Today is the festival of Brigid, also known as Imbolc or Candlemas, one of the eight great Celtic festivals that mark the seasons of the year. This year, it coincides with the full moon, so it’s a very special time. In the backyard, my housemates have lit a sacred fire in our clay oven for us too bake on today, lit by the flame of a candle kept burning since the new moon. Last night I went to Reclaiming’s East Bay Brigid Ritual, and tonight I’ll go to another here in San Francisco. I love the ritual, when we make our pledges for the year and hear them sealed by the rign of the anvil, symbol of Brigid’s forge.
Brigid was the ancient celtic Goddess of fire and water, of the holy well and the sacred flame. When Christianity took over, she became subsumed in Saint Brigid, whose sacred nuns kept her flame burning until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. But in the ’90, nuns relit the flame, and today it burns again, while Brigid’s festival has become a national holiday in Ireland, celebrated by festivals and processions where devotion to her healing powers blurs the boundaries of Christian and Pagan.
Brigid has a special importance for my own community. After Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980, the group of us who founded Reclaiming, our spiritual tradition, found ourselves in political despair. We decided to do a ritual to transform despair, and to do it on Brigid’s Feast Day. She presides over smithcraft, poetry and healing, and those qualities seemed relevant to our great fear at the time that Reagan would start a nuclear war. Her ritual also takes place shortly after inauguration day.
Imbolc—from Oimelc, ewe’s milk, marks the beginning of spring, when the days begin to grow noticeably longer. The light is returning, and the promise of life and growth is in the air. Granted, many of you are still digging out from under mountains of snow, but here in California, at least, the fruit trees are beginning to blossom and the daffodils are starting to bloom.
In our ritual we passed bowls of water around and spoke of our despair. Then we charged them with energy, passed them in the other direction, and spoke of our hope. We poured the water into a large punchbowl, our stand-in for a holy well, lit candles from a central flame and made pledges. One by one, the candles lit up the darkness, and we danced.
The ritual worked in the way rituals do. Reagan didn’t suddenly decide to be a peacemaker, but we transformed our despair to empowerment. That autumn, many of us took part in a blockade at Diablo Canyon, where a nuclear power plant was being built on an earthquake fault. For a month, we camped out, blockading again and again, being sent to makeshift jail in a big warehouse for four days at a time, hiking into the back country to cast mirror magic spells above the plant. In the end, a whistleblower revealed that in building the twin reactors meant to be mirror images of each other, some of the plans had been mixed up and they had built parts of the plant backwards. It took another four years before Diablo Canyon went online. And because of the strength of the opposition, plans for other reactors in California were scrapped.
The blockade transformed us. It taught us a way of organizing in affinity groups that made decisions together and then is spokescouncils made decisions for the whole, a form of direct, nonhierarchical democracy. In jail, we held talent shows, workshops, and strategy sessions, and organized to contest nuclear weapons as well as power.
By the next Brigid, we were blockading at the gates of the Livermore Weapons Lab, where nuclear weapons are designed and developed. We carried our magic and our organizing into campaigns at the Vandenberg Airforce Base and the Nevada Test Site, and into many other issues, from intervention in Latin America to preserving the old growth redwoods of the north coast and into all the global justice campaigns of the ‘90s and beyond. Today, in the many protests to challenge the fascist MAGA takeover of our country, I often find myself marching with friends and compas I made at Diablo Canyon, long ago.
We saved back some of the water from that original ritual and brought it back each year to be the center of a new well. We began using it to make offerings, and collected water from sacred places around the world, from gatherings and rituals and actions. Now, in my little bottle of Waters of the World, I have water from every continent and every ocean, even from Antarctica. It holds waters from actions going back to Diablo Canyon and those Brigid blockades at Livermore, from Headwaters forest, Seattle in ’99, Occupy, Standing Rock and today’s ever-growing resistance.
Last night, I was invited to invoke Brigid of the Forge. Here is the poem I wrote:
Brigid of the Forge 2026
Our nation is an anvil
made of icy streets
hammer upon hammer
blow upon blow
the window cracks
the skull shatters
the bullet rips through a heart
How much of this can we handle?
we don’t know
but we are being forged
tempered
to fine-edged steel
Murder after murder
lie after lie
even children taken
son in bunny ears
baby daughter
caged rancid food
foul water
and the billionaires engorged
with plunder
How can we possibly feel
anything but shame and scandal?
or allow ourselves to wonder
if something good might yet grow?
yet neighbor stands with neighbor
reaches out a hand, Will
you be okay? Will I die
asking?
whistle. shout. sound the alarm!
bring food
bring clear water.
document the harm.
record the slaughter.
No one is forsaken.
We are on the anvil
but tempered steel is strong
edge keen to discern
truth from lie.
what is wrong
what could be right
The Liberty Bell cracked
still a hammer rings out a warning.
or a whistle, a shout
in the dark
Beware the vandal!
Never doubt
In these murky days
how one small candle
can light
the way
one spark ignite
a blaze
Tonight, light a candle. Let a bowl of clear water reflect its light. Release into it all your despair, and let its light kindle within you determination and hope. We will get through this, together. We are being forged into the tools that will build a better world.
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This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.