Hello, dear ones -
Happy Imbolc/ Imbolg (in the Northern Hemisphere). According to the cross-quarter harvest festivals, we are now officially in the light half of the year and life is beginning to stir in the belly of the Earth. Lambs and calves are beginning to emerge from their mothers. Bear cubs are being born in caves. And the great hag of Winter, the Cailleach Beara, is beginning to give way to Brigid (or, in some versions of the story, is dying and being reborn as her).
In Brigid's name:
We honor our hearths at this time and the fire that keeps Life turning. We honor what is tender, fierce, hungry, nourishing, and new.
We honor mantles and cloaks of all kinds - the draping of protection, shelter, and belonging over ourselves and all our human and beyond-human kin that we might yet make it through dark and dis-eased times through the remembering of hospitality and community care.
We also honor how the beauty of poetry and the rigor and devotion of craft and crucible are necessary to us remembering our own humanity. How the practice of both teaches us the skills needed for justice, harmony, and the creation of more beauty to prevail.
And we remember that grief and praise are the same, that both have a sound, and that it's our human-creaturely duty to not swallow those sounds until they fester into something our body can't hold, but to offer them with wild mercy to the world until we remember that Love is everything and everything is Love.
In her name, as well as the name of our Cailleach, we honor that life and death share the same threshold. And that even as we welcome and feed the growing of Life, Death walks by her side and we need both for balance.
May it be so.
February Updates:
This remains a bit of a quiet month in terms of offers. I've been resting some after the holiday season rush and letting myself sink in to my own period of hibernation, while still slowly working away at the workbooks and DIY courses I mentioned earlier. It's quite something to be a cauldron where all the ingredients of your life (all the studies, passions, lineages, failures, successes, influences, and experiences) are bubbling away, becoming a medicine to offer out to others. It's a process of deep listening into something you can't yet see, of letting it take shape beneath your hands as you go. Can you relate?
The "Wild Sacred Journey Podcast" and "Creature Comfort videos" (Recent episodes):
Just one since our last email, though a few more are waiting at the door to come through.
“Imbolc: grief, praise, and how life and death share a threshold” (16min) - some thoughts on this threshold of Imbolc, a Celtic cross-quarter harvest and fire celebration marking the beginning of the light half of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Translating out to “in the belly”, it honors the beginning of lambing season, and the first stirrings of life in the warming soil and swelling belly of our Earth Mother. It’s also a time to honor the arrival of Brigid and all she does to protect hearth, home, poetry, smith craft, and healing. (I forgot to say this in the video, but she’s also credited with being the one to bring keening - the lamenting sound of grief and praise - to the Irish and Scottish people.) While there are many folk traditions you can engage with to celebrate this time of year, I don’t go into those here. Instead, I offer some reflections on grief, praise, how life and death share a threshold, and why it seems to matter that we continue to honor death, even as the seasons build more and more towards the peak expression of life.
**the links above are all to Substack, but you can find the episodes on the Wild Sacred Journey YouTube channel, or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many other podcasting platforms.
Upcoming Events and Offers:
#1
ONLINE - Even though as I write this on Sunday morning we're actually in the middle of the BIG OracleFest Online Event 2026, I want to mention it again because I've been able to sit in on many of the speakers/ luminaries and receive their wisdom/ transmissions over the last few days and I think there's something really potent here.
I don't take it lightly that by being on this email list you are signaling in some way that you trust me and the wisdom coming through, or you're here to explore what I have to say and build trust with me. It's a tricky thing to be one-of-many in these types of events because I don't always know the other speakers and I'm not interested in steering you in a wrong direction or doing anything to harm that trust. (Lord knows the wellness and spirituality world can be just as full of love-bombing, exaggerated hype which just wants to make a sale, and lack of integrity as the rest of the world... wherever we go, there we are. And many/ most/ all of us have been burned before in one way or another.)
While I do know and trust Kate Graham, the founder and moderator, after a few days of sitting in on different sessions, I can speak more from my own experience, too. And I can say that while I don't always agree with everything everyone says, there's a depth of humanity and generosity here that lets me take what's for me, leave what isn't, and expose me to some new thoughts which help me expand and refine how I see the world. Most of the practitioners and luminaries are holding the challenging reality we're in right now, even as we scry and speak spells into the future - I haven't encountered anything that feels like spiritual bypassing to me and that's a relief. While the world order is crumbling around us and more and more of our fellow humans are being murdered both in front of our eyes and in secret prisons in the name of power and greed we DO need spirituality and places of refuge to remember what we're fighting for... and we DON'T need the gaslighting and false sanctuary of pretending it isn't happening.
So if you're interested in developing more of your own intuitive gifts, or re-connecting with different ways of connecting to the Seen and Unseen worlds (most of which have deep, ancestral precedent) - perhaps as a way of rebelling against our modern paradigm of empire which tried to kill off, silence, and outlaw many of these practices and spiritual perspectives... you may wish to consider joining us for the final two days.
If you just want to attend some sessions live in the next few days (including mine on Monday) you can get in for $44 CAD (about $32 USD or £ 24 GBP). If you want to have access to live sessions as well as replay access - allowing you to watch ones that already passed as well as upcoming ones in your own time, it's $333 CAD (about $243 USD or £180 GBP).
I’ll be offering my Living As Creature, Not Machine transmission (I'll send a separate email with more info on this transmission I'm starting to offer different places) tomorrow on Monday, Feb 2nd from 3-4pm ET.
BONUS - I'll also be guiding and supporting integration work through a workshop called "Ground the Charge" through OracleFest on Sat Feb 28th. More details on that will be coming in the following days and weeks, but the final payment option for OracleFest (the All Star Access Pass, which can be a monthly subscription or paid for a year-at-a-time) gives you access to last year's OracleFest, this year's OracleFest, and all the other gathering circles, workshops (including the Grounding the Charge), and day-long mini-OracleFests (Podium events) on the solstices, equinoxes, etc - both live and in replay form.
Grab a ticket here.
#2
IN-PERSON (Winchester, VA) - We've rescheduled the Rose Transmission - a way to meet the potent presence of Rose through tea, energy healing, animist ceremony, and myth - that was supposed to be my contribution to Daydream Studio's January moon circle before we cancelled the gathering. So now we'll be gathering on Monday Feb 23rd at 6pm ET for 90min of dropping into deep heart-space to listen and learn from Rose as ancestor and elder with a wisdom for our heart-body-soul in these times. Cost is $25.
We just finalized the date this morning, so we don't have a registration link yet, so you can mark it on your calendar and wait for me to send you the link in a few days, or you can Venmo $25 to Lauren-Barton-3 (make sure to comment what it's for and let me know you did so I can make sure you get any emails about our gathering).
#3
IN-PERSON (Lorton, VA) On March 8th at the Workhouse Arst Center in Lorton, VA, I’ll be joining their Sunday Wellness Series to offer another Living as Creature, Not Machine workshop/ transmission. The event is 4-5:30pm ET. Cost is $35.
You can register for my workshop specifically here (and check out the other offers in their Sunday Wellness Series - they’re scheduled out through March and have sound baths, tarot reading, meditative movement, etc). You can also listen to Karen, the human behind the vision for the series, share about it on a local news station here.
iNSPIRATION and Beauty:
A lovely song from Ireland to honor Brigid (with the musicians from near where my Irish cousins currently live).
"Brighid's Kiss" by Lá Lugh:
with Big Love and prayers for wild mercy upon us,
Kate
