On Brigid's Anvil and Roadkill Magick

Alchemizing mindless death into worshipped beauty

Our Brigid dolls still lay resting in the Inglenook by the woodstove, our lamb’s skin outside at the threshold damp with Brigid’s dew, and the snow heavy silver skies tell us that this spring will be a gentle and early one.

Yesterday Brigid made herself known as the blacksmith, and a clarity descended on me that helps ease and sharpen my understanding on big sorrows and confusing pain that has been visited upon my path these last few years. I’ve been on the anvil, hellfire heat searing to soften my structures of self, so that she might hammer me into something different, something useful, something deliberate. Pain of being smashed over and over, folded in on myself, turned, hit, turned, hit. It isn’t violent, but it is brutal, and it molds one on a molecular level. Perhaps I’ve been shaped, and tempered, and now I have work to do. That is how it seems.

There was a bit of fear this winter as the slowness turned into depression, that lurid feeling that sadness is all I am, all that I will ever be, that I’ll never want to do anything with myself ever again. I’ve been through the cycles enough time that I should know to rest deep, and pray, and wait until the cracking open returns, which it surely will. And as it surely has now. Maybe that depression is a tempering - a slow application of heat to the point of almost becoming unbearable. Then the release, and the slow cooling down. It grants immense strength, but also immense flexibility.

A leaky hide trailer filled with mold has propelled me into a hide tanning frenzy, a purification ritual of attending to all of the death I have accumulated and stored. Plunging hide after hide into water, baptizing them back into a journey towards a new kind of life. The timing is perfect, this cleaning out and transforming stagnancy. And all of a sudden I feel like a newly forged knife, honed and gleaming, filled to the brim with wonder and dedication. I am in love with my craft, with the song of my days. Thank Brigid, thank the land.

With the moving of old Dead Ones, there is space for the Newly Dead, and we have been finding roadkill often.