The Longtime Sun… & St. Pat’s Day

I usually finish my meditation classes by reciting an Irish Sun blessing, called The Longtime Sun. It’s well known and has been recorded as a chant and song many times.

It goes like this:

May the longtime Sun shine upon you,

All love surround you,

And the pure light within you

Guide your way home.

Recently, I decided to download a copy of the song from iTunes. What prompted me to do so was a different version of the blessing that included a new second line about the ‘cool moon.’ I heard it recited at the end of a yoga class and afterwards asked the instructor about the line. The class had been taught on the day of the full moon, and she had led us through several variations of the moon salutation, instead of the usual sun salutation.

So I thought that she might’ve just added the line about the moon for the purpose of the class. She laughed at that idea and assured me that the line was part of the Irish Sun Blessing, and that no, she had not made it up.

So the next day, which happened to be St. Patrick’s Day, I looked it up on iTunes, and listened to seven or eight variations. But not one of them included a line about the moon. After all, it’s a sun blessing.  I particularly liked the rendition sung by a Kundalini yogina, Snatam Kaur, who has recorded several albums of sacred music.

However, no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t download the song. The tune was frozen, wouldn’t play, and wouldn’t download. I shrugged it off, but the next day I went back and found the same situation. The song would not download for me. So I started puzzling over the esoteric meaning of it all.

Then it hit me. Yesterday had been St. Patty’s Day, as I said. Not only had I tried to download the Irish blessing without any conscious recognition of the connection, but I had spent the entire day without wearing anything green. An inadvertent snub of the Irish, I suppose, and the freeze had been my payback.

So I’m wondering if the Trickster might have an Irish grandmother!

Fortunately, the Longtime Sun did play when I found it on YouTube after I wrote this post, as you can see above. But even then it would only appear as a URL, not an image, until Trish put it up.