Messages from Midwinter
Reflections & Podcast Series
A Chairde, Friends,
I write from day 4 of the Omen Days, which for me this year were inspired into action by a birthday gift from my gorgeous pal, Nadine. This came in the form of ANU Earth’s 12 Days of Christmas box, which contains a nourishing gift for each of the 12 days from St Stephen’s Day on 26th December to Nollaig na mBan (‘Women’s Christmas’) on 6th January.
The Omen Days are a divine conversation between you and nature, where you can open yourself up to receive an oracle from the natural world for each of these 12 days, each of which informs a month of 2026. Day one is January, day two is February, and so on. Our kin lines flow from an animistic culture, a world of unseen magic, where the viriditas, the greening wisdom of nature, vibrates its messages through the spider, the frosted blade of grass, the roll of the wave, through me, through you. We have to attune to this frequency to receive these messages. That’s what this time is about.
There are a whole host of wonderful resources on this practice from Laura Murphy, Caitlín Matthews, Regina de Búrca and on Substack Kimberley Ann Murray and Rebel Ma Rising, that will fill your grail cup even if you don’t engage in the practice itself. So far, my 2026 is looking like:
January - Listening
February - Crossroads: follow the energy
March - Evergreen afterlife
April - Soft horizon
It’s not too late to begin—you can always double your oracles for the first few days. Or simply, allow this to become a practice that informs your day. What if ‘soft horizon’ was not for April and just for today? What would nature have me know?
New Podcast Series
If, as part of these betwixt and between days, you’d like to cosy up with some new listening, myself and Sarah Richardson have just released the first episode of our trifecta podcast series, Dreaming into Samhain: From Apocalypse to Aliveness. We love to have the banter and this podcast is a window into our world, one that we hope you can find belonging in too. In this episode, we…
Explore the spirit of the horse as a psychopompal guide between worlds, moving us from the hustle of ‘modern’ life into the timelessness of the Otherworld.
Reflect on Samhain as a season of apocalypse, not only in the sense of destruction and decay, but in the unveiling of what’s been hidden, connecting to the archetype of the great goddess of winter, the Cailleach, the ‘Veiled One’.
Share personal night dreams of blue eggs in toilets, thresholds, and Jason Momoa, and what they are illuminating for us.
Offer journal prompts to help you navigate your own Samhain: Where are you standing in the unknown? What part of you is being asked to surrender? What’s gestating beneath the surface? What dreams and synchronicities are guiding you this season?
End with an otherworldly journey to invoke your own spirit-horse companion.
If you enjoy this episode, keep an ear out for our next release coming this Sunday.
I’ll leave you here with these words from Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘In Winter’:
‘Cold sunlight glinting on the rocky fields of cloud,
The high shrill note of Winter’s happy piper
Rises and lifts my dreamer far above the crowd.’
Keep on winter-dreaming, now is the time.
Croí isteach,
Jen x