Wild Awake

🔥 Applications open until Friday 🔥

https://www.wildawake.ie/thewildawakening

Now in it’s sixth (!!) spiral, The Wild Awakening is a seven-part journey born from over 15 years of my own explorations in cultural rewilding, both here in Ireland and abroad. It weaves together my experience as an ancestral skills practitioner, a Rites of passage guide, an activist and a fiercely loving human.

💜This programme is a queer-led, collective response to the trouble of our times; a living enquiry into how we might root ourselves once more in relationship, reciprocity and reverence. It is an imperfectly creative offering to the decolonial futures we dream to embody and inhabit.

✨Ar an tslí linn ~ on the path with us;

📖 ; award-winning poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht
🧺 Lauren Ó Droma; Basket weaver with a deep love for the weave of the wild
🦉 Jimmy Ó Briain Billings of .reexistence ; Decolonial scholar, Animist and Anarchist
🌿 Margaret Chití Ní Bhaoill; Bean na luibheanna, local folk herbalist
🦌 Ian Ó Droma; An fearr beann, antlered-man, deer ally and wild weaver
🌊 Jenny O’Hare .tree.called.life ; Deep ecologist, facilitator, and a “live it all” human kind of being
🪶 Rupert Marques; Wilderness rites of passage guide
🔥 Clare Murphy : storyteller, performer, teacher, salon curator, artist in residence. A woman of many skills.
🪨 Aodh Mac Gairbheá; local Múinteoir Na Gaeilge, Irish teacher & Seanachaí
🌳 John Duffy and Laura McGoran; Regenerative farmers & community tenders

🔥 Come leap over the Tine Bealtaine with your FiáinTuath in 2026 and live a more antlered-life

✍️Applications now open until November 28th. Successful applicants will be notified by December 3rd.

https://www.wildawake.ie/thewildawakening

An Fómhair; A Wild Awake Harvest
🌾Beannachtaí Féile Lughnasadh🫐

This year marks 10 years since I began this journey (!), first as Phoenix Forest School in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, and now as Wild Awake.
Together, we’ve gathered around fires, tended to ancestral lifeways, remembered what it means to belong to the land and to one another, and turned toward the challenging questions of our times.
As we step across this next threshold, I want to pause and listen... to divest from the harmful illusion of constant growth, and instead compost what’s no longer needed, attend to what’s alive, and reimagine what Wild Awake could become in service to our wider community.

This is an invitation to join me in a harvest; to reflect on the seeds we’ve planted together, to compost what no longer serves, and to dream into the next season for Wild Awake.

I would greatly appreciate if you could explore this with me by sharing your experiences, thoughts and insights about Wide Awake in the below form.

In reciprocity, each entry will be entered into a draw to win a €50 voucher for any Wild Awake offering. This feedback form will be open until September 30th.

Join us in blowing on the embers

A votive offering for Neantóg, nettlekin, on this Lá Fhéile na Neantóg.

Neantóg thrives in the disturbed places.
Feeding, stinging, remembering.
Neantóg holds medicine, memory and resistance.

I’ve started a substack (!) and my first piece is a written & oral piece I created for weaving_remembrance a few months ago when the nettles were just poking their heads above ground. It’s spoken from the perspective of Neantóg; if I can be so bold!

A jagged note of Decolonial love and remembering,
A purple-tinged call to re-root in land, lineage and reciprocity.

“Is mise Neantóg. I am nettle. You are nettle. We are nettle”.

🫖 Grab a cupán tae Neantóg & let me know what you think in the comments 👇

🔗 https://wildawakeeire.substack.com/p/is-mise-neantog

🔥Tending the fire, drawing from the well~ meet the hearts & hands behind Airmid’s Journal 🔥

Airmid’s Journal is a co-created, collaborative offering from Denise Conroy Votive Illustration and Lucy O’Hagan.

Friends for over ten years, our friendship has been shaped by squat parties, activism and a passion for liberated futures. In the early days, our time together was filled with punk gigs, resistance, and wild adventures through the city and beyond.
But as the years passed, our friendship shifted—less about drinking at parties, more about drinking from wells.

🌀We found ourselves drawn deeper into the landscapes of folklore, ritual, and ancestral knowledge, exploring sacred sites, old traditions, and radical ways of reconnecting with the land.

🌿That shared curiosity naturally led to our collaboration with Airmid’s Journal; a space where we could co-create, promote radical ways of relating with the land, uplift diverse voices, and breathe new life into folk practices.

✨Denise’s insight and creativity continues to shape the journal, and our collaboration is rooted in the same spirit that first brought us together—a love for solidarity, connection, and folklore as a living, fluid practice.

Get your journal here: https://www.wildawake.ie/shop/p/airmidsjournalteanga

🌱Weaving Webs of Kinship: Uplifting Grassroots Resistance 🌱

Airmid’s Journal has never just been about words on a page—it’s about connection, solidarity, and showing up for those doing the work on the ground. We aim to foster solidarity and grow webs of kinship with grassroots, community-based projects by promoting aligned organisations and redistributing a portion of the funds we raise. From mutual aid groups to land and water defenders, we believe in lifting each other up, amplifying voices, and building networks of care and resistance. This isn’t just about storytelling—it’s about strengthening the bonds that hold us together.

With our new issue ‘Teanga’ we want to celebrate the work of two incredible organisations. Each tending to land and language in their own way.

🌱Gairdín an Phobail is a community garden in west Belfast - an area where chronic poverty goes hand in hand with an abundance of talent and a spirit of community organising best captured by the Irish phrase - Na habair é, déan é - don’t say it, do it.

It is home to a network of dedicated community organisations and diverse individuals who together care for the Gairdín and its many hundreds of users from local schools and the surrounding area.

Over the course of the year the community tend to the garden and host a range of events to share skills and ideas, to grow and distribute food, to demonstrate solidarity with local and international struggles and to play a proactive part in re-wilding and defending the natural habitats around Belfasts hills.

10% of profits from Airmid’s Journal will go toward Gairdín an Phobail 🌱

✊ An Dream Dearg

An Dream Dearg is a grassroots Irish language rights campaign network established in the North of Ireland in 2017 with the aim of bringing about legislative protection for the Irish language and its growing
community of speakers through a comprehensive, rights-based Irish language act and to empower our community of young speakers in particular to become involved in grassroots campaigning on language rights issues.

✨Introducing Contributors to the latest Airmid’s Journal: Teanga✨

🌿Ola Majekodunmi ~ ‘Glow’ & ‘Lost’

Ola was born in Lagos, Nigeria and raised in Dublin, Ireland. She is a broadcaster, writer, Gaeilgeoir, creative producer and the Irish language co-ordinator at Fighting Words. She has produced and spoken at literary festival events with the likes of Dublin International Literature Festival, Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and West Cork Literary Festival.

🌀Rónán Ó Raghallaigh ~ ‘Tá Mé Gul Awailí’

Rónán .o.raghallaigh is a visual artist and researcher. His work explores pre-Christian Irish mythology
and belief and how it relates to current social, ecological and political contexts. In 2021, he graduated
from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) with an MFA Art and the Contemporary World. He
has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in Ireland and abroad.

✨Introducing Contributors to the latest Airmid’s Journal: Teanga✨

🌊Catriona Ní Ghribín ~ ‘An Rún’ & ‘Gailtín Tí Móir’

Catriona is a multi-instrumentalist and singer from the Gaeltacht of Northwest Donegal. Now living in Belfast, she is immersed in the vibrant music scene, gigging and touring extensively with her bands; the trailblazing huartan_ and lonesomegeorgeband.

Having grown up immersed in the Irish language, music and culture, and performing and touring with An Crann Óg, Catriona is dedicated to preserving and promoting the Irish language through her work and has a keen interest in disseminating the songs that are at-risk within the tradition. Throughout her Masters in Research she focused on collecting lesser-known songs from the Donegal Gaeltacht that were of extinction due to lack of documentation. She collected 20 of these songs, documented the lyrics in new Irish (as opposed to sean-chló), transcribed musical notation from old recordings and documented local stories from each song.

Catriona is now undertaking a PHD which explores the oral tradition of indigenous song and how the tradition is growing out of its boundaries by latching onto other genres. Her study explores movement, gender, the pagan resurgence within traditional music and how this is linked with anti-capitalism.

🌿Amano Miura; 舌 Tongue (Sh*ta)

Amano Miura is a songwriter, poet, and performing artist from Kerry and Kumamoto. Her work explores personal unfolding, cultural fluidity, language(s) and animist ecologies across modes of expression including folk, pop, sean-nós and spectacle. Amhránaí, file, ealaíontóir stáitse, Ciarraíoch agus Kyushu-ite is ea í Amano. Seans ann go gcuirfidh sí mearbhall ort.

✨Introducing Contributors to the latest Airmid’s Journal: Teanga✨

🪨 Cré ~ ‘Amhráin agus Foinn’

Aoife Hammond and Steve Finnerty are musicians based in Leitrim and Tipperary. When living together in Dublin in 2013 they formed a punk band and have been playing in punk bands and doing many other projects together since. They casually started playing some traditional tunes together while hanging out which led to the formation of Cré in 2024 with Aoife singing and playing guitar and Steve singing and playing Bouzouki.

Aoife .h.a.m.m.0. grew up with Irish in school and in the home. They are a community worker and event organiser at
The Common Knowledge Centre in Co. Clare.

Steve is currently learning Irish, making more progress now than what was achieved in 14 years of school. He works growing organic vegetables and does other work based around sustainable living.

📸

❤️‍🔥Leasha Hogan ~ ‘Teanga na plandaí’ 🌱
Leasha is a community folk herbalist; she works under the name 'Grá Fiánta' which means ‘fierce love’. Leasha's work is rooted in the city ecosystem and is guided by principles of solidarity, mutual aid, and reciprocity. Through her work as a herbalist, Leasha aims to reconnect people with traditional knowledge of plant medicine and mobilise it in support of people experiencing marginalisation and oppression as part of the wider struggle for rights, community sovereignty, and justice.

🌳Aoife de Bhál; ‘Beann Mhadagáin’

Aoife is from Béal Feirste, where they live happily by the Lagan. Aoife is part of the second generation to benefit from Gaelscolaíocht (Irish medium education) in the Six Counties.
Their work aims to bring people into community with each other and with the more-than-human world through wild food, nature experiences, folklore and language. Ní neart go cur le chéile.

✨ Introducing some of the amazing contributors for Airmid’s Journal: Teanga ✨

🌘 Johan Sandberg McGuinne ~ ‘I LONG TO KISS YOUR SCARRED LIPS
WITH A DECOLONISED TONGUE’

“To translate ourselves back home again is a decolonial act of love – a tangible act that is forged in discomfort, existing comfortably outwith the metaphors of academia that, in turn, ”kill the very possibility of decolonisation.””

Johan Sandberg McGuinne is a South Saami and Scottish Gaelic poet, traditional yoik singer, writer, literary scholar, and language activist, working as a teacher and translator in Lïkssjuo, Swedish Sápmi. He is currently serving as the president of Tjállegoahte, the Saami Writers’ Centre in Sweden.

✨ Gráinne Holland ~ Cúr Rua ✨

Gráinne is a Belfast-born singer, songwriter, storyteller, and media producer. Educated through the medium of Irish, she was immersed in Irish traditional arts, which inspired her love of folklore, mythology, and music.

She released her debut album of traditional songs Teanga na nGael in 2011, followed by Gaelré in 2015 under the Gael Linn label, and her original album Corcra in 2019, produced by Brian Finnegan. Gráinne has presented BBC music and arts programs and produced content for BBC, TG4, and RTÉ before founding her own company, Corcra Media.

In 2021, she launched Ceol na Sióg, a children’s book and CD of her original songs, which inspired a theatre show which was performed across Ireland. Her podcast series Tales of Tuatha Dé Danann, retelling Irish myths with music, debuted in 2023.

In 2024, she released Draíocht an Dúlra, a book and album celebrating the magic of nature, along with a theatre show based on the material that toured extensively across Ireland.

🌿 Pre-orders now available:
https://www.wildawake.ie/shop/p/airmidsjournalteanga