CC Podcast S01E02: Weight And Strength From The Same Lineage
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Lora O'Brien: [00:00:00] So there comes a point where you look at where you come from, and you decide that you're finished with the whole lot of it. The religion goes, the family sayings go, the way your mother did everything goes with them. And for a while, it feels like the cleanest decision you ever made. And then something happens that you'd normally have known exactly how to handle, and you find that you've mislaid the bit of you that knew how, because it came out of the same house as everything else you threw in the skip.
Introduction
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Lora O'Brien: I'm Lora O'Brien. I'm a native Irish educator and cultural steward. I hold a master's degree in Irish history. I work with the Irish material as it was actually practiced, not as it got tidied up afterwards, as much as we can know that. The tidying up is what I want to talk about today, though, because we do it to our own families every bit as hard as anybody ever did it to the historical record.
The Cailleach and the Butter
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Lora O'Brien: So I want to start with an entry from the school's [00:01:00] collection on Duchas, and that's the body of folklore that schoolchildren all over this country gathered from their own people in the 1930s. So their parents, their grandparents, their old neighbors, anybody that would talk to them, basically. And it's all online now at duchas.ie.
And this particular entry comes from Glaslough in County Cavan, and the Glaslough is a stream that runs there, and the entry says that it used to carry another name. So Tloc na Ceallainsir was a name given formally to the Glaslough. It was supposed to have been used in olden times by the Cailleach in making butter.
It is said that she supplied butter to King Bóréce, who pastured his sheep on the Mourne Mountains. ~And the Cailleach is also alleged to have supplied butter to Léanfada when he was carrying stones for a cairn~
~Cailleach is also alleged to have supplied butter to a lean fathach ~when he was carrying stones for a cairn that he was building Now, notice how carefully that hedges itself. It was supposed to have been used by her. It is said she supplied the butter. She's alleged to have supplied lean fathach. [00:02:00] The child writing that down is reporting what was said locally rather than swearing to any of it, and that would have been the way that it was given to them.
So what we've got is a provider. The two people that she provides for are both at work. A king pasturing his sheep up in the Mourne Mountains, and a man hauling stones for a cairn. And that man is filling his creel on one hill and crossing to the next in a single stride, so it's a giant scale of labor, and she's the one feeding it. Before I go on now, I want to say what butter actually was because we hear it as
a breakfast item, and in these entries it isn't one. One of our folklorists, Shane Lehane, who has gathered the butter material, says that butter was the most valued food luxury in any household, and the major saleable commodity as well. So sold to the market for hard cash that the tea and the tobacco and the sugar came out of, and it was the women that made the butter.
So when you hear butter in these entries, hear money. This was [00:03:00] the wealth of the family, and the women were making it. Now, if you hold that beside the other half of what Lehane has gathered, because the butter stealing woman of Irish folk tradition works her charms on May morning at Bealtaine, walking the fields before sunrise and skimming the dew off the grass the way you'd skim the cream off milk, and using that to beautify herself by the by.
But she's also bringing other people's butter home to her own churn. So she often works with what was called a boróg or a spancel, which is the rope of cow hair or straw that you'd use to tie a cow's legs at milking so it didn't kick you. And she'd tie a knot in the spancel for each cow that she meant to profit off.
In the examples that Lehane gives,
The words that go with it are plain enough because what she says is basically, "Come all to me, all to me." That's it. So she's-- as she's churning, she's doing [00:04:00] the work, this kind of a little mantra that she's using And the counter charms sit right there beside it in the record. You have a rod of rowan tree that was cut on a May morning and it went around the churn or around the dash.
Salt went into it and a lighted sod of turf was swung three times around the base of it. Now, rowan specifically was a charm against witchcraft but also like tricky magic from the fairies. And the salt and the lighted sod of turf, so fire basically, are both traditional charms against magic.
So you would see them used against witchcraft or against the fairies because the fairies were always out to get you as well in the Irish tradition. And the other one would be iron, which went into it as well. So a small horseshoe was fixed to the bottom of the churn or nails would be hammered into the wood.
And Lehane says that it was fire and iron together that provided most effective of all So it's the [00:05:00] same word carrying both of them, the giver on the stone in Cavan and the taker at the churn on May morning, and it's money going in both directions. The one Cavan entry has her giving and Lehane's butter material has her taking, and neither of them stops to square the two.
Blessing and Cursing
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And the counter charms at the churn will tell you that people, will tell you what people did rather than what they thought of her. We've gotten very bad, I think, at holding a figure who does both, the blessing and the cursing, basically. We want the ancestor to be one thing, and we want the mother to be one thing, and we want the religion or the country or the family to come out as either the source of the harm or the source of the good, so that we know whether to keep it or bin it.
But here's what that costs you. When you decide that what you came from is harmful and you cut it off completely, you don't get to pick and choose what goes with it. The endurance [00:06:00] goes, and the resourcefulness that got the women before you through goes with it. The stubbornness that means that you finish things goes too.
The surviving out of spite often goes too, speaking from personal experience. Or at least it goes underground, because you've decided that everything carrying that fingerprint is contaminated, so you bury it. Now, to use the old cliche, that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and what you're left with feels like freedom for a good while.
It starts to feel like standing in a field. I'd call it a kind of like homelessness, a rootlessness. And I've watched a lot of capable women arrive at it sometime after the clean break that they were so certain about. And I'm not saying don't cut things out that are toxic to you.
Of course, we need to do that. But we need to be able to hold that two things can be true at once. That not every single thing from the bit that ~you're cutting out was valueless.~
~From the bit you're cutting out was lacking in value ~The alternative, though, is staying in [00:07:00] relationship with what came before and putting a boundary around it, which is a completely different act from either going back or making peace with anybody. So that's the ground that those two entries put her on, the woman, the witch, the hag, the Cailleach.
And she's the one that I keep coming back to for this work. She's not a cozy mother figure in any shape or form. She's more like a grumpy granny with a cane, the one who'd give you a whack across the back of the legs when you weren't doing it right, and who'd still clean you up if you were bleeding and tell you to rub a bit of dirt on it or a spiderweb to stop the bleeding, in my granny's case.
And that old classic one, "Ah, sure you'll be better before you're married." Now, anybody who grew up in an Irish house knows that woman, and she gives in the cavern entry and she takes at the churn on May morning, which is why the relationship that those entries support is one with a boundary written into [00:08:00] it.
Inherited Weight vs. Strength
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So there's two different things that came down the same line to you, and I want them separated out because that's how we do this work. The first is the inherited weight, which is what you were handed and never agreed to carry. And see the first episode if you've missed that one. Go back and listen to that for more about that.
That one is usually silence or fear or religious pressure or some repeated weakness that keeps turning up in the family. Abuse is often carried through that. Now, the second is inherited strength, which is the traits that let your line survive long enough to produce you. And the women that I work with name the weight of it straight off, and then they go quiet on me when I ask for the strength.
And that silence isn't because there's nothing to say. It's because nobody ever asked in that direction. They never really thought about it. So i'll give you a few of the ones that women have written to me about as I've been doing this work, [00:09:00] but you'll have your own ones too, if you think about it.
But here's some examples. So endurance is one that's often named first, and after it comes resourcefulness with almost nothing to be resourceful with. Then there's stubbornness, which gets called a fault in a girl. I know that stubbornness was never supposed to be a good character trait when I was getting accused of it as a child, and, you know, rightly so accused of it, in fairness.
But it turns out to be the reason that the girl is still standing. And then there might be a scale of some particular kind that runs in the family and gets treated as ordinary because everybody in the house has it. But when you look outside the household, it's not so common, really. But last of all then, there's care, and that's most often the practical kind that shows up with the dinner rather than with the sentiment.
It's what's actually done to show that you're cared for
Now all of that came [00:10:00] down the same line as the silence did, and it came from the same women in the same houses under the same conditions. And quite often it came from the exact same person who handed you the worst of it
And that bit is where women often get stuck. So I'm gonna stay with it just here for a minute. If your mother handed you the silence, and your mother or your grandmother also handed you the way that you can hold a room together in a crisis, then you can keep the second one without excusing the first and without going back under her authority, under her thumb.
Because it means that she was a person with more than one thing in her, in a country and a century that gave women very little room to
have anything in them at all So a trait that everybody in a house has stops looking like a trait at all and starts looking just like the floor or the walls because nobody ever hands it to you as a possession. But when you name it, it changes what you can do with it because you can only [00:11:00] keep on purpose a thing that you've actually got a name for, a thing that you can hold onto, and everything else just gets carried by default until the day you throw the whole lot out.
The Tearing Practice
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You can unpack this suitcase a little bit, this baggage. Right, so this practice that we're gonna do now just needs a page and a pen and one sitting, and you'll want paper that you can tear rather than a notebook that you'd mind ruining. But draw a single firm line down the center of the page and take your time over it.
Make it deliberate because that line is what you're going to tear along. Now give yourself two columns and no headings
But keep what goes on either side short. So we want three or four words that you actually mean, 'cause that's worth more than a paragraph that
you're arguing with as you're writing it out. On the left-hand side, list what you're no longer willing to carry as your responsibility. So some examples would be silence, fear, religious pressure, whatever that is for you And really think [00:12:00] about naming what you didn't create
And on the right-hand side, list the traits that allowed your lineage and you specifically to survive. So you could be looking at endurance, resourcefulness, stubbornness, skill, care. That's the strength that reached you, and it reached you because somebody in that line had it, and they passed it down And when both sides are written, tear the page slowly down the center line, slowly enough that you can hear it tearing.
Really, really focus on what's happening as you split those things apart, and let your body register the separation rather than rushing it. Then take a breath in and hold it and let it out fully. Now put the left-hand side away from you and under something heavy, like a glass of water or a book or your phone.
Anything will do as long as it's holding that paper down. That weight is the gate, and it's standing in for the boundary that [00:13:00] you're setting. And then hold the right-hand side in your two hands and say out loud or under your breath, " I steward the strength. I leave the rest at the gate.
I have what I need. Now, that tearing is where the work happens, by the way, and I don't mean that as decoration. You've been holding both of these in the same place your whole life, inside the same sentence about your family, some of them without even thinking about them. And a decision that you only make in your head is very easy to unmake in your head.
You can think about it as I'm talking to you and then wander off and get sucked back into your day, and nothing actually happens. But when you actually do it, when you have two bits of paper in two different places, that's a decision that your hands have made as well as your head, and your hands are a good deal harder to argue with afterwards
So the part that I often hear back from women isn't necessarily the tearing, though. It's the [00:14:00] right-hand column that they're left with, and they come to it expecting it to be short, and they find that they can't stop. And then they have to take in the fact that the women who handed them the worst of it also handed them the things that they like best about themselves
Now, I'd be putting one boundary on this work, and it's because this practice asks you to sort, but that's all that it asks you. You don't have to forgive people who hurt you. You don't have to be the better person because forgiveness is a whole separate question, and it stays yours, honestly. It's not something that I can advise you on.
But nothing here needs the forgiveness in order to actually work. And that paper that you've put under something heavy, you can rip it up, you can put it somewhere safe, you can put it away from yourself, you can bury it in the garden. You can do whatever you want. You can throw it in the bin. You can do whatever you want with it.
You can choose to [00:15:00] keep it somewhere in your vicinity or get rid of it altogether, and that's up to you
But this is a sorting practice. It's not therapy, and it's no substitute for therapy either. Now, this podcast is definitely not supposed to be a substitute for medical advice or therapy. So if what comes up on the left-hand side of that page is bigger than a page, it does deserve proper support, and going and getting that support is the right next move.
This Week's Work
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So the work is for this week to tell your own inheritance apart item by item instead of taking one flat decision about the whole of it, either to keep it or throw it all away. You don't have to do that. You don't have to do either of those things. You can put that boundary in place. You can separate those things out.
Now, if you want something to steady yourself with while you do it, there is a grounding audio and a PDF that goes with it for completely free at cailleach.community/past, [00:16:00] P-A-S-T. And it's what I give to women who come to me with the waking anxiety and the inherited heaviness that I do be talking about in these podcast episodes.
So it's free, and it's yours. Enjoy, and I will see you in the next episode
