When the Daughters, and Why?

From the 1994 newsletter, by Hawthorne

One of the Daughters of the Flame sent me an email today asking, "...when did you set up Daughters of the Flame? And what inspired you to do so?"

I wrote a brief reply and after doing so thought maybe others would be interested, as well.

So:

"I began working on it in 1992. I'd devoted myself to Brigit a few years before, and I thought it would be good to have the practice of tending her flame reintroduced. At that time it was not being tended anywhere, not even by the Brigidine nuns, and that felt sad to me.

I didn't have a lot of energy for organizing, but I thought this I could do. So I asked some women friends if they wanted to do it, and a man friend offered to make a computer program for scheduling worldwide, and we lit the flame for the first shift on Imbolc 1993.

I didn't know for several years that the Brigidine sisters relit the flame in Kildare on that day, as well. Very cool. Obviously the time was right."

Still is.

Blessings.

From the first Daughters of the Flame newlsetter: the astonishing news that by word of mouth we had grown from five to twenty flamekeepers between Imbolc and Bealtaine. Astonishing because I knew almost no one in The Community.  Remember, this was pre-internet, and I was not yet on email. Another world, it was...