CTA blue line entrance at Jackson

Threshold blessing

Living Irish Witchcraft – Today's Journal Entry

This is a threshold blessing.

Stand in your threshold. Take a breath. Put your hand on the doorway and feel the wood. Then say:

«What comes in supports my well-being.

What goes out is released without harm.

I stand in my sovereignty.»

Take another deep breath and pass through the doorway.

the great silence in Irish history

This morning I watched a video from the Irish History Podcast that talked about what is referred to as the Great Silence, a period during which historians did not write much about the Great Hunger. It lasted for about a hundred years after the famine ended. The Irish president, in 2014 or 2016, referred to this period as the Great Silence. His interpretation was that people were so traumatized they didn't want to talk about it. Another version of the same interpretation is that people were ashamed or embarrassed by it, and apparently that might have had something to do with it because they had to do some pretty extreme things to survive.

In reality, ordinary people were talking about it all the time. It was just that academic books were not being written, and government officials and other people in power weren't talking about it. Cecil Woodham-Smith published The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849, which became a bestseller and was even serialized in newspapers. Folklore researchers around that time discovered that stories of the famine were very common in Irish folklore, and even songs had been written about it. The Fields of Athenry is a famous song about the famine that is still popular today and is sung at soccer matches, similar to the way we play the national anthem.

The historian in the video made a good point that there are still villages and isolated huts all over Ireland that were abandoned during the famine, and it would be very hard to ignore these very obvious signs of it. My own opinion, which he didn't mention but makes sense to me, is that newer generations would naturally want to know why they have family in America, Canada, Australia, or elsewhere. That question would be impossible to answer without mentioning the famine if that was the reason their ancestors emigrated, as so many did.

So, in reality, it was just that official and academic books weren't being written. There was a huge revisionist movement at the time, where people were reluctant to write anything that was overly critical of the British government. According to the historian Mary Daly, she was reluctant to write about the famine because she didn't want to produce a work that might, in some way, support the IRA, and she believed other historians felt the same.

Ironically, some of the next books to become popular with the public were written by English historians, including Cecil Woodham-Smith's The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 and Terry Eagleton's Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture.

Paxton IL

Black Oak Bayou at LaSalle

Nature Journal – Bayou Walk

I finally made it to the woods. I meant to come out a lot earlier, but by the time I woke up and got moving, it was already as hot as it was going to be for the day. I'm already hot and tired, and the dogs are already hot, and I felt like this was not going to be a fun trip. Less than satisfactory, I guess.

I opted to take a different path because I wanted to stay out of the sun, but the mosquitoes were terrible. I rounded them up and got back in the car, and we drove down the road to the bayou. It's not as sunny, but it's also not super shady, and I was hoping there would be enough bird predation to keep the mosquitoes down.

Right now I'm sitting in the car just enjoying the fact that there's actually a breeze here, which is nice. I already saw a bunch of great blue herons and some great egrets. I saw a goldfinch while we were driving, and I heard a mourning dove.

Walking along the bayou turned out to be a lot better. There's enough air movement to keep the mosquitoes down, and there's almost kind of a little breeze. The trade-off is that I have to watch and make sure the dogs don't jump in the river because Max has no sense. There are patches of shade mixed with the sun, and there's more grass and trees, so overall I think this is a better choice.

As soon as I got out of the car, I realized something smelled dead. It didn't take long to figure out why. There were dead fish everywhere along the shoreline—hundreds of them, with one every few feet. Even the little beach I wanted to go to was contaminated with dead fish.

The whole place has sort of a prehistoric or post-apocalyptic feel to it today.

I also saw a killdeer, a flock of about seven goldfinches, a sandhill crane, a double-crested cormorant, a box turtle, and a small family of what I think were geese, although they were so far away it was hard to tell. I found what looked like the remains of a recently hatched turtle nest in the sandy soil.

I was also thinking the oxygen problem is more likely the issue with those poor dead fish. They're mostly on the end closer to the boat launch. This year they pulled out all the water lilies in that area because they were getting unbearable.

I don't know what they did with all the vegetation. Since this is an area managed by professionals, specifically for fishing and hunting, I would think they would haul it up and throw it away somewhere. It doesn't make sense that they would leave it to rot if this is a predictable outcome.

Unfortunately, because of the heat, my underlying stress today, the dead fish incident, and the rest of it, this was a sadly unrestorative walk. 

Wildlife List – Bayou Walk (July 8, 2026)

Birds

• Great blue heron (multiple)

• Great egret (multiple)

• Sandhill crane

• Double-crested cormorant

• Killdeer

• American goldfinch (flock of about seven)

• Mourning dove (heard)

• House finch (tentative)

• Small family of probable geese (species uncertain)

Reptiles

• Eastern box turtle

• Evidence of a recently hatched turtle nest (species uncertain)

Other wildlife

• Frogs (heard)

Notable observations

• Large fish kill, concentrated near the boat launch, with hundreds of dead panfish along the shoreline.

Irish Prosperity Magic

What I Learned Today: Prosperity Magic

Laura O'Brien was talking about prosperity magic. She didn't give an actual spell this time, which she usually does, but instead talked about her own prosperity practice.

She has a little money bag that she occasionally picks up and shakes to stir up the money energy. I don't totally understand the backstory of it or how she originally set it up, but she said she got the bag for free somewhere. It was green and kind of cute, and it appealed to her. She would occasionally put coins into it, which makes sense as adding to the money energy.

One day she picked it up and discovered it had a hole in it, and money started falling out. She started panicking a little because she thought, "This is our money, this is our prosperity, and now look, it's all falling apart."

So she found another bag that she liked even better. It was bigger, golden-colored, and made of velvet. She said that just holding it, shaking it, and moving the money around was a much more sensory and satisfying experience.

Her first thought when she started using the new bag was, "Oh, this is so big. I'm never going to fill it." She used that as an example of how much of what holds us back in doing magic is our own self-doubt and those little voices in the back of our heads that tell us all the self-sabotaging things.

She also said that the energy comes from the experience of handling the bag.

She talked about having a small prosperity altar in her home office right beside her computer where she does her work. I wish she had shown it. She said everything on the altar represents abundance. She's not pursuing money for the sake of money so much as trying to create comfort, stability, and security for herself and her family so that she can then put her effort into doing good in the world.

She also said that whenever they have a slowdown in their income, the first thing they do is give something away. Then they start thinking about how to correct whatever is going wrong or how to improve their income.

One thing I noticed was that when she talked about her work, she described it as "putting things out into the world." When she talked about giving things away, she used exactly the same phrase. I took that to mean that what she's putting out into the world isn't just donating money. It's also creating free content and giving from what she already naturally lives in, which is her faith and her work with the school.

Summer Solstice in Ireland

What I Learned Today: The Summer Solstice in Ireland

Contrary to what they seem to be saying over at Irish Pagan School, apparently the summer solstice was kind of a big deal way back into ancient times. It wasn't just because they were celebrating the longest day. It was also because this was about the time that last year's harvest was starting to run out.

The really poor people lived almost entirely on potatoes for most of the year, but about this time the potatoes were starting to run out and the new ones weren't ready yet. In order to fill the gap, they grew cabbage, which has a much shorter growing season. They actually had to eat so much of it that their skin in the summertime had sort of a greenish-yellow color.

People think of the Great Famine in the 1840s because everybody knows about it and it was so huge and catastrophic, but there were also a bunch of other famines that happened earlier than that. They were just shorter and less widespread.

Eventually, the summer solstice festival was Christianized and changed to St. John's Day or St. John's Eve on June 23rd because, of course, they had to change everything, but not too much. People believed that if you didn't burn a bonfire on St. John's Eve, your crops would be unlucky that year. St. John's Eve was also a big festival day going back as early as the 1300s.

Another sad thing that happened during the solstice festival, and later on St. John's Eve, was that farmhands would be hired out. Kids as young as twelve or thirteen were often hired out as labor. How they were treated pretty much depended on wherever they landed. Some families were good to them and treated them like another one of the kids. Other families treated them worse than their work animals.

It wasn't just that people were hoping the kids would earn wages to send back home. It was also a way to send them away for the summer and get them fed somewhere else because these families didn't have enough resources. Sending the children out to work temporarily reduced the number of mouths to feed until the next harvest.