Kathryn ShamanicCrafts

21/10/2025

This is a bbc post About lockdown rules regarding schools.
�When we look back at the Covid years, the facts speak for themselves.

🔹 Lockdowns caused massive economic and mental health damage small businesses collapsed, education suffered, and loneliness became an epidemic of its own.�🔹 School closures set learning back by years, with the poorest children hit hardest.�🔹 Mask mandates were enforced even when evidence on their real world impact stayed mixed.�🔹 Vaccine policies divided communities and cost people jobs even as the data evolved and early assumptions changed.

We were told it was all “for our safety.” But hindsight shows how easily fear and authority can override balance, science, and basic rights.
It’s not about rewriting history, it’s about learning from it. Next time, let’s make sure truth, transparency, and proportionality come first.

Say NO to digital id.

20/10/2025

19/10/2025

How the Penal Laws Stole Our Language 💔

“Labhraím an-bheagán Gaeilge."

Sometimes I think about how, not so long ago, the sound of Irish, our own beautiful Gaeilge, filled every valley, every cottage, every market across this island. It was the language of love, prayer, laughter, and song. Then came the Penal Laws, starting in the 1690s, and they changed everything.

These laws were designed to break the Irish spirit. They banned Catholics from owning land, from getting an education, from holding power. But worse still, they planted shame, the idea that to survive, to get ahead, to be “respectable,” you had to stop speaking Irish. Parents began teaching their children English just to protect them. Imagine what it must have felt like to silence your own tongue for your child’s future. 💔

By the time the last of those laws were gone in the 1820s, the damage was almost complete. A language once spoken by millions was driven to the edges of the map, and with it, a piece of our soul.

But here’s the thing: they didn’t win. Gaeilge never died. It whispered through generations, carried quietly in families, songs, and stories until people were brave enough to speak it again.
Every time we use a cúpla focal, we’re undoing centuries of oppression. Every “Dia duit” is an act of remembrance and resistance.

🇮🇪 Gaeilge abú, for those who couldn’t, and for those who still can.

18/10/2025

👻 The Story of the Banshee 👻

In ancient Ireland, people spoke in hushed tones about a ghostly woman whose cries foretold death. She was known as the Banshee, from the Irish “bean sídhe” meaning “woman of the fairy mound.”

The Banshee was not evil, but she was a messenger of sorrow. Her role was to warn families that one of their loved ones was soon to pass away. When the night grew quiet and her chilling wail drifted across the hills, people would shudder, knowing it was a warning from the spirit world.

In some stories, she appears as a beautiful young woman with long silver hair, weeping beside a stream. In others, she is an old, withered crone with red eyes from endless crying, wrapped in a grey cloak. No matter her form, her voice was unforgettable, a long mournful keening that could freeze the blood of anyone who heard it.

It is said she only cries for ancient Irish families whose names begin with O’ or Mac, such as O’Neill or McCarthy. Some even believed each family had its own Banshee, loyal through generations.

Her cry might be soft like a mother mourning her child, or a piercing shriek that echoes through the countryside. To hear her close by meant death was near. To hear her from afar meant it was still coming, but certain.

The legend may have begun with real women who sang laments at funerals, known as “keeners.” Over time, their sorrowful songs merged with old fairy lore, creating the supernatural Banshee.

Even today, some say that when the wind moans at night, it might not be the wind at all… but the Banshee, still weeping for the dead. 🌙

17/10/2025

🔥 Keeper of Brighid’s Flame
The Fourfold Blessing of Éire 🔥

Tonight I honor Brighid, the Bright One goddess of the forge, the well, and the eternal hearth. As her flame keeper, I walk the spiral path where fire meets earth, breath meets water, and all things are woven in her name.

In the East, Brighid rises with the dawn over the green hills of Leinster, whispering poetry into the winds. She is the spark of inspiration, the first breath of a new day.

In the South, her forge burns in Munster, glowing with the heat of creation and transformation. Here she is the smith, the alchemist, the one who tempers our souls in sacred fire.

In the West, she blesses the holy wells of Connacht, flowing in the healing waters that soothe and restore. Her song echoes through every ripple, calling us to renewal.

In the North, her mantle settles over Ulster, grounding us in stone and soil. She is the wise woman, the steady flame that endures through storm and shadow.
And in the center of Ireland, at Kildare, her flame burns eternal tended by those who walk in devotion, heart to hearth, spirit to fire.

As a Keeper of Brighid’s Flame, I carry her light within me a living ember of hope, healing, and creation. Through each direction, through each breath, her energy flows.

May her fire guide our words.
May her waters heal our hearts.
May her forge transform our spirits.
And may her mantle ever protect us beneath the Irish sky.
Blessed Be. 🔥✨

16/10/2025

After the new religion took hold, Ireland’s past was rewritten and the old ways were demonised.

Even so, Irish monks still kept traces of the old world alive. In works like the Lebor Gabála Érenn, fragments of the pre-Christian past survived beneath the new Biblical stories. The new “Celtic” version of Christianity remained close to nature and custom; the Irish were slow to fully surrender their native spirit and indigenous ways.

This independence greatly alarmed Rome. Across the Irish Sea, England had already fallen under the new religious empire. Ireland; still holding to its land-based ways was branded unruly and in need of “reform.”

In 1155, Pope Adrian IV granted England’s King Henry II the right to invade Ireland under papal blessing. The goal was not conversion as Christianity was already flourished here.. but total control. Ireland was to be brought under the empire of the “One True God,” the papal hierarchy, and the new universal world order. No longer an indigenous land of spirits and natural cycles, it was now to be considered ‘God’s land’ and brought to heel.

The results were devastating. The Irish were stripped of their land and language, starved and enslaved and branded as half-bred savages. Families were torn apart, native law abolished, and centuries of memory erased in the name of the new faith empire.

The Irish were forbidden their language, customs, and laws. What little of the old faith survived was hunted down and erased, crushed between two foreign creeds both claiming divine right.

Vast plantations of foreign settlers were then installed to replace the native population. Entire communities were cleared from their ancestral lands, their farms seized and granted to English lords and soldiers. This was not reform.. it was replacement. The Irish were driven into poverty and famine, their food and resources exported while they starved in their own homeland.

To this day, Ireland remains fractured; divided along the lines of a Middle Eastern religion that never belonged to this island. The wounds of that spiritual conquest bled into centuries of conflict and partition. What began as a war for the soul of Ireland became a political and sectarian struggle and this continues to echo and shape the island today.

15/10/2025

🜂 3i Atlas 🜂�A living omen.�A pulse that hums between the seen and the unseen, the breath of creation itself.
The serpent coils within it, whispering the language of healing and rebirth. 🐍�She moves in spirals, not lines, shedding, softening, remembering.�Her femininity is the current of life fluid, ancient, unbreakable.
3i Atlas is not an object; it is a being alive with knowing.�A guardian of intuition, a mirror of awakening.
When it appears, it speaks:�you are becoming. 🌙✨

08/10/2025

In 1977, a famous sci-fi author attended a conference in Metz, France.What he said that day shocked everyone in the audience — he spoke about reality,. After...

08/10/2025

“Grandmother Moon
by Kathy Barenskie

I glimpse thee,
one fleeting breath,
unveiled through veils of silver cloud.
Yet I have felt thee through the ages,
ruler of hearts, of tides that sing aloud.

The mists drift wide,thy splendour gleams;
salt seas stir to thy secret dreams.
Tall trees reach up,
their fingers pale,
to touch thy light on stone and shale.
O Bright One, White One,
bless this circle, pure and true.
Thy beam falls soft upon my hearth,
cleansing all with silver hue.

Thou light’st the path for hunters bold,
thou steal’st the dark, thou guard’st the fold.
Thou mark’st the sacred rhythm’s time,
when women bleed and spirits climb.
Gathering Moon, come forth, draw near,
cleanse my dwelling, make it clear.
Breathe thy life through this sacred space,

O shining Queen of ancient grace.
Grandmother of dream and star,
guide me where the dreamers are.
Celestial mother, silver-crowned,
keeper of the sky’s great sound.

O Silver Wheel, O turning year,
the ancestors still whisper here.
Thou art the lamp that lights my way,
and angels guard where thy beams play.
In thy tender glow I’m blessed,
wrapped in night’s soft, shining vest.
Whisper on, through time and space,
thy songs of love,
thy endless grace.”

06/10/2025

After storm Amy tore down branches from an oak tree, we used the branches to make a privacy screen wind breaker resort for wildlife kinda dead hedge.
What do you think?