A New Dawn?
On powerful things that seem to be shifting and emerging in Ireland but which I cannot name or explain
I had a much longer, quite weighty, research-heavy piece planned for today’s Substack, but it’s not quite ready yet. It needs a bit more fermenting.
Yet, what I have arrived here to share today and, specifically, what I have come to ask for your thoughts and help with, seems much more apt and right for now — it’s something that has come to the forefront of my thoughts around the Summer Solstice every year for the last two years.
That is:
Is something significant happening in Ireland right now, especially amongst women? If so, what is it? How can I name it (this thing people tell me they are feeling)? Is it a paradigm shift? A New Dawn? What?
As I write and share now, I am full of the vulnerability and fear that comes with sharing something before I have fully metabolised and intellectualised it. I am writing of nothing more than feeling and sense — of something that feels so delicate and hard to grasp that to try put it on a page and into words might destroy it. It can only be written about by bypassing thought and intellect altogether, because this is not stuff of the cognitive realm. It’s stuff of the otherworld (our unconscious, our nervous systems, our relationality with land and energy, our intuition, our felt-sense).
And so, I have to trust that something I say here might evoke something in you that you can relate to too.
I have nothing more to go on than messy, convoluted thoughts which do not lend themselves to being expressed clearly or easily on a page. I am, instead, relying on sharing several examples where ‘the thing’ — this shift, this feeling of a new paradigm emerging, how women seem to be sensing it and engaging with it most strongly — has appeared in my life.
And, by doing so, I hope to open the conversation to you and ask: Do you feel the same?
1. Last year, I wrote the following in my notes:
I write this on the Summer Solstice — the time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere when the sun’s power has reached its zenith and its apex and I’ve just had a conversation with a woman, a woman I’ve never met. She informed me that Ireland is the “heart chakra” of the world and we spoke about how excited we feel about Ireland’s future as more and more people continue to wake up to the buried knowledge systems and well-spring of power in Ireland’s diverse and rich landscape and lands. We spoke about how all the ‘old powers’ of the world — the old empires— and their patriarchal systems are crumbling under the immense pressure of their own imbalanced power systems. ‘What an opportunity Ireland has’! we exclaimed. It feels like the hidden, underground power that Ireland could offer up is the kind we all so desperately need — an earthy, feminine, grounded power. For if Ireland has long been cast and downtrodden — othered and storied— as the feminine mirror to Britain’s masculine power, then, we said, “let’s embrace and reclaim that”, for we need a different relationship to and conceptual view of power. A power that is grounded, led by the heart and supported by the head. As Alastair McIntosh describes, there is a need for a world shaped by an interconnection between mythos, eros and logos. Ireland has all of this (e.g. connection to myth, an earthy sensuality, and a strong intellect). “There has never been a more exciting time to be a woman of Ireland” we both concluded, “because it feels like we are on the cusp of birthing a new dawn, even when it feels like there’s never been so little hope”.
I share this unabridged and unedited, but exactly as I wrote it in the moment following a conversation with a woman — a conversation which echoes many more I have had since — where we both shared this tentative, bubbling, unexplainable yet heartrendingly exciting feeling that something is happening in Ireland. An awareness of a buried and ancient, yet relevant, force which feels ever more appealing and important bubbling up from beneath.
2. “Éire is calling us home”
All credit for this phrase goes to the wondrous Kate Murphy whose photography captures the magic and luminosity of the landscape of Ireland in a way few can. Over many a voice note, we’ve chatted about a groundswell we have noticed in Ireland, both in our different ways, but with similar feeling — something is happening, people are being drawn to Ireland, specifically to the land and the landscape. And it feels compulsive and challenging, healing and nourishing all at the same time.
Things, older ways and older stories, that were once dismissed as irrelevant are being reclaimed and revitalised. There is this urgency to connect with something that only the land of Ireland can offer that has led many living abroad to suddenly and unexplainably pack up their whole life and move back. “Éire is calling us home”.
And even if we don’t yet know why, many are trusting that call.
3. “The Future is Female”
This was the heading of an advertisement I saw on the Luas while heading into Dublin a few weeks ago during a visit home. I think it was the title of an art exhibition, but I have to say, I didn’t really take note. What the title referenced or introduced was not what grabbed me. It caught my attention because it felt serendipitous; reflective of a feeling that has whirred through me every time I’ve been home on a visit to Ireland — that something is happening amongst women.
I cannot shake this feeling that something feels different about women in Ireland. Maybe it’s because I am different? (I have been out of Ireland for over a decade now). But I don’t think that is just it — there is this palpable, pulsating power that seems to filter through the air that says, ‘the female is rising’ (I prefer this to the ‘future is female’ which seems a bit reductive or restrictive), and I don’t feel it in the same way when I am here in Britain.
I mentioned this over coffee a few days later with a woman older and wiser than me. A woman who is well connected; someone with her finger on the pulse of what is happening in all sorts of different communities and networks. I struggled to articulate the feeling, the best I managed was “Something is happening with the women here”.
“Yes"! she agreed, as I felt what I had tried to express hit something deep within her too. ‘Women are coming together in all sorts of ‘Meitheal’ type groups, and they’re coming together to support one another, to create and co-create’.
Something is happening with the women here, we both agreed, and it is very active and generative.
Even with these examples, I struggle to fully express what I am picking up on. But it’s something that is there, floating in the foreground of my awareness as I’ve had these conversations and the many times I’ve heard it said that Ireland has an incredibly important role to play in a time of great change and turmoil (a phrophetic idea that comes from myth). I admit to struggling with the latter, I worry that we exceptionalise Ireland too much, but then, there is something happening…… what though?
I would love to hear if any of this resonated with you? What your own thoughts and experiences may be?
Do you think Ireland is going through a ‘New Dawn’ moment? A moment where things are stirring and awakening? Where old ways are being challenged and threatened by what is emerging? Things that feel potent and powerful if daunting and unexplainable?
Please do feel free to send me a message, an email, a voicenote or leave a comment. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Belinda xx
I think you are right and I think many of us feel it, although perhaps in different ways. When I went into the woods this time last year, it felt significant somehow that the group I joined turned out to be all women. How harmonious and gentle and peaceful those few days were. It was a slow way of living in which I really began to feel called back to the land, it showed me that we can live sustainably in partnership with nature. I cried when I left. My husband once said that all the small things I did in support of nature were impacting on our sons, and I hadn't even realised. Maybe as women we are turning our mothering skills to other areas, and by doing we are teaching, and that is a quiet underground revolution, or movement that can't be prevented by the gardaí, or government's, or the judiciary. I love Mary Reynold's idea of ARKs - Acts of Restorative Kindness - linking up across the country; she's talking about rewilding the land, but I think women are also rewilding themselves, we are all individual ARKs connecting across the land. And the fact that the patriarchy defending a soldier who beat a woman to within an inch of her life, at this solstice time of year, as the Cailleach is preparing to step back into her power, has certainly got women across Ireland rising up in shared anger.
Thank you Annette. Really interesting and lovely to hear your experience and how you feel the pull too. And yes, that coming together gives me so much solace too. I feel like we can survive anything when we're in those spaces together!