Meditation: August 31st, 2025
"In the final moment of every season, the earth teaches us that true farewell is not abandonment but transformation—that what we release with love returns to us in forms we could never have imagined
I will not speak on this day. I never speak on this day. I hate, as much as a Druid can actually hate, the dawn of this day, until the dusk of the day ending. I may speak tomorrow, but I will not today. No Lives. No chatter. Nothing. What I will say is this, “It is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.”
Physical Setting & Preparation
Find yourself at a place of ultimate threshold—where the last light of day surrenders to darkness, at the final edge where land meets endless water, or in a space where something once beloved has already departed, leaving only the sanctified emptiness of what was. Let your body rest in complete stillness, feeling how the earth beneath you has held countless final moments, countless last breaths, countless ultimate releases. Notice how the air itself seems to shimmer with the weight of endings and the promise that lies beyond all farewells.
Opening Invocation | Fosgladh
Màthair na Talmhainn, aig deireadh an rathaid
Mother of the Earth, at the end of the road
Tha sinn a' seasamh
We stand
Far nach eil tilleadh ann
Where there is no return
Le cridhe a tha a' briseadh
With heart that is breaking
Agus a' fosgladh
And opening
Aig an aon àm
At the same time
A' ionnsachadh
Learning
Mar a chanadh slàn gu bràth
How to say farewell forever
Breathe into the finality that settles around permanent partings like deep snow, muffling all sound except the essential rhythm of your own heartbeat. Feel how your chest rises and falls with the knowledge that some doors close so completely that even memory becomes insufficient to bridge the distance. Let your breath carry both the weight of ultimate loss and the strange lightness that comes when there is nothing left to lose.
Body of the Working | Corp
Today we walk through the territories of devastated and liberated—the complete destruction that clears the ground and the radical freedom that emerges when we have nothing left to protect.
Tha sgrios agus saorsa
Devastation and freedom
A' coinneachadh nam anam
Meeting in my soul
Mar theine a' losgadh coille
Like fire burning forest
Gus fearann glan fhàgail
To leave clean land
Airson sìol ùr
For new seed
Nach gabh a chur
That cannot be planted
Gus am bi an seann rud air a dhol
Until the old thing is gone
Picture yourself watching the last wall of your childhood home being torn down, every room where you learned to be human reduced to rubble and dust. This is devastation's true landscape—not the dramatic destruction of sudden catastrophe but the thorough dismantling of what once seemed permanent, the complete erasure of structures that held your identity, your story, your sense of place in the world.
Feel how this devastation moves through you like winter wind through bare branches, stripping away everything that seemed essential until only the irreducible core remains. It takes your past, your plans, your carefully constructed sense of who you thought you were, leaving you standing naked in a landscape you no longer recognize, speaking a language that no longer has words for your experience.
Ach anns an sgrios
But in the devastation
Tha rudeigin eile a' fàs
Something else grows
Saorsa nach robh agam riamh
Freedom I never had
Nuair a bha agam rudan ri dhìon
When I had things to protect
Saorsa a bhith
Freedom to be
Neach nach robh riamh ann roimhe
Someone who was never there before
Now feel the other current emerging from the wreckage—not relief but something far more radical: the devastating freedom that comes when you discover you can survive the loss of everything you thought you needed. This is liberation in its most fierce form, the terrible gift of finding out that who you truly are cannot be taken away because it was never dependent on anything that can be lost.
The Deep Working | An Obair Dhomhain
Tha mi a' ionnsachadh bho na reultan
I learn from the stars
A tha a' bàsachadh
That are dying
Le lasraichean cho àrd
With flames so high
Gun cruthaich iad eileamaidean ùra
That they create new elements
Nach robh ann roimhe
That were not there before
Agus gun cuir iad iad
And scatter them
Air feadh na cruinne
Throughout the universe
Gus beatha ùr a dhèanamh comasach
To make new life possible
Descend into the earth's deepest understanding of endings—how mountains are ground to dust to make soil, how stars explode to seed space with the elements that will become new worlds, how every death feeds life in ways too vast and mysterious for any single mind to comprehend. Here the Mother reveals her most radical teaching: that devastation and liberation are not opposites but the same force working at different scales, the cosmic recycling that ensures nothing is ever truly lost, only transformed beyond recognition.
Feel how your own ultimate farewells participate in this vast alchemy of transformation. Every person you've had to release forever, every dream that had to die completely, every version of yourself that had to be utterly destroyed—all of these apparent endings are actually seedings, scatterings of essential elements that will combine in unforeseeable ways to create possibilities that could never have existed while the old forms remained intact.
Ann an sgrios
In devastation
Tha mi a' faighinn
I find
Na h-eileamaidean bunaiteach
The fundamental elements
De cò tha mi
Of who I am
Ann an t-saorsa
In freedom
Tha mi a' faighinn cumhachd
I find power
Rudan ùra a chruthachadh
To create new things
Nach gabh a shamhlachadh
That cannot be imagined
Let yourself become like the earth at the moment of complete seasonal transition—holding nothing from what was while remaining infinitely open to what wants to emerge, demonstrating that the most profound act of love is sometimes the courage to let go so completely that return becomes impossible, making space for transformations that could never happen while we still hoped to keep what was.
Afterthought | Smuain Dheiridh
Take a moment to contemplate:
What if your most devastating farewells are actually the universe's way of clearing space within you for forms of love and creativity and connection that could never fit into the life you used to live?
Closing Blessing | Beannachd Dheiridh
Màthair na Talmhainn, ann am meadhan
Mother of the Earth, in the middle
Gach dealachadh deireannach
Of every final separation
Bi còmhla rinn
Be with us
Ann am meadhan gach sgrios
In the middle of every devastation
A tha a' dèanamh àite
That makes space
Airson saorsa nach robh againn a-riamh
For freedom we never had
Teagaisg dhuinn
Teach us
Gun gabh slàn a ràdh gu bràth
That farewell can be said forever
Le gaol
With love
Agus gum bi sin
And that this
Na bheannachd
Is a blessing
Slàn leat, a shamhradh
Farewell, summer
Slàn leat, a h-uile rud
Farewell, everything
A bha agus nach bi tuilleadh
That was and will be no more
Thig air ais mar rud
Return as something
Nach urrainn dhuinn fhaicinn fhathast
We cannot yet see
Ach a bhios nas àille
But that will be more beautiful
Na bha againn riamh
Than we ever had
Return slowly to the world that remains, feeling how the earth continues its ancient work of transformation beneath you. Even this moment of meditation is a farewell to who you were when you began it, and a greeting to who you are becoming through the sacred practice of learning to love so deeply that you can release everything, trusting that what matters most cannot be destroyed but only transformed into new forms of blessing.
Wow Wendy.... 🥹👏👏