The Nudge - Dispatch 11 | Spring Equinox 🦋🌿
“The Spring Equinox opens the veil between the physical and the spiritual so that a resurrection in our lives can be inaugurated. The keynote of this season is creation. It is the drive to move our lives upward, like a seed pushing forth out of the earth into the air. The Spring is the time when the creative powers we have been nurturing through the winter can be expressed to initiate a new world of opportunities for ourselves.”
by Ted Andrews, Nature Speak
Welcome to The Nudge | Spring Equinox 2023
This seasonal care package has been prepared by the team at The Trailblazery.
Dear Friends,
We are delighted to prepare for you our monthly care package, The Nudge, as we approach the Spring Equinox or Vernal Equinox here in the northern hemisphere (March 20). This is a solar festival of the Wheel of the Year, when the sun rises in the east, travels across the sky for twelve hours and sets in the west. At this special time, day and night are equal, hence the name “Equinox” which means equal night, while “Vernal” comes from the Latin word for bloom.
The Rites of Spring
The Spring Equinox is a time of renewal and rebirth. It heralds the awakening of nature and of our own creative life force or ‘neart’. It represents the new light and new possibilities as we emerge from winter’s hibernation with a renewed sense of wonder and enthusiasm. This moment in the Wheel of the Year is an opportunity to make a commitment to your life. It's a new beginning — a time of initiation.
There is so much wisdom and well-being available when we track and align with the cycles, seasons, rhythms and life force of nature around us and inside us. Our ancestors lived in rhythm with the natural cycles and honoured this time with ceremony and celebration. The solstices mark the longest and shortest days of the year, while the equinoxes mark days that are equally light as they are dark. The ancients believed that the successful progression of the year relied heavily on sacred rituals observed on solstices and equinoxes.
Like our ancestors before us, we can harness the rites of spring as as a gateway into creative activation and expansion.
Journal Prompts to inspire you, as we approach the Spring Equinox:
🌿 At the threshold of this new cycle, what is emerging from within you?
🌿 What areas of your life feel unbalanced or out of kilter?
🌿 What is growing within and around you this Spring?
🌿 How is your life different from last spring and what has remained the same?
🌿 Is there anything you want to leave behind in the passing season?
🌿 How do you intend to care for yourself this spring?
🌿 What seeds are ready to push forth?
🌿 How can you tend to your 'neart' or creative life force?
🌿 Who are your allies and expanders as you prepare to cross this threshold?
What’s coming up over the next
6 weeks at The Trailblazery:
As the Great Wheel turns we are invited to pause and remember what we have travelled through together. We are excited to let you know what the future holds for our community here at The Trailblazery.
Hedge School Bealtaine
Returning to our Senses | BeoBríomhar Arís
Sat, May 13, 2023, from 1:00pm - 09:00pm EST
Pictured: Cappassgl, Currach Botanica Bláthanna by Appassionata Flowers, ©️ Yvette Monahan & Sean Breithaupt.
This year, Hedge School is partnering with the Irish Arts Centre in New York on Féile na Gaeilge, an annual Irish Language Day celebration which explores the themes of the season of Bealtaine, which marks the transition from dark to light—from giamos to samos—and is a powerful pivot point on the Wheel of the Year, the map handed down to us by the ancients that honors the living and the dying.
The Hedge School, along with special guides and guests including Irish composer and music artist Brian Crosby, will lead this day of exploration and kinship through a series of workshops, conversation circles, film, and more.
Open to Gaeilge enthusiasts of all levels, from the advanced speaker to the absolute beginner.
For more info and to book for Féile Na Gaeilge, click on this link.
April Moon Medicine on Mon 3rd
Featuring Aoife De Dannan
Aoife Ní hEochaidh is a daughter of Éiriú. Working intimately with the land, ancestors and elements, Aoife is devoted to remembering the ancient ways of Éiriú.
Through fire and native plant ceremonies, sacred site tours, retreats, and ancestral celebrations, Aoife offers a space for others to heal, pray, and listen to the land. Aoife is an eternal student and guide of the land, she has trained with an Irish medicine woman for 3 years, as well as sitting in many ceremonies with Indigenous teachers. In her conversation with Kathy, Aoife will share the embodied wisdom that she received by living in the heart of a forest, an experience which cracked open her ability to converse and commune with the Plants & Trees.
Remember, if you can’t attend live, you will be sent the recording 24 hours after the event.
Recommended Resources
Here are a few reading, watching and listening pieces to nourish your senses in the days ahead:
♪ Listen: For your ears
Vintage Spring | Youtube
Songs For Spring | Spotify
Vivaldi – The Four Seasons | Recomposed by Max Richter
✦ Smell & Taste: For your nose & lips
To brighten the senses, citrus and mint oils can aid in a shift from sluggish to energizing. Lemon (Citrus limon), grapefruit (Citrus paradisi) and orange (Citrus sinensis) essential oils are great for use in the diffuser to disperse into the room. The essential oils of peppermint (Mentha piperita) and bergamot mint (Mentha citrata) may be used as a drop for palm inhalation. Note: Be sure to wash hands well after using mint oils.
Clarifying herbaceous oils to harken our Spring nature include essential oils containing more spicy and camphorous notes such as basil (Ocimum basilicum ct. linalol), black pepper (Piper nigrum), clary sage (Salvia sclarea), and rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis). It may be used in a carrier oil and used in a massage.
Floral notes that may also elicit states of happiness and new beginnings are the essential oils of rose, geranium (Pelargonium graveolens), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), laurel (Laurus nobilis) which may be used in a mister to spray around the face, body and our energetic field.
✯ Watch: For your eyes
The Rites of Spring by Igor Stravinsky
Vivaldi Four Seasons | Spring
The Sound of Music (1965)
❤ Read: For your heart
Salmon in the Spring : The Ecology of Celtic Spirituality | Jason Kirkey
"Spring" | Ali Smith
Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman
✬ Connect: For your Soul
Following in the steps of nature’s blueprint, we observe that early spring after the ground thaws is ripe for unearthing liver-cleansing roots like dandelion and burdock, anti-inflammatory barks like wild cherry and birch, and delicate, tonifying buds like roses and calendula.
While some of these plant parts are available to us all year round, paying attention to their growth cycles and picking them during the appropriate season ensures that their beneficial Phyto-compounds will be at their peak.
Later in the spring, the plant’s energies or medicinal properties travel up from the deep roots all the way to their unfurling new growth. Picking leaves, buds, and flowers during this time maximises the aromatic volatile oils, phytosterols, and other chemicals in the plant, which translates into stronger acting and more effective herbal medicine when we ingest these plants or use them topically.
Ancient harvesting techniques in herbal medicine call for using the moon as a guide for when to harvest what parts of the plant. Harvesting roots, leaves, buds, and seeds with this kind of careful attention and intention results in making medicine potent and charged with healing energy how we make our medicine matters.
❤ Touch: For your pleasure
Hope Macaulay is a contemporary, luxury and bespoke fashion brand of a young fashion and textiles designer based in Northern Ireland. Hope Macaulay pioneers and creates sustainable, feel-good Colossal Knits handmade to order by her team of local knitters in Northern Ireland.
Hope's creations are not a representation of reality but a world in which you may find in your dreams, inspired by her fascination with the mind, distortion, reality and surrealism. Hope’s garments are wearable pieces of art, that are bold and vivid experiences, each telling a dream-like story.
EnJOY these days - may the awakening light be yours.
Thank you for walking this path with us,
Beannachtaí,
Kathy and all at The Trailblazery
