Welcome Brigid, Welcome All

An Irish Goddess on Turtle Island

As this is the first issue of Myth Is Medicine, a quick introduction is in order. If you already know me and my work through my other newsletter or through KnotWork Storytelling, just skip to the story of Brigid on Turtle Island below!

I’m a myth worker, a story healer, and a coach for writers and creative entrepreneurs. My book, The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic was released in 2020, and my podcast, KnotWork Storytelling, which focuses mainly on Celtic mythology and Irish folklore is just reaching its first birthday. (Season 3 will begin on February 1 with Brigid: Rebirth of the Mother, a story by Laura Murphy, the poet-in-residence at Herstory Ireland.)

I was born in the United States, a child of mixed European heritage. Research into our genealogy has proven that my dad’s assertion that “we are more Irish than anything else” was correct. At least five generations away from Limerick and Mayo, I wasn’t raised feeling particularly “Irish,” however. I found that identity on my own when I was searching for magic and for belonging when I was a depressed thirteen year-old during a long Cape Cod winter. That fascination translated into a degree in Irish studies from Boston College, a year at what is now University of Galway, and an MA from University College Dublin in Anglo-Irish literature and drama.

And now… I am living the quest to make my own my assertion, that “Myth is Medicine,” into something real. I do this through stories and conversations on the podcast, my work with individual creatives and circles of women, and raising a family on the land that once was home the Munsee Lenape people. I hope that I am living in reciprocity not only to my family and my community, but to the more-than-human-world as well.

It is my deepest desire to understand, embody, and express something like what my Hudson Valley sister

Sophie Strand

teaches, “Myths are the earth talking to itself, seeking to express ultimate truths with personified elementals.”

Cruising Turtle Island: Finding Brigid’s Well by Way of Hopewell Junction

Along with two good friends - cronies in the wildest, most wonderful wise woman sense - I made my way under the rainbow lights of the Mid-Hudson Bridge and over to the Taconic Parkway. We were headed to the Moss and Moonlight Sanctuary in Hopewell Junction, NY where I was to lead a women’s circle about Brigid and creativity.

I don’t think I even wondered about the word “Taconic” until now. It comes from the Algonquin family of languages, and is given such diverse meanings as the name of a Lenape leader, or as "place in the woods" or "waterfall in the woods" or, according  Encyclopedia Britannica, a tree, a wood, or a forest. Franklin Roosevelt, one of the Hudson Valley’s most famous sons, advocated for the construction of this old highway. Presumably, when the road was completed in 1925 and named for the nearby mountains, everyone was more interested in a quick, scenic route for upstate visitors than they were about the tribes whose only highway was the mighty river to the east.

Admittedly, that night, my friends and I weren’t particularly concerned with the Native American history or the waves of colonization that transformed forever pristine wilderness into the greater Poughkeepsie area.

We were talking about our now. Aging parents, kids’ post-grad plans, unexpected career changes, a third grader’s questions about gender identity, and various aches and pains. We were on our way to an event to honor a goddess who was born in a country that was home to our great-great-great-grandmothers. A country across an ocean. Soil that was three thousand miles away.

This is the contradiction of America. These are the tricks of whiteness and “that’s just the way it is” modern life. 

If we stop to think about it, we’re briefly devastated to recall that a man named Henry Hudson sailed up a river once known as Muhheakunnuk, the river that runs both ways… And then promptly inspired the erasure of thousands of years of history for thousands of people.

But then, we sigh, wrap ourselves in the centuries that separate us from this historical horror, and continue with the now. We absentmindedly revert what we were taught about discovery and exploration, setting aside, once again, those deeply uncomfortable words like genocide and colonization.

The stories of the Algonquin and Lenape peoples are all but lost. I admit I have only just begun my own search for what still remains. (That will be part of taking my own medicine moving forward.)

For now, I know is mine to do: bring my passion for my Irish ancestor’s stories into conversation with what it means to be an American of mixed European heritage living on Turtle Island.

“Turtle Island.” That’s not a phrase you hear in typical conversation with Americans, even those who are tuned into history and a desire to redress the ravages of coloniality and whiteness. (A notable exception is Michael Newton, a US born scholar of the Scots Gaelic tradition who will join us later in season 3.)

It’s only in my dialogues with people in Ireland over the last year that I have begun to feel my way into a new relationship with this name that came before Amerigo Vespucci ever dreamed of setting sail.

I wonder why that is.

Does “Turtle Island” sound pretentious to US ears? Are we so thoroughly American we can’t imagine living on the shell of a giant reptile? Is our grasp of history before Alexander Hamilton just that weak?

Ok, I know.

This is supposed to be an article about welcoming Brigid, not about turtles and the colonial history of New York state.

Did you come to a publication like Myth Is Medicine looking for some lovely stories of ancient gods and heroes that will inspire you to do something epic? Are you giving me the side eye because an essay about welcoming Brigid is really about forgetting and remembering the Lenape tribe, the nearly lost nation whose name means “original people”?

Oh, but my friends, this is the medicine. This is what it means to care about mythology.

Maybe next time I will tell you tales of Saint Brigid that highlight her compulsion to give and give, whether it was sneaking bacon to a dog or a valuable sword to a hungry man. Those stories are told to invite us pause and wonder when we’re giving, when we’re taking, when we’re completely blind to the needs of others, past and present.

Mythic medicine alerts you to the contradictions that stick in your throat and make you question everything. It speaks to the yearning for an ancestral culture when you only have a family tree to hang on to (or not even that). It allows you to admit that your belly growls for inherited wisdom.

Next week, for Imbolg, the festival whose name means “in the belly,” I promise more stories of Brigid, Ireland’s goddess and saint.

I’m nearly bursting with excitement about the brand new story, “Brigid: Rebirth Of the Mother” that Laura Murphy will share with you in Season 3, Episode 1 of KnotWork Storytelling. (It drops early Wednesday morning.)

But you don’t have to wait for Brigid: I invite you to tune into Kate Chadbourne’s stories from last February!

Be sure to subscribe to KnotWork Storytelling on your favorite podcast platform. Or, you can always access the complete library at www.marisagoudy.com/knotwork-podcast.

This publication exists to take you deep into the stories of KnotWork, and beyond.

If you’ve been looking for a way to support the podcast, and my work as an independent author and scholar, please consider joining at the paid level.