The Celtic people speak of the thin places, the liminal spaces, the times and locations when the veil between the worlds is the most permeable.
This could mean the time around Samhain (what you might call Halloween). It could mean the area surrounding a sacred site, like a holy well, a stone circle, or a fairy tree.
Over the last few months, I’ve come to understand a thin place as the time and space an author must occupy between when her book is deemed “complete” and when it is birthed into the world.
Finally, The Waiting Is (Almost) Over
The sun rose into a peach pearl of a morning and convinced the sky to try blue. The snowy ground stretched beneath the last glimmer of a crescent moon. Warm and snug by my bedroom window, I held The Sovereignty Knot: A Woman’s Way to Freedom, Power, Love, and Magic in my lap.
I held my book in my lap.
After a year and a half of writing and decades of dreaming, I was holding a book that has my title emblazoned on the cover, my name stretched up the spine, and my world imprinted upon each page.
Those years of writing and dreaming were long and hard, but, somehow, the three months of waiting to share this book with the world often felt longer and harder than anything that came before.
For me, a lover of Celtic myth and Irish folklore, liminal spaces have always sound so alluring and mysterious. I’ve always wanted more chances to wander in the mist and hear the Otherworldly voices. It has been disappointing to realize that the liminal space between the creation and release of something as big and meaningful as a book is both fragile and clumsy.
Waiting for that link to go live on Amazon (launch day is 2/4/20!) is at once too damn lonely and quiet and too bloody noisy with shoulds and doubts and fears.
How I Navigated the Post-Book Slump
Turns out, the post-book blahs are normal.
My mentor, the wise, seasoned writer Elizabeth Cunningham who has written many books, including The Maeve Chronicles (and also the foreword to The Sovereignty Knot) described this as the “postpartum period.” As she watched me wrestle with anxiety and depletion and the sense that I was endlessly called to do something even though I could barely get off the couch, Elizabeth offered me the exact guidance I needed:
Ask the book what she wants.
It took me a while to quiet the ego and release my need to control everything and take this advice, but when I did, I could breathe again. I could see again. I could trust myself again.
The book reminded me that I was tired. It was the hard earned kind of tired that you recover from with the help of long walks, long novels, and a long break from the screen.
Ever so gently, the book also pointed out that I was scared of what might come next (or what might not come next) once it was out in the world.
And, the book reminded me that I needed to ask for support from forces that are much more powerful and enduring than a collection of printed pages. To get through the liminal space between the book’s private formation and public birth. I needed to rely on the forces that helped me write it all in the first place:
My goddess guides.
The trinity of Celtic goddesses who speak to me and through me are imprinted into every line, but you’ll really get to meet them when you get to Chapter 12 of The Sovereignty Knot.
Telling their story is another step on my lifelong spiritual journey. Ever since I found the section of the bookstore that offered me Celtic spirituality and the secret of the sacred feminine, I have been seeking out these goddesses, begging them to come closer, and learning how to dance with them in the dark.
More often than I have wanted to admit, however, I’d lose track of their divine presence. In the face of all that divine yearning, I couldn’t recognize that my goddess guides were always right there waiting to be noticed the moment I stopped fretting about why I didn’t feel divinely inspired.
To get through this weird period between “I wrote the last word!” and “Come buy a copy!” I needed, to quote my coach KC Carter, to “double down on the spiritual practice.”
I needed to get quiet, to listen closely, to open my heart wide. I needed to remember that I wasn’t supposed to get through this all by myself. I was never supposed to figure it out all by myself. I needed to talk to them.
Brigid, The Goddess of Liminal Spaces
In my book, you’ll get to know Brigid, the Irish goddess turned saint who has been my guide since I was a fourteen year-old trying to get through my confirmation so I could finally escape the Catholic Church.
Though I have had a relationship with Brigid for more than half my life, I need to admit that I have long been afraid to fully enter into a relationship with her. Somehow, I was always waiting to be worthy of her, to feel chosen by her, to have her appear more fully in my life.
(Maybe, foolishly, I thought Brigid needed me to publish a book before I was enough of an “expert” to get her attention. Hot Tip: Goddesses don’t operate that way, and no human being worth knowing operates that way either.)
She is the goddess guide who has been waiting in this particular liminal space with me, holding the torch that guides the way. All along, she has forgiven me for covering my eyes, for being unable to see her in my quest to hide from the unknown. Brigid trusted that I would eventually look up and stand tall when it was time to enter through the doorway into authorship.
“Brigid lived her life in the liminal space between Heaven and Earth. The Celts perceived liminal spaces as “thin places” where the supernatural world and the visible world could meet, allowing beings to pass back and forth from one to the other. Throughout Brigid’s life, she held a thin place within her own self. She was rooted in the practical everyday world, but she could also see the world of angels and spirits. Her life was lived on the threshold.”
— Kenneth McIntosh in Brigid’s Mantle: A Celtic Dialogue Between Pagan and Christian
Now that I can hear her and feel her presence in my life again, I can trust that she is guiding me and she is guiding this book into the world.
It’s no accident, of course. I deliberately chose the book’s release date to coincide with the energy of Brigid’s Day, of the Imbolc festival and her saint’s day, that happen over February 1 and 2.
Over the next couple of weeks as the book launch week (February 4 - 8) approaches, you’ll hear a lot more from me about Brigid, about why this goddess of fire and water, of poetry and family, of smithcraft and even beer is a guide for Sovereignty seekers like us.
We need her to help us navigate these liminal spaces as creatives, as caregivers, as beings who need more self-care.
And, considering I am an American who calls her energy to me all the way across a vast ocean, I think there’s something to say about how she can help us as we navigate these liminal spaces as a country and a global community, too.
Be sure to follow me on Facebook to dive deep into Brigid’s magic.
To get email updates about the book and all the Brigid material, visit this page and leave me your address.
