I am walking along a dusty gravel path in never-ending golden grasslands strewn with boulders, noticing my foot falls on the stones and the pale dust marking my tracks and coating my feet. After a way, as I’m watching my feet carry me along, I become aware of some other feet standing still facing me, not far in front of my own, shod in old scuffed black leather. My gaze travels upward, and I see an old woman looking right into me with mischief in her eyes; she has a staff made of bone and an apron full of rocks.
She is ‘An Cailleach.
Art: Seán Fitzgerald
I feel her winter and wisdom in my heart. She stands at a magnificent threshold, it is in the middle of nowhere, yet a doorway stands here, of white marble veined with silver, and through the open doorway is a vista of mountainous ranges in varying greys and blacks, their vastness swathed in slow-swirling lacy mists. It is mysterious and a little ominous, and very compelling for my adventurous soul. I know that she does not intend to let me through this doorway easily.
I ask ‘An Cailleach, “Why do you gatekeep this place? I could just walk around your gateway – there are no walls, I can just go around!”
“Give it a try!” she cackles.
I am curious, so I must. I walk to the left, but no matter how far I walk the threshold is still before me, yet I can still peer around it, where there is only the never-ending grasslands rather than the mysterious mountain ranges. I try again with the same outcome. I go to walk around the right with the same result. I cannot walk around it or simply past it. This grand threshold has no footholds I can scale and I have no digging tools to try burrowing under. So I stand before my grinning gatekeeper.
Two wooden rocking chairs appear out of nowhere, as does a little wrought round table upon which sit two cups steaming with a long brewed tea of licorice, lotus and mugwort.
We sit and sip tea together, ‘An Cailleach and I, and she asks me of my quest. I tell her of my longing of opening in this dream space to awakening, stoking and nurturing my Inner Magician, of the work I intend to let flow through me, and that I am walking this path as the valleys of my psyche, to see more clearly, to know - and now that I am here and have been shown, I want to embark through this threshold in the middle of nowhere to know where it leads; perhaps it is like walking through a giant hagstone?
She picks up her staff of bone, letting her fingers trail around the many cracks on its surface, and tells me she would like to have my pelvis, my inner cauldron! I tell her she cannot have my bones, I need them! So she bargains for access to the void within. I sit with her request and ponder, as the tea I am sipping warms and softens my being.
My inner void, my womb, is my place of power I use for my own journeying. It is how I arrived here, after all. I am contemplating whether I can hold the potency of ‘An Cailleach when she wishes to travel with me. She, the birther of lands, mountains and winter.
I decide that I have come to this place and met with this famous crone for a reason.
With skin prickling in primal response, I tell her, “I will give you access to my void, with one condition: that your counterpart, Brigid, will cycle with you, just as the moon does, as does my blood, and in the way of the Earths Seasons - so I do not get stuck; I have access to the medicine of the dark, and my journey’s will always be cyclic, of spirals, returning to the light.”
She agrees.
As a gift, I hand her a horn with a smouldering ember within, and a beautiful smooth black rock, just like a dark moon void itself, that fits perfectly in her palm. She takes the gifts and places them carefully in her apron; then she rubs her hands together, and offers them to me. I grasp her bony yet surprisingly warm hands in my own, and the agreement is set. I step through the threshold and look beyond the mountains, to my unknown path and calling.
Thresholds can arrive when we are on a precipice, consciously or not; in the betwixt and between. There is often a guardian who stands at the threshold, guarding something sacred…they slow us down so we can ready ourselves. There may be a task, a question…and most likely a sacrifice.
Earlier this year, over Lughnasadh (the first harvest festival on the Celtic Wheel of the Year) I was thinking about the harvesting and threshing of wheat. To thresh wheat separates the grain from the straw, then the grain becomes bread, beer, or something else.
Being curious about liminal thresholds of the psyche, I was wondering if the etymology of ‘threshing’ and ‘threshold’ were similar; to turn something from what it was, into something else entirely. Wheat to bread ~ wound/initiation to medicine ~ experience to wisdom.
The threshold in an inner-world-sense is a gateway of initiation, sometimes a conscious decision to step through and face something, thus leaving who and what we were behind. To go past the dweller at the gate, and into the underworld - there is a metaphorical death, and a rebirth into the life that calls us anew ~ wheat to bread, if you like.
Sometimes we are thrown over a threshold not of our choosing, and when this happens we have no choice but to walk this path, and may have to trod it many times, in and out of the labyrinth, shedding skins, culling and remembering, as we dissolve and become.
I met ‘An Cailleach at the threshold when I went into meditation to open and feel into the archetype of The Magician, and the story shared above was the experience that arose within that, and then was fleshed out with ink to paper.
Are you standing at a threshold? If you are, can you become more consciously aware of what is being asked of you?
Thank you for reading!
Oooh this is powerful - in depth and symbolism! I’m grateful for your writing coupled with my vivid imagination (and sight), so that I can experience such a meaningful & transformative ‘view’ of this journey. ☺️
Thank you for this beautiful piece sister 😊 Very powerful! I feel like I may be close to crossing a threshold that I have likely been circling for a large part of life x