12/06/2025
There is a resilience in the Cailleach. Somehow in my older age, I relate to her. She is keeper of the winter. As an herbalist, each season is embraced for the part it plays in the cycle of the turning earth. Going into the slumber season, I believe the Cailleach spreads her cloak over the seeds, keeping them safe below the surface. When she steps aside at Imbolc, the stirring gently begins.
As the light wanes and the nights grow long, the Cailleach awakens. She is the ancient winter hag of the Highlands, the old woman of storms and stone, the keeper of frost and the quiet turning of the year. In Scottish tradition, her presence is not abstract—she is woven into the very landscape. With her staff she shapes mountains, summons blizzards, and freezes rivers into stillness. Her arrival is felt in the first hard frost, the bare trees, the wind that seems to carry an older voice through empty fields.
The Cailleach embodies endurance, sovereignty, and the sacredness of endings. She is the crone who knows that decay feeds new life, that the death of the year’s light is not a loss but a necessary pause. Folklore describes her as veiled and formidable, her hair white as spindrift, her eyes keen as ice. Sometimes she strides through the storm; other times she moves silently through frost-blackened forests, leaving the world transformed in her wake. To encounter her is to understand winter’s truth: stillness is not emptiness, but a deep, generative quiet.
Her stories are older than memory. In some traditions she rules the dark half of the year, handing over her power to Brigid at Imbolc when the first signs of thaw appear. In others, she renews her age each Samhain, drinking from the Well of Youth before stepping into her season of sovereignty. She counts the snows as markers of her rule, and with the planting of her staff she can freeze a loch, bring down a storm, or hush the land beneath a mantle of white. Her magic is elemental—patient, deliberate, and absolute.
The Cailleach is not a figure of fear but a presence to honor. She teaches that winter’s austerity has purpose, that the world—and our inner lives—require this quieting. As she moves across mountains and moors, her touch brings clarity: the stripping away of what cannot endure, the sharpening of what must. Under her watch, the land rests, seeds sleep, and the bones of the world show through. Her lessons are carved in frost—surrender, resilience, and the strength found in stillness.
Imagine her moving through the hills around you: heavy-footed across stone, brushing branches with a cold hand, drawing the hush deeper. Notice what is settling in your own life—what is falling away, what is being cleared, what lies dormant beneath the surface. Let her presence remind you that winter is not absence but preparation, and that the quiet season is holy in its own way.
In her wake, endings are honored. In her silence, wisdom roots. In her frost, the hidden world prepares to bloom again.
