What If Your Day Began at Sunset?

Imbas Dispatch #46

A Chairde,

The equinox has arrived here in Ireland today and with it comes a question from me:

What if you began your day at sunset?

Five years ago, I began continuously asking myself this question. Then asking my clients and community, and anyone I thought might be interested: What would life look like if I believed that my day started at dusk, not dawn?

Beginning my day at sunset has become an almost daily ritual practice for me. I love how it reframes my day to begin with rest (even if disrupted at times), not activity, to begin with dreaming, not doing. Today, I share an oracle card from Celtic Dream Oracle: Ancient Symbols to Guide Your Modern Life, inspired by this, and also an announcement…

Working on the oracle deck has been a slow, lush tending, which I am continuing to devote myself to. I hope the project will be complete by the end of 2026. As always, following my night dreams, I have decided that something else will come first - The Sunset Journal. This will be a printed journal for anyone who feels inspired to cultivate a practice of beginning your day at sunset. It is infused with the wisdom of our ancestors but for contemporary life.

There is a lot of research on the healing benefits of evening journalling, and also on how our perception of time can lead to chronic stress and depression. We need disrupters here, and these ancestral teachings have helped me massively in what can feel like my own time-poor life as a creative, entrepreneur, mentor, student, mammy, wife, sister, daughter, friend, contributor to society, etc.

I am working with the gloriously talented Steph Sheahan, who is supporting me with the design of the journal ( and in doing so, holding me accountable lol). Steph and I met when we studied Jungian Psychology with Art Therapy together at Limerick School of Art and Design, so ours is a mercurial relationship, rich with magic. Steph is also a former client who knows my work intimately. You can discover more about Steph and her sublime body of work here.

The Sunset Journal will launch this summer with a small print run and ship worldwide, so if you are interested, you can sign up to the waitlist and I’ll reach out to you closer to the time.

Now onto the oracle…

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Sunset

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Keywords:

Sunset, Lunar Consciousness, Tír na nÓg Time

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Suit:

Time

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Symbol:

The sun sets, journeying into the Otherworld, while holding a mirror to us in this liminal space and time, creating a portal to begin anew - to begin our day at sunset.

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Lore:

We tend to think of time as scientific fact but time is also cultural, an expression of a peoples and how they relate to the world around them. This question: What if I began my day at sunset?, is inspired by our ancestors and how they likely began their day at sunset, not sunrise as we do today. A question that enthralled me sending me down through a warren of sources to understand more about our ancestors’ perception of time.

There is well-known Roman commentary from Julius Caesar on how the Celtic Gauls measured time not by the number of days, but by the number of nights. Instead of saying something is three days away, with this way of looking at time, it’s really three nights away, almost like how children get excited about how many sleeps, ‘Two more sleeps until Santa Claus comes.’ Caesar also says that the Celts honoured their birthdays, and the beginning of the year and its months beginning at night and then leading into day.

In Irish tradition, it’s thought that the ancestral year began with the onset of winter at Samhain, the month of November in Gaelic. We still celebrate this today with Oíche Shamhna, ‘Samhain Eve’ or what has become globally known as Halloween. Samhain marks our entry into the dark half of the year and is followed by the light half of the year at Bealtaine, the month of May in Irish. These great turnings of time were marked with fire, Bealtaine itself may mean, ‘Mouth of Fire’ or ‘Bright Fire’. The ritual Samhain fires were lit at sunset, whereas Bealtaine fires and rituals often flowed into the coming of the sun’s own fire at sunrise, again illuminating how darkness comes before light.

A unit of time is described in Irish mythology as ‘adaig ocus lá co lí’, meaning ‘night and day with colour (or brightness)’. It is the absence of the sun not its presence where time begins. In the myth, ‘The Settling of the Manor of Tara’ (Suidigud Tellaig Temra), we meet at sunset coming from the west, Trefuilngid, a supernatural druid-ancestor whose size is of such magnitude that you can see the sky and the sun between his legs. He says that he has come from the land of the setting sun, travelling into its rising, and that he, himself causes these movements of time.

Like in many sister mythologies, the soul upon death travels westwards across the sea into the setting sun, into night, to the Otherworld or Tír na nÓg - the land of timelessness and rebirth. As well as being the direction of the Otherworld, the west of the setting sun is the direction of knowledge. When Trefuilngid asks Fintan mac Bóchra, the file, the ‘poet-seer’ who lived for 5,500 years by shapeshifting into a one-eyed salmon, an eagle, and a hawk, about the energies of the directions, he says that from the west we receive:

‘Her learning, her foundation, her teaching, her alliance, her judgement, her chronicles, her counsels, her stories, her histories, her science, her comeliness, her eloquence, her beauty, her blushing, her bounty, her abundance, her wealth — from the western part in the west.’

The use of ‘her’ here is reflective of the land as the goddess. Ireland, Éire in Irish, is named after the goddess Ériu. As you can read, there are treasures to be uncovered in the direction of the setting sun. The bards of this island knew this well, as blindness, whether real or simulated, was an asset to see into the Otherworld. Our poet-seer ancestors created at night or in dark rooms, incubating their visions to ignite the fire in their head - the imbas that shoots like a fiery arrow through the darkness.

Attuning our energies to sunset, dusk, twilight and night, not only brings us closer to our ancestors but helps us cultivate a lunar consciousness. The moon invites us to relate to our own becoming as each night she appears robed in a different form moving through her cycles of birth, becoming, death, and resurrection. By beginning our day at sunset we are fed by her mysteries at night so that we arise full, our souls satiated at sunrise.

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When this card appears:

What if you began your day at sunset? What if you entered your day through a portal of rest and receptivity, through the dreamtime? Or in whatever way this feels true for you. What would life look like from this place?

You are being asked to explore your perception of time. Get curious and play under the red fire of the setting sun, under the ever-changing robes of the blue moon, and cultivate your own ritual to begin your day at sunset.

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Invocation:

At sunset, dusk, twilight or night, as part of your own sunset ritual, invoke:

‘I invoke the place where falls the Sunset.

I invoke the place that announces the Ages of the Moon.

I invoke the place that fashions Fire in the Head.’

This is inspired by the Song of Amergin, thought to be the first poem invoked in Ireland.

Croí isteach,

Jen x

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Sources:

An Introduction to Early Irish Literature by Muireann Ní Bhrolcháin.

Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales by Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees.

Celtic Myth and Religion: A Study of Traditional Belief by Sharon Paice MacLeod.

The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion by Mircea Eliade.

The Sacred Isle: Belief and Religion in Pre-Christian Ireland by Dáithí Ó hÓgáin.

The Settling of the Manor of Tara (Suidigud Tellaig Temra), translated by Richard Irvine Best.