The Fearsome Anxiety of Spring

The Coming of Bride and the Departure of the Cailleach

Spring is a tricky time.

There’s the joy-filled energy of return, of course. The mornings bursting with bird song. The first tongues of green grass. The scattering of daffodils. The forsythia that seem to come to life in the space of one sunny afternoon.

But there’s something under the surface of all that hope. 

There’s anxiety. The too much and not enough that haunts the dreams, saps the concentration, and confuses the spirit. The sense that things are speeding up, but we’re not ready because that the long winter’s rest wasn’t nearly restful enough. 

Not so long ago, these early days of spring would be days of starvation and uncertainty. They still are for those who depend on the earth rather than the grocery store and the global supply chain. At this point in the season, stores from the last harvest would be depleted, rotten, devoured. The new shoots are full of promise, but potential doesn’t fill an empty belly or calm a troubled mind.

I see this unease reflected in my family every year. I’m almost prepared when our spring break is barbed with jittery, hollow-eyed exhaustion rather than nonstop vacation fun vibes. Almost.

It’s the burn-out from too much screen work and too little time in nature. It’s what happens when you live on food that traveled halfway around the planet to make it to your plate. It’s the weariness and the desire to finally set down all the busy work of modernity, just when nature is engaged in a riot of growth and beginnings.

It’s disorienting. It’s easy to feel out of step and out of sync. It easy to feel isolated and as if you’re “doing spring wrong” when everyone else is turning their faces to the sun with celebration and the energy to do more and plant anew.

But, of course, there’s a myth for that.

Bride and Cailleach: A Scottish Story told by Katy Swift

If we experience seasonal changes as psychological and emotional disturbances now, our ancestors knew the time when coldest weather melted into the warming part of the year as question of life or death.

Why would a planet that offered such abundance also put its creatures through times of such intense scarcity? Could it be the creator’s anger at the relentless, unstoppable passage of time?

Our guest, Katy Swift shares a story of Scotland’s creation and the cycle of the seasons, the story of the Cailleach, the goddess of winter, and Bride, the goddess of spring. 

The story is inspired by Donald Alexander Mackenzie’s Scottish Wonder Tales from Myth and Legend. Katy’s version of the story gives us the Cailleach as creatrix, the giantess who waded in the receding waters of the great flood and formed the land with mud from her creel. She is the mother of a great brood of gods, and she is beloved. 

But then, times change. Time changes the earth and society. Time changes her. 

When the Cailleach’s son brings home a sweet young thing, the summer goddess Bride, the benevolent Mother Goddess is truly replaced by the fearsome hag figure remembered in Scotland today. Blue skinned, rusty toothed, the Cailleach is the most frightening energy of cruel winter embodied. She seems to have no love left to spare for her children or their tender hearts.

And, as is the experience of a small family in New York’s Hudson Valley, bumping through this first week of April with short tempers and brittle nerves, the transition for these characters as they move from winter to spring is equally fraught and tricky.

Our guest

Katy Swift is a Socially Engaged Artist and Storyteller from Northumberland, now based in the Scottish Borders. Her work aims to create social and political change with individuals, groups or communities through weaving together Scottish Gaelic folklore, mythology, folk herbalism and creative practices. She recently graduated with an MA in Socially Engaged Art with the University of the Highlands and Islands, where she focused on how ritual and creative practices can help us to process our collective grief for the Earth. 

Our Conversation

• KnotWork Storytelling tends to emphasize the Irish storytelling tradition. Listeners will hear familiar names in this tale - Cailleach, Angus, and Bride who shares so much in common with Brigid - but Katy’s tale brings us deep into the unique nature of the Scottish mythological tradition

• In our most recent episode about Cessair ended just as the great flood waters rose, which is just where this story began, as the Cailleach, a giant, wades through the waters and creates the land.

• This story is tied to the Celtic Wheel of the Year, particularly the Scottish  Là na Caillich or Auld Wives Day or Ladies’ Day, the day that the cailleach falls asleep for spring and summer, which falls on March 25.

• Once these stories were reminders to trust the cycles of the seasons. Now, these stories are medicine as we grieve as a species, unsure of where we belong in the natural order of things.

• Katy’s own story of eventually falling in love with the stories of the Scottish Borderlands after years of seeking endless summer and studying the stories of Southeast Asia.

• The importance of liminal spaces in Scottish folklore, including past podcast episode, The Man Without a Story, told by Michael Newton 

• Keith Basso’s book Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, describes how holding a place name in your mouth is to speak the words of the ancestors

• The significance of place names in Scotland and the resurgence of the Scots Gaelic language