Sunday, March 28, 2010

Musings about Brighid and Healing, Poetry, & Smithcraft

I've been thinking lately about the three areas traditionally associated with Brighid: healing, poetry, and smithcraft.

To me, each of those areas is much larger than the single word descriptor. That is, "healing" is much more than physical healing. It incorporates mental, emotional, cultural, and other kinds of healing, too. "Poetry" is a stand-in for the larger concepts of wisdom, knowledge, learning, teaching, communication, artistry, and related ideas. And "smithcraft" is about creativity in all it's forms, not just metal work. So that would include all kinds of arts and craft work; building, repairing, and maintaining all sorts of physical structures; and more esoteric ideas like crafting solutions and forging alliances within a political, social, or cultural context. To me, it even includes fertility in all its many facets.

And there is a great deal of overlap among all those things. Each of them involves aspects of art, f'ex.

I'm wondering how others view these areas.

What do they mean to you? What does it mean to you that Brighid is so closely associated with them? Is it important to you to have some contact or involvement with any or all of these areas as part of your work with/for Brighid? If so, how do you express each of them in your life? Do you consider any one of them to be more important than the others? Does any one area somehow incorporate the others (i.e., are two of them subsets of one)?

Finally, if you think in symbols, like I do, what symbolizes each area for you? Do you associate any objects, designs, colors, sounds, etc. with healing, poetry, and/or smithcraft? If you wanted to get a tattoo that symbolized the three areas, what would it look like?

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