Blog #5 May 1, Beltane

Something about the west of Ireland draws me. There is a content feeling, a warm fullness in my belly connected to the earth, water, and stones. Even the air is alive, with trickster wind teasing and gusting. It is such an ancient landscape littered with Neolithic giant stone dolmens, stone circles, court tombs, cairns on every hilltop, megalithic standing stones engraved with spirals and solar and lunar symbols. These 5000 year remains we’re created by a mostly unknown people with no written language. Their history is lost in the mists of time, but traces reman in oral history and rich and extensive mythology that inhabits the earth. It is everywhere, especially in the west. There are sacred rivers and holy wells throughout.

There is a multitude of early monastic constructions from the 5th to 10 th century, with more nearly historical legends and lore, strangely carved standing stone crosses 1500 years old. Soaring huge stone abbeys from the middle ages tower in every town, by the rivers or the sea. These were torn down, burned, and rebuilt and destroyed again and again by the various invaders. A mulitude of huge stone castles from the time of the Norman invasion, in the 1200s and later the British castles built to intimidate and control the Irish population, occupy the heights every 8 miles. And it is all preserved in stone, a resource that Ireland is rich in….. And the land still supports the tribes of the past. The O’Rourkes, the Rosses, the O’Donellys, Conlans ( my mother’s maiden name), and they still live and love close to their kin and the land of their ancestral clam for millennia, telling the stories of the living landscape, from which they are born and to which they return. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust is only part of it. The grass grows from the dirt of the land, feeds the sheep and cows, which the descendants eat and live on. Their molecules and spirits recycled in each new generation. Do you have your great great grandfather’s eyes? Maybe so, in more than appearance.

And where the wild north Atlantic Ocean crashes into the granite cliffs, and golden beaches, the wind and the rain and the sun combine into something so vividly elemental that it is easy to feel the carbon earth of my body, the 70% water, the breathe, and the fire of my heart’s beat, and my cell’s metabolism in communion, part of it all.

Yes, I know this deep sense of connection, kinship, belonging, being part of it all, not an objective being separate, is the basis of my spiritual passion. Can you imagine the lapping of waves on a sandy beach, an ever changing interface of the feminine elemental aspects of matter? Or the roaring foaming crash of the waves on the ragged eroded rocks, roots of a continent? The dynamic interconnection of opposites perpetually dancing together, while the wind howls and the sun enlivens and burns.

For 3-4 days I explored County Sligo, Yeats country and rich in archeological sites, lakes, and waterfalls. Then, I travelled north to the edge of the world outside a tiny village called Glenncolombkille, in Donegal. I followed the coast north as far as Bunbeg and Bloody Foreland, before turning back to the south, passing by Mount Akiscal, and vast boglands.

Today, I left that magical countryside behind and drove east toward Dublin, as I prepare to make my pilgrimage to Iona, Scotland, across the Irish Sea, in the Inner Hebrides.