Skirt hitched and gathered, the Old Woman treads the North Atlantic like a wading pool.

Yes, Her calves are all gooseflesh.

Yes, the wind is tangling grey hairs and tightening the itchy scarf round Her neck.

And yes, since you asked, the basket of peat and stones She carries is wearing heavy on ancient bones and She would quite like to put it down now.

So the Cailleach allows Her burden to drop, spilling great sods and boulders into the sea.

*

Hebrides and Highlands She fashioned this way, and if She shaped up the edges of the Western Isles with Her bare toes, pushed a few out of the way to leave a walking firth, that’s nae our business.

Some say the Cailleach had a husband or two over in Éirinn, and children to show for it. That may be.

Some say She used to wrestle with the Stoor Worm, long before he got all his teeth knocked out by a little brat looking for a magic sword. I do not know if that part is true, but I have heard how She filled several lochs with Her weeping when the great Worm left his liver in the North Sea and curled up to die under Ísland.

Some say the Celts brought Her over in story and song when they paddled from Europe only a few thousand years ago, but that is the tallest tale of them all.

No, the Cailleach was here amongst the early humans. Watched some of them traipse over Doggerland, saw the ocean drown that liminal realm and cut them off from the continent.

And the Old Woman liked those little people who erected standing stone circles for Her, would even come out on Midwinter to feel the warmth of their fires.

What interested Her too were the sheep they brought across the channel, for Her loom had only known the hair of Britain’s primitive goat.

Yes, wool She could abide.

**

Hebridean Goddess, Winter Queen, Divine Crone, Ancestral Creator of landforms and waterways throughout Scotland and Ireland: I quite like this Old Woman who sits on Highland mountains and teaches nymphs to guard their streams — though She doesn’t need my approval or praise.

Yes, I like this embodied Crone with Her feet in the ocean.

The Cailleach is the perfect answer to an immaterial Sky Father such as the one described by Anne Sexton in her poem, “The Earth”:

God loafs around heaven,
without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
[…]
He who has no body.

[…]

He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.

(from The Awful Rowing Toward God, 1975)

Unlike Sexton’s God who “loafs around heaven / without a shape” and longs to have “a body / and come down / and give it a bath / now and then,” the Cailleach has a shape and a body. She even has a plaid dress that She washes in the Minch.

***

After spending many months on the Misty Isle, one of the Cailleach’s created lands where two hills of identical height (2,402 ft) bear the name “Beinn na Caillich” (‘mountain of the old woman’), I see and feel the Hebridean Creatrix this November. I relate to Her lonesome stature, too.

Watching the croft for my Skye friends while they go away, I pretend this is my land: milk the goats, count sheep, collect eggs, pet the working mousers, dig around in the garden, drink cups of tea, make sure nothing blows away in the divine Crone’s winter gales, then retire for long nights of reading, drawing, and writing.

It is this balance of engaging my creative practice and working outside in solitude that allows me to feel content, healthy, embodied, and real — and it is the Old Woman who reminds me that I too am a fundamentally autonomous creatrix, with a body that must return to quiet teachings on hills and run ever back to the sea like one of the Her swift mountain streams.