put out year after year. A piece of cloth that she might lay across the back of the cow who was giving birth - akin to the touch of Brighid herself, associated with midwives and new life coming into the world.

Perhaps she used it herself for a sore head or perhaps an aching foot or leg, or put it in her bag for some journey into town she wasn’t looking forward to. Most of all I think of her, doing as I do on Imbolc eve, to go outside whatever the weather and feel the magic in the air. As if the world holds its breath for Brighid’s return.

Folklore of the Brat Bhride

The 'Brat Bhride' translates to the cloth of Brighid's cloak and the tradition involves leaving out a piece of cloth, or clothing after sunset on Imbolc Eve. The cloth might have hung on a tree or bush or a window ledge, in the morning it was important to collect the cloth before sunrise so that the dew-soaked into the cloth hadn’t evaporated.

This is one of my favorite Imbolc traditions - the magic associated with it and in the stillness of the night. I often envisage a flicker of northern lights announcing her return as her very presence blesses everything in her path, the pregnant ewes, the melting snow, the gushing spring, houses and lochs, tall towering Ben’s (mountains) cattle, and the cloth and objects laid out for her – strung out in gardens, across bushes and on trees.

Harris Tweed on an Imbolc morning, left out overnight ice crystals formed, like little glittering blessings

The Magic of the Dew

It is important to collect your brat before sunrise as its healing qualities lay in the dew which was soaked into its fibers. The brat would have been stored in a special place, and never washed, as this would wash out the dew and so remove the protection.

The blessings remained on the cloth for a year and as it was cloth it was easily portable and so could be carried in a pocket, or pinned to the inside of your coat.

I read an instance by Frather Sean O Duinn who recalls fishermen putting their scarves out at Imbolc, the scarf might even be used to wrap up the Brideog doll. This way the fisherman had those blessings embedded in his scarf as her went out to sea.

Healing Qualities

The brat was seen as being particularly useful in combatting particular ailments such as headaches, sore eyes, toothaches, and in helping sick animals. It was used by midwives who aided both women and often animals in giving birth, and so when complications arose the midwife would have her special cloth, blessed by Brighid who was both a matron of midwives and healers, but also had a special affinity with cows and sheep.

A strip of your brat cloth would even be used as protection, and tied to a tree if a storm was approaching and offered protection to the house, those inside, and animals in the barn and surrounding fields.

A shawl left out

Creating Your Brat Ritual

In planning your Brat ritual, I find the best place to start is by considering what cloth might you like to leave out. You could lay out an item of clothing you use that doesn't get washed too often - such as a scarf or an item such as an altar cloth.

A Brighid doll with a cloak made from fabric left out on Imbolc

As someone who works with fabric and wool, I often lay out pieces of Scottish tweed, one year I had so much cloth I needed a wooden clothes horse. Some of the fabric was used as doll clothing, such as the green tweed cloak above, or as altar cloths, anything that needs some extra magic, protection, and a touch of Brighid herself.

Consider where you might place your fabric overnight, you may wish to drape it over a bush or a tree branch, porch railing or garden chair. I have a friend in California who leaves it wedged under the window of her flat.

I left the felt fabric (from the above photo) out on Imbolc eve, then sewed on quartz chips to resemble the ice of that particular Imbolc. I added a brooch pin, this way as I wear the brooch I travel with Brighid's protection.

Whatever your ritual, get outside, or hang out of a window and soak in some of the magic of the night that Brighid returns.

I’ll also be sharing an overview of this year’s Gather the Keeners Grief Pilgrimages to Scotland. This keening circle is open to everyone.

Join me this Monday 2nd February Feb, 7-8 PM, 2-3 PM US Eastern

• Guided Imbolc Story

• A place to bring and sit with your grief

• Musical journey

Please arrive a few minutes early as I will begin on time

Zoom Link:

Imbolc Gathering, Monday Feb 2, 7-8 PM

Click here to join the Zoom meeting

Direct URL: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83017133550?pwd=7xbP8X8cF7CQ8HNndy5XmbnNP3dIkh.1

Meeting ID: 830 1713 3550

Passcode: Imbolc26*

Check out our Grief Pilgrimages

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A Grief Pilgrimage: Creating a Keening Doll

This grief pilgrimage is not about fixing grief or getting over it; it is about engaging with it, sitting with it, and expressing it through our hands in doll making, and through the voice and body.

Keening Doll

A keening doll is not just a decorative object; it is something you make with your hands and soul. It is a prayer to your grief as you select materials, stitch and felt, this way the doll becomes a vessel, a place where lament and love, tears and tenderness are welcomed, and the doll becomes a figure which holds feelings that sometimes words cannot.

Radical Doll Making

Doll making is a radical art, an ancient tradition which can trace its roots back to figurines such as the Women of Willendorf, who is approximately 25,000 to 30,000 years old.

Your keening doll will most likely hold the same intentions that some of your most ancient foremothers placed into their dolls, hopes and intentions, sorrows and prayers. While we have many stone and clay figurines which survived, there was thousands upon thousands of bone and fur, blood and bone, twig and stone creations which didn’t survive. Perhaps part of their magic was that they were scattered by rain, and dispersed by the wind.

Liminal Space

Dolls are born out of both worlds. Making a doll brings you into a liminal space, a place our ancestors visited, a place of collective memory.

In this ritual, we are stepping onto an ancestral path, a place of collective memory, where the doll may come to embody a particular message that has appeared to people through symbol and story over thousands of years, a message that is always relevant, always powerful, always needed.

The Ritual of Doll Making

You do not need to be ‘good at art’, as this is a process you can learn, step by step and you will be guided through the process. You only need a willingness to honour your grief, to listen to it and learn from it.

You will engage with several steps of ritual in making your doll, such as:

• A guided journey to meet your doll before you begin Creating intention as you gather your materials

• A blessing of your doll once the body is formed

• Creating a meaningful symbol to be felted onto the body of your doll

• Honouring who and what you are honouring in this grief ritual

• An invitation to incorporate some cloth from clothing from someone special (or using their jewellery)

• Slow stitching as prayer

• Using natural items as embellishments and talismans

• Use of a shroud

Gather the Keeners is a week-long sacred grief pilgrimage on the Isle of Eigg (Eilean nan Ban Mòra — the Isle of the Big Women), inviting participants to reclaim grief as a vital, communal, and transformative practice.

Rooted in the ancient tradition of keening, this pilgrimage weaves together story, art, ritual, walking the land, and collective mourning to create a living grief practice for our time. Rather than avoiding grief, we meet it directly as it is, an expression of love, a form of remembrance, and an act of resistance in a grief-phobic, death-denying culture.

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The mountainous peaks of the Three Sisters. A painting made with soil from my favourite hill

There’s an old tradition which was practiced in England, Ireland, Wales, Germany, Netherlands, France, Switzerland, and the United States of telling the bees about important events such as who has died and who has been born, news of those that have left for a long journey and all manner of things that happen to people of the household.

In this tradition, if important events weren’t shared with the bees, it was thought that in the bees might leave their hive, stop producing honey, or even die.

While we might share our joys and inspirations with friends and family what do you do with your sorrow? Where do you take your grief and your unrest, your rage and despair - all those different faces of grief?

I take mine to the hill. A place I’ve been visiting since I was very wee, in fact I journeyed the skirts of this hill on many a walk when I was in a pram.

When I bring my grief to the hill, I don’t always speak it aloud. Sometimes I am silent, falling on my knees to the ground, curled up and held by the land. For the land is so much bigger than me, her presence so vast that I am completely enveloped. I lose myself and she takes over - my tears dried by the breeze; body held by solid ground. I feel my emotions being recycled. I am held, my soul is soothed, she has the power to reform, recycle, rebirth.

Each time is different. I have come to the hill on wet and rainy days, I have sobbed and added to the rainfall. I have buried things in her soil. I have brought offerings of whisky but most of all my main offering is myself. I have sang laments low and out of tune only to be joined by crow and skylark.

The land has witnessed much sorrow. In the 18th century the local Luss Estate landowner Sir James Colquhoun began some of the first evictions of tenant farmers to make way for sheep, who were far more profitable. These people who had lived on the land for generations were evicted. This pattern would travel to the Highlands forcibly removing hundreds of thousands of people from the land.

The next hill over forms the route of a coffin road where bodies would have been carried the ten miles up and over a steep hill to their final resting place.

My brother is buried in this land at the skirts of the hill.

An Autumn Equinox ritual - Burying the doll

Each time I visit I come home with a story. There is always an encounter, always a presence. Walking around the hill you might find yourself stumbling into a dip in the landscape, and it feels if there is an energy nestled there. Perhaps something happened there, perhaps you left something there?

Join me this summer for a week of reclaiming keening, through art, story and ritual on the Hebridean Isla of Eigg. While our August Pilgrimage is now full we still have places on for May and July

I have carried out many gestures of ritual on the hill - there were my last visits when I lived in the US and I would visit days before returning back. First visits on arrival. Pilgrimages for an equinox or summer solstice. Walks to share grief, journeys to share gratitude.

This photo of my gran and grandad is most likely taken in the local area.

What endures is my relationship with place. In all the life the places has witnessed, from being part of a different continent somewhere else on the planet, to being covered by great glaciers miles thick. My small relationship with this place makes up part of its history.

We have an enduring friendship, this small hill is my homing beacon.

John O’Donohue speaks about having a relationship with place in The Invisible Embrace of Beauty

Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That is could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? perhaps your favourite place feels proud of you. We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places. When the funeral cortege passes the home of the departed person, is it the home that is getting one last chance to say farewell to its beloved resident or is it the deceased getting one last look at the home? Or is is both?

John O’Donohue - The Invisible Embrace of Beauty

The woman whose house the top painting now resides with in Ireland shared a story that both her and her mum and dad had a special relationship with the hill.

When her mum died and the funeral cortege took the road which passes the bottom of the hill. I like to think that she had a last glimpse of the land, and the land a last glimpse of her.

She added that as the car passed a hawk in all its splendor flew alongside the car.

Whatever emotions I bring to the hill, they are welcomed, not judged and often transformed.

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Join me this summer for a Grief Pilgrimage in the Inner Hebrides, Scotland

If your interested in joining me for a Grief Pilgrimage this year there are places available on the May and July pilgrimages - click here for more details

Links:

Telling the Bees

John O’Donohue - The Invisible Embrace of Beauty. Rediscovering the True Sources of Compassion, Serenity and Hope.

If you’d like to hear more about my ‘Gather the Keeners’ retreat which takes place in Scotland this May 2025 - click below for full details and sign up for the Zoom gathering which takes place this Saturday 11th Jan

Gather the Keeners Retreat