Reclaiming March 17th: A Faery Blessing from Tír na nÓg & the Living Soul of Ireland

A faery Blessing Ireland with the true magic of green

✦ A Faery Blessing Is Being Cast Upon You ✦

Stop.

Breathe.

Feel the green.

Somewhere beneath the noise of this day, beneath the clinking glasses and the performative revelry, beneath the plastic shamrocks and the exported mythology, something ancient is stirring.

She has been waiting for you.

She is the damp breath of moss rising from hollow hills at dawn. She is the silver thread of a sacred well finding its way upward through dark stone to meet the light. She is the shimmer at the edge of your vision in a wild meadow, that flash of luminous movement you almost saw, almost heard, almost felt before the rational mind stepped in to explain it away.

That was a Faery.

And She has not left. She has never left.

The Faeries of Tír na nÓg, those radiant, ancient, luminous spirits who dance at the threshold of our world and the Otherworld, are calling out to every heart that has grown weary of celebrations that feel hollow. They call to those of us who have always known, in the deepest chamber of our being, that this day holds something far older and far more sacred than the story we were given.

If you are reading these words, the Faeries have already found you.

Come closer. The veil is thin. The green is alive. And the magic is waiting.

The Enchanted Ones: Ireland's Shining Faery Kin

Let us speak first of the Faeries themselves, for they are the heartbeat of everything that follows.

In the lore of ancient Ireland, the Faeries were not the delicate, gossamer-winged sprites of Victorian fancy. They were not diminutive beings to be captured in jars or painted on nursery walls. They were the Aos Sí, the People of the Mounds, regal, luminous, formidable beings who carried the wild, untamed consciousness of the land itself within their shining forms. They were ethereal elementals of unfathomable depth, spirits of nature who danced between the veils of the worlds, whispering secrets of love, fertility, and transcendence to those with ears tuned to the frequency of wonder.

They are the Shining Folk. And in their most exalted form, they are the Tuatha Dé Danann, the divine children of the Goddess Danu, the elder gods of Ireland who, rather than leave their beloved island when the world changed around them, descended into her. Into the hollow hills. Into the sacred wells. Into the dreaming root-world that hums beneath every footstep. They became the invisible sovereigns of a realm that exists just one breath away from our own: Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth, where flowers never wither, sorrow dissolves at the threshold, and time moves like honey through sunlight.

And yet, and this is the exquisite secret that the faery lore of Ireland carries, the Faeries exist on a spectrum of presence. Just as a river expresses itself as both the thundering waterfall and the gentle mist, the Shining Folk appear in many forms. There are the great and ancient Tuatha Dé, the elder gods of incomprehensible luminosity, and there are also the gentler fae, the nature spirits, the flower divas, the guardians of stream and stone and wild hedgerow, the ones who leave mushroom rings in the meadow grass and who steal away to dance in the moonlit glades. Both are real. Both are sacred. Both are expressions of the same living, breathing, sentient intelligence of the Earth herself.

To walk through Ireland, or to feel Ireland living within you as an ancestral resonance, is to walk through a land saturated with faery presence. Every Hawthorn tree standing alone in a field is a Faery tree, a threshold marker between worlds. Every ancient mound is a Sídhe, a hollow hill where the Shining Ones hold court, where their music can sometimes be heard by those who go still enough, open enough, humble enough to receive it. Every holy well is a portal tended by a water spirit, a sacred guardian who has received the prayers of the people for uncountable generations.

These are not metaphors. This is the living cosmology of an island that never forgot that the world is alive.

What Was Lost: The Silencing of the Sacred Green

And now, Beloved, we must speak a truth that lives in the stones.

Every year on this day, millions of people around the world pour into streets draped in green, raising a glass to a figure who, by the historical record, arrived on Irish shores with a singular mission: the conversion of a people who did not ask to be converted. The legacy of St. Patrick is, at its core, the legacy of colonial Christianity, the systematic replacement of indigenous spiritual wisdom with a foreign doctrine, imposed not through invitation but through the calculated dismantling of everything the people already held sacred.

We speak of this not with bitterness, for bitterness is not a medicine. We speak of it with clarity, the same clear-eyed, truth-telling clarity that indigenous communities around the world have always called upon when asked to celebrate the very forces that sought to erase them. The story of Ireland mirrors the story of countless indigenous cultures across our precious planet: the forced silencing of earth-based wisdom, the criminalization of ancestral practice, the demonization of the sacred feminine, and the severing of the cord between a people and their Living Mother.

Across the world, from the Amazon to the Andes, from the forests of North America to the sacred groves of the British Isles, missionaries arrived bearing the same message cloaked in different costumes: your gods are demons, your ways are darkness, your connection to the Earth is superstition. What these emissaries feared was precisely what made these cultures whole, their deep, reverent, reciprocal relationship with the living world. Their knowledge that the Earth is not a resource but a relative. Their understanding that the sacred is not housed in distant heavens but is here, alive, woven into every root and stone and breath of wind.

To celebrate this day as it is conventionally offered is to participate, unknowingly, in the erasure. But to reclaim this day, to strip away the performance and return to the ancient green heart beneath it, is an act of profound spiritual courage.

And that is exactly what we are doing here.

We are not mourning what was taken. We are remembering what never truly left.

The Serpent That Was Never Banished

The famous myth tells of serpents driven from Ireland, and it is told with such triumphant certainty that few stop to ask the question the land herself is asking:

What serpents? There were never any serpents.

No physical snake has ever been native to Ireland. The serpent in this story was not a reptile. She was a symbol, one of the oldest and most sacred symbols in the human spiritual vocabulary: the Serpent of Telluric Wisdom, the coiling, living intelligence of the Earth's own energy body.

The Druids called her Imbas, the divine, spiraling inspiration that moves through the land and through the human spirit alike, the animating fire of creative and visionary consciousness. She was not dark. She was not evil. She was the umbilical cord between the people and the Mother, the felt-sense of the Earth's intelligence moving through a body permeable and receptive enough to receive it.

Beneath our feet, this force still moves. The old traditions called these currents Dragon Lines, not the rigid, straight Ley Lines of human geometry, but the serpentine, living, breathing rivers of Earth-fire that meander and coil through the hidden veins of underground water, through crystalline quartz, through the magnetic whisper of the deep soil. They gather and intensify at the Sídhe, those sacred mounds where the Faeries dwell, nodes of concentrated earth-power where, if you stand in silence and press your hands to the ground, you may feel the unmistakable pulse of something vast and alive and ancient moving beneath you.

This is what was symbolically "banished." Not serpents. Serpent wisdom. The felt-body knowledge of the living Earth. The capacity to know the land as a sentient, sacred, communicating being.

And the Faeries, the Shining Ones of Tír na nÓg, have been guarding this wisdom ever since, keeping it alive in the hollow hills, waiting for the day when enough humans would remember to come and ask for it back.

That day is today. You are the ones who are asking.

The Three Faces of the Sovereign Goddess

Speak their names aloud. Feel what opens.

Ériu. Banba. Fódla.

In the ancient Lebor Gabála Érenn, when the great Tuatha Dé Danann first set their luminous feet upon the island of Ireland, they were met by three sisters who were not merely women. They were the Triple Face of Sovereignty, the living Goddess of the Land manifesting in her three essential aspects, the three sacred layers of what it means for a place to have a soul.

Ériu is the fertile, yielding, generous body of the Earth herself, the green hills, the rich dark soil, the meadows that receive the rain with gratitude. She is the physical Mother, the one who feeds us, holds us, receives our dead and transforms them into wild grasses and mushrooms and new life. Her name breathes in the very word Éire, Ireland. To honor Ériu is to kneel in a garden and understand you are on holy ground.

Banba is the untameable one, the spirit of the wild, uncultivated mountain, the wind-scoured clifftop, the bog that has never been drained, the forest that has never been cleared. She is the protective wildness that refuses to be bought, governed, or reasoned with. She guards the Thin Places, those extraordinary locations where the veil between the worlds is gossamer-thin and the Faery presence is unmistakable. To honor Banba is to bow before the parts of nature that will always remain beyond our control, and to give thanks for that immensity.

Fódla is the keeper of memory, the spirit of poetry, of ancestral law, of the stories that refuse to die no matter how many times they are silenced. She is the reason the old songs kept being sung in secret, the reason the wisdom survived in folk custom and in the language of the land itself. To honor Fódla is to tell the old stories aloud. To protect indigenous knowledge. To refuse the amnesia.

Together, they are the complete and living Soul of Ireland. And they are not mythology.

They are awake. They are present. And they know your name.

The Faeries Are the Guardians of the Green

This is the heart of the matter. This is why the Shining Ones are calling today.

The Faeries of Tír na nÓg carry one luminous, unwavering vision in their ancient and radiant hearts: they wish to keep this world Green. Not green as in the color of a holiday. Green as in alive. Green as in the mycelial web intact, the holy wells flowing, the Hawthorn trees standing, the Dragon Lines unbroken, the thin places unbuilt upon, the sacred reciprocity between humans and the living world unbroken.

This is their mandate. And it has always been ours too, if we remember.

In the pre-Christian traditions of Ireland, to damage a Faery tree was considered a transgression of cosmic proportions. Not because of superstition, but because of understanding, the understanding that these trees were nodes in the living nervous system of the land, that the Faeries who dwelt within and around them were real guardians of real ecological and spiritual balance. The Hawthorn that stands alone in the center of a field in County Clare is not just a tree. She is a temple. She is a threshold. She is a Faery dwelling that has stood for hundreds of years, and in many parts of Ireland, even the most modern farmers will drive a road around her rather than through her, because something in the deep blood-memory knows: you do not cut down a Faery tree.

This is the old knowing. And it is exactly the knowing we need now.

To hear the call of the Faeries today is to receive a sacred assignment: become a Guardian of the Green. Let every holy well you protect be an offering. Let every wild tree you defend be a prayer. Let every patch of untouched soil you leave undisturbed be a covenant with the Shining Ones, your soul's way of whispering across the veil:

I hear you. I remember the contract. I will not let the world go grey.

The Declaration of the Priestesses of Ireland

We who are devoted to the Living Earth and to the Sovereignty of Ériu, we rise. We open our mouths. We speak.

We speak for the Sídhe that were silenced. For the Wells that were paved over, forgotten, left to dry beneath car parks and construction. For the Serpentine Wisdom that was cast out by those who feared what they could not control. For every indigenous people on this Earth whose sacred, living relationship with their land was named heresy and darkness and superstition by those who carried a different god in one hand and a deed of ownership in the other.

We grieve what was taken. And we reclaim what was never truly lost.

We honor the Goddesses Ériu, Banba, and Fódla, not as shadows of a forgotten past, but as the living, breathing, present Heart of this Island. We honor the Faeries of Tír na nÓg, not as fantasy, not as metaphor, but as the real, radiant, elder guardians of the green world who have been holding the light through every century of forgetting, who have left mushroom rings and shimmer-sightings and half-heard music in the twilight as their way of saying: We are still here. Come back to us.

And to every soul who feels the call of Tír na nÓg moving in their blood:

Beloved. Remember.

Your connection to the Earth is not a belief system. It is your birthright. You were not born into a world that is merely material, merely mechanistic, merely explainable. You were born into an enchanted world, a world where Faeries tend the hollow hills, where the wells carry prayers, where the Dragon Lines pulse with the Earth's own dreaming, where pleasure and devotion and wild laughter are not distractions from the sacred but are pathways into it.

Your intuition is not irrational. It is the whisper of the Shining Ones moving through you like wind through meadow grass.

Your wildness, that irreducible, untameable part of you that refuses the grey, refuses the numb, refuses to stop loving the world with a fierceness that sometimes frightens you, is the medicine. It is exactly what the Earth is asking for.

We cast off the veil of the missionary narrative. We step into the ancient emerald light. We declare what has always been true and what no amount of conversion or conquest could ever finally destroy:

Ireland was never in need of saving. She has always been Divine. And so have you.

The Serpent returns. The Faeries dance. The Green endures. The Mother is Sovereign.

And She has never, not for a single radiant breath, been otherwise.

Written with Love & Devotion by Renee Boje Plant Priestess & Guardian of the Green In sacred offering to the Shining Ones of Tír na nÓg March 17th, A Day of Remembrance

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