I Voted with the Cailleach

Listening to the Wise One Who Whispers about Earth & War

I’ve been working on a newsletter to let you know about the latest KnotWork episode which opens with Irish singer, songwriter, musician Sionnáin’s powerful song, “The Wise One,” and flows into a conversation about the Cailleach, the grandmother goddess of the Celtic world.

My writing took some unexpected twists and turns, and I’ll share those Cailleach thoughts with you soon, but it’s not what I am supposed to share with you on November 5, 2024 when I am an American writer just waiting for this day to end.

Oh, that’s funny. What do I think will happen at midnight? We cannot possibly expect to go to sleep tonight with a sense of arrival or clarity. And I don’t just say that because it’s almost certain that the election results will be delayed and contested.

I voted with the Cailleach, and that means I am seeking deep transformation, but I don’t expect immediate answers or change. Everything tinged with the energy of the sacred hag goddess is part of the long game.

If we wake with clarity tomorrow, it’s because older, wiser angels have prevailed. It’s because the Cailleach and her kind will sent dreams that take us beneath and beyond these particular candidates, and even this nation’s democratic experiment.

I’m looking back at past MiM newsletters. I really thought I had said more about politics. I was actually afraid I had said too much. It seems that those were all first draft thoughts. In the editing, I stripped out the actual pain I felt as I lost faith in the Democratic party that raised me. My political stories are only scattered here and there, and are all set in the past tense: 

Our particular generation was born of hippies who washed up on the shores of Cape Cod to avoid the rat race. This Catholicism was riddled with contradiction and was generally of the “show up, stay quiet, and vote Democrat” kind. The Kennedys attended our church, after all.

That’s where I was. Let’s talk about where we are today. And let’s talk about what is to come.

I voted at sunrise.

My vote won’t set the ghost of my mother to haunt me (she’s the one who baked that Massachusetts liberal creed into my brain), but I felt little of the joy that was advertised at the convention. There was no way I was going to vote against reproductive rights, or LGBTQ safety, or some semblance of accessible health care for all. And yet…

Perhaps it's the ghost of my mother’s generation in their youth, the anti-war movement hippies who have risen and whisper that there is no real lasting joy in voting for the candidate who assures us we’ll have “the most lethal fighting force in the world.” The specter of those same 1960s radicals are muttering that bringing more manufacturing back to America is not a climate change policy. 

Once upon a time, the generation that protested Vietnam and spearheaded the modern environmental movement was radically afire with youth and revolution. I think they were actually attuned with the oldest of forces. They heard the whisper of the Cailleach and all the ancient wise ones who would speak on behalf of peace and the planet.

Though profiles on the Baby Boomers would show us their generational priorities have shifted over the decades, I have to trust that the Cailleach has the ear of the next wave of young people and we’re moving toward real peace and real climate restoration.

The Cailleach guides us through death and rebirth.

The systems that this most powerful and lethal country built in the last century are not built for this new millennium. But many of us are still trying to pretend they are. We’re good at pretending. We already have so much practice at pretending that this democracy was built for all people. 

It hurts to recognize the delusion, and it will hurt more as more of us really start to feel the collapse of the systems we were told would ensure liberty and justice for all. 

Maybe I have left these thoughts in the first draft folder because they feel too pessimistic, too dim. I’m in the mythology business, after all. This is meant to be a place of mystery and wonder, of working out the big, hard age-old pains within the confines of a nice costume drama, right? Well, of course it isn’t. I do myth work because it’s how I am meant to contribute to life work and future work. (Honestly, I have tried to take a more direct path to making a difference in this world. It’s just not my road).

I do myth work because I see the collapse around us. And because I also see the story of rebirth on the other side of death.

I actually feel more hope and a greater sense of freedom as I realize I’m no longer interested in the spectacle of the blue balloons dropping from the ceiling of the arena. Voting eyes wide open to the extreme limitations of the “us or them” system that’s been set out for us is both devastating and liberating.

As I said above, I am voting with the Cailleach. Is an ancient hag goddess born with one foot in Ireland and one foot in Scotland registered to vote in the United States? So many of her many times great grandchildren live here, it must be a way to become a naturalized citizen? Who knows. They let her into the voting booth with me all the same.

The Cailleach has seen it all. She uses the hollow bone of time as a telescope to see through every delusion. She is fierce and wild tenderness. She will give us a good shake when we cross the line in the limestone. She will walk away for a time, perhaps, in those sunny spells when we forget we need her protection. But she always returns when the winds turn cold and the nights stretch into the long dark.

When you listen to Sionnáin on the podcast, you’ll hear this song. It’s what’s been in my heart since our chat, and it’s what was playing in my head as I filled in those boxes at the fire station at dawn.

Learn more about Sionnáin and her powerful work, and hear her songs on Instagram.