God bless to me the new day
never vouchsaved to me before
it is to bless thy own presence thou has given triumph
God.
Bless thou to me mine eye
may mine eye bless all it sees
I will bless my neighbor
may my neighbor bless me,
God give me a clean heart
let me not from sight of thine eye
bless to me my children and my wife
and bless to me my means and cattle.
(TRANS. A. CARMICHAEL)
For the Celtic person the new day was lived amidst nature. It is easy to have a creative sense of the day when you live in the presence of the great divinity called nature. For the Celtic people, nature was not matter, rather it was a luminous and numinous presence that had depth, possibility, and beauty.
There is also a beautiful invocation of the day in an ancient poem called “The Deer’s Cry”:
I arise today
Through God’s strength to direct me,
God’s might to uphold me,
God’s wisdom to guide me,
God’s eye to look before,
God’s ear to hear me,
God’s word to speak to me,
God’s hand to guard me,
God’s way to lie before me,
God’s shield to protect me.
God’s hosts to save me from snares of devils
From temptation of vices,
From everyone who shall wish me ill,
Afar and anear,
Alone and in a multitude.
(TRANS. KUNO MEYER)
This poem articulates the Celtic recognition of the omnipresence of God. The very act of awakening is recognized as a gift. At the threshold of a new day there is no arrogance; rather, a longing to praise. God is pictured in sensuous detail as the divine anam 
ara. At every moment and in every situation, God is the intimate, attentive, and encouraging friend.
This notion of the day as a sacred place offers a lovely frame for the creativity that a day can bring. Your life becomes the shape of the days you inhabit. Days enter us. Sadly, in modern life, the day is often a cage where a person can lose youthfulness, energy, and strength. The day is often experienced as a cage precisely because it is spent in the workplace. So many of our days and so much of our time is spent doing work that remains outside the territories of creativity and feeling. Negotiating the workplace can be complex and very difficult. Most of us work for someone else and lose so much of our energy. As a matter of fact, one of the definitions of energy is the ability to do work. Days spent caged make us tired and weary. In a city, all the morning traffic jams hold people who are barely out of the night and are sleepy, anxious, and frustrated. Pressure and stress have already stolen their day. In the evening, the same people are weary after a long workday. By the time they get home, they have no energy left to the desires, thoughts, and feelings that were neglected all day.
It is very difficult, at first consideration, to bring the world of work and the world of soul together. Most of us work in order to survive. We need to make money; we have no choice. On the other hand, those who are unemployed feel frustrated and demeaned and suffer a great loss of dignity. Yet those of us who work are often caught within a grid of predictability and repetition. It is the same every day. There is such an anonymous side to work. All that is demanded of us is the input of our energy. We move through the workplace, and as soon as we are gone in the evening, we are forgotten. We often feel that our contribution, while it is required and demanded, is merely functional and in reality hardly appreciated. Work should not be like that at all; it should be an arena of possibility and real expression.
THE SOUL DESIRES EXPRESSION
The human deeply desires expression. One of the most beautiful ways the soul is present is through thought. Thoughts are the forms of the soul’s inner swiftness. In a certain sense, there is nothing in the world as swift as a thought. It can fly anywhere and be with anyone. Our feelings too can move swiftly; yet even though they are precious to our own identity, thoughts and feelings still remain largely invisible. In order to feel real, we need to bring that inner invisible world to expression. Every life needs the possibility of expression. When we perform an action, the invisible within us finds a form and comes to expression. Therefore, our work should be the place where the soul can enjoy becoming visible and present. The rich unknown, reserved and precious within us, can emerge into visible form. Our nature longs deeply for the possibility of expression in what we call work.
I was raised on a farm. We were poor, and each of us had to do our share of work. I am always grateful that I was taught how to work. Ever since, I have found satisfaction in being able to do a day’s work. I find it frustrating when a day goes astray and at evening I sense that many of the possibilities that slept in that day remained unmet. On a farm, work has a clear and visible effect. When you are digging potatoes, you see the results of your harvesting; the garden yields its buried, nurtured fruit. When you build a wall in a field, you are introducing a new presence into the landscape. If you are out footing turf on the bog, in the evening you see all the gro-gaín of turf standing up ready to dry. There is great satisfaction in farmwork. Even though it is difficult, you still see a great return for your work. When I left home, I entered the world of thought, writing, and poetry. This work is in the invisible realm. When you work in the territory of mind, you see nothing. Only sometimes are you given the slightest little glimpse of the ripples from your effort. You need great patience and self-trust to sense the invisible harvest in the territory of the mind. You need to train the inner eye for the invisible realms where thoughts can grow, and where feelings put down their roots.
PISREOGA
For many people, the workplace is unsatisfactory and permits neither growth nor creativity. More often than not, it is an anonymous place where function and image have control. Since work demands such labor and effort, it has always made the worker vulnerable. Even in the ancient Celtic tradition, negativity could be harnessed to make nature work against the worker. When people disliked each other or wanted to damage each other, they often did it through destroying that person’s harvest. This is the world of pisreoga. Maybe one neighbor was jealous of another and planted eggs in his garden of potatoes. When the neighbor goes to dig up the potatoes at harvesttime, the potatoes have decayed. The destructive wish of the neighbor is realized through a ritual of negative invocation and the symbol of an egg. This then robs the power and the fruitfulness of the garden.
In the Celtic tradition, the first of May was a precarious date. The Celts guarded their wells at this time; negative or destructive spirits might want to destroy, poison, or damage them. Such negativity is illustrated in a story my uncle used to tell of a neighboring village. One May morning, a farmer was out herding his animals. He met a strange woman pulling a rope along the meadow. He greeted her by saying a blessing: “Dia Dhuit.” But she did not answer. Rather, she turned and disappeared, leaving the rope behind her. It was a fine rope. He coiled it and brought it back to the house and threw it into a barrel in one of the outhouses, where it lay forgotten. The following harvest, the neighbors were helping him bring hay home from the meadows with the horse and cart and they needed an extra rope to tie the load of hay. Someone asked if he had any other rope. He said, “Níl aon rópa agam ach rópa an t-sean cailleach”—that is, “I have no rope but the rope of the old hag.” He went to the shed to find the rope, but when he came to the barrel, it was full of butter. The old woman was no innocent visitor; she had stolen the cream and strength of the land on that May morning. When she dropped the rope, the power remained in the rope, and the cream of the land filled up the barrel. This story shows how sometimes the harvest and the reward of work could be stolen at the precarious threshold of May morning.