Fáilte, Welcome, to the Cultural Dreamtime
I’m Jennifer (or Jen), tá fáilte romhat, you are so welcome here!
A little about me…
I am a Dubliner born and bred, raised on story and creativity. As a child, my grandmother Frances filled my ears with Irish folklore she learned growing up in Pimlico, a working-class community in inner-city Dublin. She had a penchant for tales of the Banshee (Bean Sídhe), the psychopompal death messenger in Irish culture and so I have never in my life picked a comb off the road (more on this taboo to come…). Listening to Frances regale her stories felt like I had somehow been let in on a secret, on a whole otherworld of mythic beings and ways of knowing.
The Irish word for folklore is béaloideas, béal (“bale”) means mouth and oideas (“id-jis”) to give instruction or educate. This ‘mouth education’ that I received as a child urged me on to a degree in Medieval Irish and Celtic Studies over 20 years ago now. And so, the Celtic Otherworld has always been a part of my life’s education in both informal and formal ways.
Frances, along with her daughter, my mother Katherine, showed me how creativity was essential to life even in the face of adversity, and that creativity doesn’t simply come from ourselves, it comes from being in co-creation with the natural, ancestral and mythic world that surrounds us—from the Celtic Otherworld.
The Celtic Creatives is an invitation to journey with me into a Creative Otherworld of possibility and in doing so, tend to your creative soul and your sense of belonging. I hope that here you will also experience moments of craic (yes, an Irish cliché but one that’s rooted in the humour of a tale well told) and joy!
My Approach
My ever-unfolding apprenticeship to following my soul’s breadcrumbs has guided my work and academic studies in Medieval Irish and Celtic Studies, Anthropology and Development, Creativity and Innovation, and Jungian Psychology and Art Therapy. I am also a qualified Feminine Embodiment Coach and Non-Linear Movement Teacher.
I support creatives from diverse fields to (re)connect with the mythopoetic imagination of Ireland. Using ancient wisdom to inform modern creativity through myth, dreamwork, imagination, the body and nature, my work to date has emphasised a reclamation of the Irish mythic feminine (for all).
My approach is anchored in the five elements:
Enchantment (Wind): To unlock my heart to the wonder-awe of the seen and unseen. To be spellbound by the mystery within nature and the cosmos that spirals within all life.
To wander through the everlasting of myth, folk and fairytale and weave back threads of lumination. Not to reinvent the past but to reenchant the present.
To heed my soul’s whispers through the fantastical within me. To honour the creative spirit, imagination, and dream as the highest realm of [soul] reality. To recognise, respect and tenderly nurture this in others.
Beauty (Earth): Emboldened by my senses, to trace the texture of beauty in the life that surrounds me so that I can become more wholly (and holy) alive.
To relish in the creation of beauty even the simplest of spendours. To collapse into the beauty of a moment, into the luxury of being.
To witness the beauty that lives behind a facial expression, a word, a bodily gesture, a creation; that gifts it its spirit.
To see beauty in the creation and death faces of the Great Mother, like the Sheela-na-Gig, gloriously ripe and gloriously decaying.
To take joy in the beauty of imperfections; my own that make me, me; and others that make them, them.
Craft (Fire): To devote to quality, depth, richness of broth over consumptive speed. To be wise to the dance and stillness of seasons and great cycles.
To engage the dream that comes prior to thinking and make with it through images, my words, my hands, my body. To do so in a co-creative spirit with the Otherworld intuiting that in this way creativity is infinite as the Well of Segais never runs dry.
To sow my craft with heart and humanity trusting it will grow under the light of those who need it. And to cultivate the space for making in others.
To have the courage to change my mind, make mistakes, adapt, reinvent, evolve. To be an apprentice to life.
Legacy (Water): To contribute to the evolution of the Irish culture.
To embody the discernment of the king to apply a critical lens to the overculture, and the timelessness of the Goddess to enter the cultural dreamtime.
I am a cultural dreamer. I dream for our culture.
To breathe life into old ghosts whose origins are debated by scholars. And yet, their archetypal patterns live on within us, speaking to our soul’s code.
To be a Creative Ancestor, listening, really listening, to the voices of the past and the voices of the future.
Co-creation (Soul): To dance with all of the above by co-creating with the Creative Ancestors of the Otherworld, and through collaboration and community with others, nurturing our creative clans.
Your space here feels delightful. I discovered you on the “chat feed” where you shared how you learned a way to write your about from another substacker. And as I am in this part of my substack journey I adore your about and now set to rewrite my own.
As a multi-racial woman of Choctaw/Cherokee/Celtic ancestry, who’s main focus has been to speak with and from my Indigenous ancestry of the Choctaw/Cherokee, your space is inviting me to give more time to my Celtic ancestry. For that, I thank you.
So excited to journey alongside you! I also adore the photo of you and your grandmother - what precious souls.