Blog
Bridget Saint of Opposites
Wednesday 11th February 2026
Mike Mullins
Every month the Soul Rewilding community will be sharing reflections from "Soul Garden", our monthly online community gathering. Here is February's meditation on St Bridget and liminality:
It’s 1st February, a full moon and St Bridgets day. Imbolc, or “in the belly” in ancient Irish. Half way between the winter solstice and spring equinox. February is a transition month the beginning of the end of Winter and the emergence of spring when everything is “in the belly”. Bridget was of Kildare, church of the oak grove. So I go in search of an oak grove to be with her.
As I walk it’s lightly spitting and there’s deep mud everywhere laced with decaying oak leaves beneath my feet. We could be fooled for thinking that February is the same as January. Everywhere bare trees, cold, frost, sometimes even snow but the days are lengthening and mother earth knows it. The signs are appearing. Across woodlands are snowdrops the flowers of Imbolc and Candlemas, horse chestnut tree buds ready, present and pregnant, hazel trees draped with beautiful golden catkins. Blackbirds are calling, so too are robins, the first birds to start nesting in late February.
I’m back in the mud, 3-4 inches deep, my boots squelch as I head up a hill to a sacred grove of oaks. My head bent down looking for signs of animal tracks I come across the imprint of a dog’s paw with its pads and four toes. Huge prints .. is it a great Dane? Two dog prints are intertwined. The rear paw print on top of the fore paw print. I can see the nail print in the mud. The dog’s been running perhaps chasing birds up the hill to the oak grove. Then I see a Fallow deer track, cloven hooved. What were they doing, thinking feeling, this cold wet February day when food and warmth are sparse. Hunkering down surviving. With each track you enter into another world, the world of the more than human.
I reach the summit of the hill and into St Bridgets sacred oak grove I go.
Tall majectic oaks everywhere reaching for the sun, for light and for life. I am with the nation, the family of oaks. I greet them bowing deeply. They are all quite young 100-150 years old and in the midst of them a young beech on its own, separated from its beech family, but adopted and cared for by the oaks. I sit at the foot of the greatest oak, the mother tree and ask her to tell me of Bridget. And so she starts her story.
Across the sea in ancient Irish stories on 1st February, the Cailleach, the ancient hag of winter, would journey to the mystical Island in the sea to drink from the well of eternal youth. When her dry cracked lips sipped from the well, she was transformed into the beautiful goddess of spring. Raising her hands over the islands, she would turn them green and then from under her cloak she would scatter snowdrops, the first flowers of spring across the green fields. Bridget is the saint of greening mother earth and of new life rising. The mother oak continued.
As Cailleach’s power wanes Brigid takes over, bringing light, growth, and renewal. A cosmic threshold the old year loosening its grip and life beginning to move again. A sacred turning point, the promise that life and light are reawakening, within the world and within ourselves.
Bridget was the golden-haired saint of Kildare. She was born just before sunrise in the twilight of early morning, in that time governed neither by the sun, nor the moon's light but by two lights, the twilight. Her mother gave birth to her neither within the house, nor outside the house but on the threshold.
She is the meeting of opposites: of night and day, of winter and spring, the sun and the moon, of within and without, of masculine and feminine, the pagan and the Christian. She’s a mandorla, a sacred moment transcending time and space. She invites us into the “in between”, the liminal, to be open to sacred wisdom beyond our own faith traditions.
She was the midwife at the birth of Christ, in one world, within all worlds. The barmaid at the inn of Bethlehem. The old innkeeper had told her to stop welcoming any more guests as the Inn was full and it was a time of famine, scarcity and loss.
But one stormy night in deepest winter a grey-haired old man and a young beautiful, pregnant woman came to her door asking for shelter. Bridget shared what little she had with them; a cup of water and a loaf of bread. Then she took them to the cattle byre and helped Mary give birth. At his birth she picked up the babe Christ and held him high in joyful thanks, then suckled him at her breast. And so Bridey became the midwife and wet nurse to Christ.
Her father was a Druid, her mother Christian. She was a druid of the community of the holy oak in Leinster, the most sacred site in Ireland. Bridget came to see Christ as her Druid. Her community became known as the church of the oaks, Kildare. Her name means the “the “shining one”, the druid earth goddess. She is the shining, the brightness deep in all things, the immanence, the spark of life in all things. Reverenced in the rivers, the streams, the mountains and the forests.
In the druid community at Kildare a flame was kept burning, day after day, night after night, celebrating the light shining in all things. Bridgets community of sisters continued the tradition for over ten centuries. Openness to the good the wisdom in different traditions. In the Hebrides it is said the tradition of tending the mother fire in the family hearth continued until recently.
There are so many tales of Bridget’s generosity. The oak Continued. As a girl she was known for giving away her family's milk, butter and cheese to passersby. As the abbess of Kildare she gave away the most cherished liturgical garments of her religious community to feed the poor. As a young woman she gave away her father's jewelled sword to a beggar. Her father, at the end of his tether, went to the king of Leinster to complain. In St Bridgets community at Kildare no one was ever refused food, clothing, or sanctuary. To us oaks she’s our saint of transcending boundaries and inclusion. A saint for our times.
Bridget's eve 31st January was the threshold between light and dark, heaven and earth, the winter solstice and the spring equinox, the threshold between those who had gone through the veil of death and those that remained among us. It was the threshold between the masculine and the feminine.
And so blessed Bridget invites us to be aware of thresholds that we are in the midst of, individually and collectively: the changing of seasons, the dawning of the day, the approach of nightfall, special times in our lives, transitions, the birth of children, new beginnings, endings and partings and letting go.