Past Events

Deep in the heart of winter women gather on the feast day of St. Brigid, February 1. Also known as Imbolc, Brigid’s feast day is an ancient Celtic festival midway between Solstice and Equinox, one that marks a deep turning toward the hope of spring. The women gather around a sacred fire, a flame that burned for millennia in Brigid’s monastery of Kildare, rekindled now with revived interest in the figure who is both Irish saint and Celtic goddess. Brigid encompasses healing, art, music, poetry, fertility, midwifery, cultivation, untamed nature, and more. She is the embodiment of the Sacred Feminine. Yet her story is woven in mist and mystery. Who is this wise, wild, loving, powerful and holy woman? What might she be saying to women today?

After years of being apart, we invite women to come together once again on sacred land to recollect ourselves in this threshold time between what has been and what may yet unfold. Join Lindsay McLaughlin, Julie Gabrielli, Lisa Bardack, and Katy Gaughan for a weekend’s immersion following the Heroine’s Journey deep into the heart of the Sacred Feminine and the animate Earth. Participate in guided circles of story and ceremony, dance, drumming, and council. Go for wanders in the forest looking for what is in danger of being lost (our scattered bones), and listening for guidance for ourselves and for our community: the wisdom whispered by stream and oak, stone and hawk, squirrel, fox, turtle--all the wild inhabitants of the thousand special acres called Rolling Ridge.

In this time of cataclysm and change, the weavings of soul and the strands of a woman’s life remain essential for wellbeing, even as they must be experienced apart from one another and within separate boundaries of place. Indeed, the crises all around us can be understood as a full-throated call to discover the deep resources of the soul and the hidden possibilities for healing, both personal and universal, in each of us.

Solstice, meaning “sun stands still,” in winter marks the moment when deepest night lingers over the Earth’s northern hemisphere as the sun seems to pause at its lowest point in the timeless cycle of light and dark.  Our ancestors knew in their bones the sacredness of this time.  They entreated the sun to move again, heralding the light and warmth of spring, even as they relished the revelatory dark.