“A Comhla breac is a rock in the mountain which opens once in the seven years. The nearest person to the Comhla breac would be swept in. There is a Comhla breac in Pairc Mhór and it opened this year at night and it woke three women. There is one in Doire Dubh and a dog was swept in and he came out after a time with a leath ceann. There is a big Comhla breac in Glen Flesk in Kerry a man from Bantry went in there one night by mistake a woman came from another room two times and if he stayed there until she came the third time the rock would have shut. Each time she was caoining but she did not speak atall.”

– dúchas.ie, The Schools’ Collection, Co. Cork, Barlinn, Bridgie Flynn, collector

At our Stone Creed Yule this last season at the end of 2017, I took an oath to resume writing my blog, Comhla Breac, a name which translates to “the Speckled Gate.” This is, of course, in a peculiar Irish way, where “speckled” is a color like the coloring of trout or of certain dogs and horses, spotted, freckled, in a way like my own face. It’s an Otherworldly color, like the changing mauves and grays of twilight and the dappling of light and shadow, also akin to checkering.  The Irish digital literary journal Breac asserts that breac can also mean “to write, to carve, to illuminate, to ripen,” an assertion I wish to explore more deeply.

For me Comhla Breac began in 2015 as a fledgling writing effort, during a time when I was doing a lot of other composition. I had taken a Filedecht intensive on medieval Irish poetry and its courtly culture, from noted polytheist PSVL, so I was churning out triads, praise poems, even full length ballads. I had applied myself to the Ar nDraiocht Fein Naturalist Guild curriculum and received some inspiring accolades from my evaluator, so a blog seemed an ideal place to further flex my literary muscle.

And then, in late 2015, my daughter confided to us that she was suffering from an ever worsening opiate addiction. Her older brother, already a veteran junkie, had brought me so much anxiety and suffering over the years before this, but I thought I had found my own way to a reasonably detached place with his illness by this point. He had done several stints behind bars, moved to the westside of Cleveland, and was now too far away to be seen scratching and nodding off or slurring his words in that telltale way, too far away to just show up and ask me for money or take it when I wasn’t home. Alas, he was also too far away to sound any kind of alarm about his sister’s transition from a pain management patient to a pillhead, then to a fearless, and maddeningly driven, street drug user.

I abruptly turned away from all my blogging, spiritual writing and studies, and began instead to focus on her. I wrote her voluminous texts over-flowing with happy memories and my faith-filled aspirations for both of us. When she found her way into treatment, got sober and stayed that way for seven months, it was to her I wrote praise poems. When she got charged with manslaughter in the death of someone who had used with her the year before, I strained to write hopeful missives and even grateful celebrations, as she miraculously made it through the early impact of those unnerving charges without relapsing. When she wrote to me of her sorrow over not being able to be with her daughters as they prepared for their first day of school in August last year, I evoked to her a future where we would all be together again, and how the joy would fill all of us when reunited we all would be.

I wrote her a text one night that she never answered. The next day her phone went right to voicemail, indicative of a full and unlistened-to supply of worried messages from all of us who loved her. The following day saw me standing under the hot eclipsing sun, waiting for the police to arrive, waiting for her landlord to open the door, waiting for the medical examiner to carry her still winsome shape out in a white shroud, to lay her no longer breathing body in that long green, and these days, too-oft-summoned van with its ominous plaque on the door.

Now I find myself back at the Speckled Gate, a blog I blithely began before I knew how bad things could get and how tenuous the life of a fierce girl could be when street drugs involve contamination with Chinese carfentanil. I now find myself writing shadowy entries in my head while I’m driving or sitting, yet I get paralyzed instead at the keyboard, overwhelmed at times by what to write about. Comhla Breac was supposed to be a nifty blog about my spiritual journey, but my spiritual journey of the last two years has been at times completely exhausting, like that night-ride on the back of an otherworldly horse that lasts seemingly for years in a place between the worlds. I often think I need to write some about the comfort I have found with my Nar Anon family group, certainly more so than I have from some of my own relatives, who seem mired in scapegoating, blame and inflexible prejudice. But other days I think I should just write about knitting patterns, or fruit tree saplings, or the best recipes for plant-strong rice bowls. All in all I hope that as a project this will lead me back to my Druidic studies and to more poetry.

I was, as related, above the nearest person to a Speckled Gate when it opened wide.  My daughter and I were swept in for a time, only she never came back out. I alone have been cast back out amongst you, disoriented and seeking grounding, not only in deepening spiritual practice and communion with my allies amongst the gods and spirits, but also in the simple practices, crafts and skills I have cultivated through my life. Expect in the future to glimpse some of these if you peer through the dappled light of this gate.   …At least expect so for the next year, because my Oath entails submitting at least one entry per month until next Yule, at least.  And I have roused myself enough from a kid of integrative over-thinking to post this in under the wire tonight for January, …so “Go me!”