my favorite reading nook in all the world. o’connell’s dairy farm in drumellihy, county clare
i tried. i truly did. it seems i’ve, well, failed. if failed is the verdict we choose to put to the determined effort to concentrate, to focus, to linearly follow page after page.
instead i am a jackrabbit of a reader. i cannot, for the life of me, trace a straight line. one minute i’m attempting ulysses, starting with an easy reader after traipsing the trail of leonard bloom through dublin. another minute i’ve decided pope francis’s slim collected works, against war: building a culture of peace, is the page i need to put to heart. then it’s onto raising hare, a love story so gentle i found it the perfectly prescribed balm in a week when bombs fell and mistruths fired right, left, and sideways.
i know full well that i set out to stick to one and only one tome till i—or summer—came to its end. etty hillesum was going to hold my attention. but my attention didn’t listen. it was distracted. as it so often is.
my irish poet penpal tadhg described rabbit holes, the literary divots i fall into, in charming irish terms not so long back. he makes every word he writes and utters sound poetic or profound, and he fails not here (his description of how it was that my last name leapt out and caught his attention during a morning’s meditation):
“Like the early Irish monks who doodled mystical nature poems on the margins of sacred manuscripts, I was distracted by the spelling of your name and wandered off, as those monks were wont to do (excuse the arrogant comparison), down a boreen (from Irish bóthairín, diminuitive of bóthar, meaning ‘road’, from the Irish ‘bó’, ‘cow’. A meandering pathway made by a cow).”
i am now—especially after strolling country lanes pocked with aftermath of bovine traipsing—inclined to consider my rabbit holes in more bucolic irish terms, and think of them as my boreens, meandering pathways made by my cow mind.
my boreen, in physical form, looks not bucolic at all. in fact, it’s rather a beehive of possible distraction, all piled and teetering hither and yon:
i cannot for the life of me go straight.
besides gulping down my friend tadhg’s glorious meditations on the stations of the cross, i found my nose deep in raising hare (see last week’s mention), and am tucking in my overnight bag practice of the presence, a glorious little tome of translations from one of my favorite saintly souls ever, brother lawrence, whom i think of as the patron saint of pots and pans, though in fact he’s more oft referred to as the friar of pots and pans, and ultimately the friar of amour (love). he’s the humble little monk who toiled fifty years in a monastery, forty of those in the steamy kitchen, and thirty as a sandal repairer (monks wear through their soles on the road to polishing their souls). he described himself, famously, as “a clumsy oaf who broke everything” in his early attempt at being a hermit, and then a footman. when at last he found the monastery at 74 rue de vaugirard, he found his peace and his place.
and in him, i find mine: the gentle, humble soul who finds grace and God in the most quotidian of daily tasks, and spends his hours in the company and comfort of the Author of It All. even in the steamy monastery kitchen.
what’s notable is that dear brother lawrence hated kitchen work, but in his biographer’s writings it’s told that he did it “with the greatest love possible.” and that his practice of the presence of God in the most ordinary of moments, stirring a kettle, pulling trays of bread from the oven, “grew like dew, or mist on mountains.”
the translation i’ve just found, by carmen acevedo butcher, is extraordinary in the fullest measure, and might be the soothingest read yet of this hot summer.
the little monk’s spiritual maxims, work gently, be humble and authentic, includes this boreen (meandering cow path, remember?) on the highest reach of the soul, writing that in true spiritual union:
“the soul is not asleep as in the other unions, but finds herself powerfully stirred. its activity is more intense than fire, and brighter than the sun when not obscured by cloud. we can, however, misunderstand this feeling, for it is not a simple expression of the heart, like saying, ‘my God, i love you with all my heart,’ or other similar words. no, it is an i don’t know what, a je ne sais quoi of the soul, a something indescribable, loving, and very simple, that carries the soul and nudges her to love, respect, and embrace God with a tenderness that cannot be expressed, and that only experience can conceive.”
to this indescribableness, i dive deep. turning page after page. in no particular order. but trusting i’ll find the grace i seek.
may your distractions, too, carry you to lofty heights and voluminous depths. what distracted you this week?
before i go, and scurry off to a writerly retreat at my dear friend katie’s on the lake, i am sending love without end to my beloved friend andrea whose birth we celebrate tomorrow, and who is closing the book on one fine chapter of her life on the same day. i love her dearly. her wit, her hilarity, her unconditional and undemanding love. she is like no other.
there are a few brother lawrence books out there, but the one i’ve just procured and cannot recommend more heartily is carmen acevedo butcher’s, from broadleaf books. you can find it here.
annagh river at kildimo south, my ancestral land, as it flows toward the sea at spanish point
i don’t want to wash it off. instead, i am in that necessary liminal state of in-betweens, when a newfound knowing needs time and space and silence to seep in. when we’re wise to open wide our pores, to fill our lungs, to allow our synapses to affix to new neural pathways. to come to indelible understanding.
if that seems an odd way to describe an adventure, so be it. my days in ireland were so much more than a “trip,” a “vacation,” a “getaway”—banal descriptors for folderol and whimsy, with suitcase attached. instead, my days in dublin, cork, and county clare were something of a journey in its deepest form: a coming to know someone, some place, i’ve always known but not yet fully met. and that someone, in fact, was me. a deep-down part of me long stirring, long felt, but not yet seen in fine focus. as if untold parts of me longed to know from whence they came. and not just my affinity for cloudy days and wit and poetry. and why i feel the hand of God so profoundly in the morning’s mist, and the moonbeams’ amber glow.
or maybe it was propelled by a yearning never sated, a yearning my whole life long to know the people from whom i sprang. the grandmother whose stories have stirred me from the start. the father who spoke so little of his past, and whose answers to my questions died when he breathed his last in 1981.
maybe my search was a daughter’s reaching for the hem of her father’s cloak. to run my fingers along its nubby threads, to stitch in quilt squares where the cloth had worn too thin. maybe there is something of longed-for re-union in my diligent tracings of ancestral ties and tales. maybe my father is who i try still to reach.
and then there’s the radiant present, the crucible of time that amplifies the here and now, the intense knowing that each and every hour is a gift, and before it ends, i intend to magnify the time, to expand the boundaries of my heart, to leave tracings on the ones i love so that my imprint might not fade so quickly. so that some part of me forever lingers in the one place where it matters: their blessed hearts.
i remember, in the darkest turns of these past two years, and especially at the turning of my latest birthday, how deep the wish i made, when i closed my eyes and drew a deep, deep breath, one that filled my lung and a half. i wished with all my might for precious time with my boys, time huddled close, time punctuated with the percolations of laughter without end. time punctuated with the sort of silence that is sodden even its wordlessness, because you know each other so well, so adoringly, you’ve room for time inside the vault of your own thoughts.
my wishes, every one of them, came tumbling true in the trek we took these past eight days, returning to the homeland of my soul, my spirit, my way of being.
in that uncanny way we can reach across time, reach into a past that was not ours, i’ve long felt that tugging cord to my grandma anna mae, the kentucky schoolteacher whose papa, thadius shannon, hailed from the granite house at annagh bridge, in county clare, on the wedge of land squeezed between the confluence of the annagh and the kildimo rivers as they flow into the sea at spanish point.
annagh riverancestral home, the annagh bridge house built 1726, at kildimo south
to press my sole onto that soil, to walk the land and listen to the rush of water playing over rocks, to do so with my boys at my side, and my God shining down and through me, was to feel bathed and baptized in life as sweet as it allows.
it’s too soon, really, to step back and make sense of all of it, so at this just-home stage i’ve little but a mosaic of moments i’ll not forget, and which i’m scrambling to scribble onto the page in hopes of holding on for a good long while. among the litany i’m pressing to my heart, re-looping through the sleepless jet-lagged night, there are these:
awaking on a rain-sodden morning when the country lane was still puddled, and the branches dripping diamond-like droplets of morning drink, and stepping into the soundscape of magpie and rook and lowing cows and calves. the whir of the milking machines beginning to rumble before the roar.
arms that reached out to wrap me in the minute i knocked on the door and introduced myself as a long-lost cousin, no questions asked. the rounds of drink at the pub that night where we gathered to tell tales above the lilt of harp and fiddle. and the hilarity of the cousin who moaned, “oh jezus!” when i asked if they might have a prosecco. and when i leapt into the self-mockery right along with her, she continued on, “you’re in a pub in a wee town, jezus, what are ya thinkin’?” or words nearly to that effect.
harp and fiddle in the “snug” at friel’s pub in milltown malbayshannon cousins huddled at friel’s pub and fueled by pint
driving down country lanes that turned like corkscrews (in fact one set of directions included the name “corkscrew hill,” and i feared dear blair’s heart might skip a beat or two, if not pause altogether), and threaded through ancient arbors where branches on each side of the road reached out to join hands.
the plates of food that arrived with herbs from the sea and tendrils of sweet pea, the butter from cows who sleep in the fields, under stars and moon each night and chew the sweet grasses by day, the fish you imagine leapt from streams just beyond the kitchen where little more than heat was put to flesh.
the hilarity and wit. of just about everyone. from the taxi drivers in dublin to the tattoed and multi-pierced fellow clearing away your luncheon plates.
the charms of signs like: “matchmaking goat farm.” do they matchmake goats or give you a choice? a mate or a goat, your pick. (photo to come!)
the english food market in cork, a veritable labyrinth of fresh-from-the-earth-and-sea delicious. a butter chicken pie in a crust so flaky the only apt desciption, according to what i witnessed in the expressions of my boys, might be (excuse my language) “orgasmically delicous.”
a whole museum that heralds words, and language, poetry and wit, the Museum of Literature Ireland, where Copy Number One of Ulysses basks under glass, and whole rooms are filled with epigraph upon epigraph, one of those rare places on the globe where human language and its infinite configurations are held up as priceless treasure.
the straight-from-a-storybook propietor of the Dublin pharmacy, Sweny, where on page 88 of Ulysses, in the chapter “Lotus Eaters,” Leopold Bloom buys his lemon soap. the drippingly elegant gent who, upon barely-whispered request, broke into Gaelic song while sipping from his vat of burgundy wine on the eve of Bloomsday.
i’ll turn it over here to a bit of Joyce and his telling of Sweny’s:
“The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle.”
seán of seán’s bookshop
the bookseller Séan in Milltown Malbay, the town from which my people hail, whose shelves near collapsed under the weight of thousands upon thousands of tomes, with that telltale musty smell of words embalmed in ancient ink, and dusts of time a welcome attribute.
the countless times we heard the sympathies for us pitiable americans who at the moment seem to find ourselves under the rule of the “feckin ijeet.” eye rolls every time only served to emphasize the point. one cousin told us they keep keen eye on news from america as if it’s real-time soap opera leaping from the daily news.
the infinitely comforting knowing that 45 years after my first and only other trek to the land of forty shades of green, it’s truly not too changed. sure, there are homes built bigger and sturdier than i’d seen before, but ancient thatched roofs are not a rarity, stone walls still scythe the hillsides, a geometric grid that bespeaks hard labor never shirked and an undying reliance on the old ways, and town centres present row after row of storefronts in kaleidoscopic colors, no pink too pink, no purple or orange too vivid. as one new friend, a poet and old irish professor, told us: in a land so gray, a language rife with wit, and a townscape of vivid palate is but necessity.
my friend Tadhg Ó Dúshláine, poet, writer, professor of Irish
and i shall let my poet and professor friend tadhg close us out here with these words sent to me upon our arrival home….
It’s just after 8.00 a.m. here in West Kerry, as I look out at the sun rising over the top of Mount Brandon, the holy mountain of the Navigator, across the bay of Smerwick Harbour (google Battle of Smerwick). The ebb and flow of the sea and the steadfast reassurance of the mountain reminds us that the flux, change, coming and going, restlessness, which is part of the human condition, is reflected in the sea; just as our eternal destiny is represented by the mountain, to which we lift up our eyes, in the awesome wonder of faith and hope. At times like this I embrace Isaiah’s vision: ‘… and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares’, le cúnamh Dé.
Bíodh lá maith agat agus fan slán.
Tadhg.
may you too take the necessary journeys of your heart and soul.
while away, i got notice from my little library that a book i’d requested was waiting on the “hold shelf,” and before i got back in the door, i began to read. it is so fine a read, i am leaving it here on the table should you be poking around for a summer wonder. a new read: raising hare: a memoir, by chloe dalton, described as “a moving and fascinating meditation on freedom, trust, loss, and our relationship with the natural world, explored through the story of one woman’s unlikely friendship with a wild hare.”
and whilst in the little town of milltown malbay (pop. 921), from where my people hail, we stumbled into Seán’s Bookshop, an emporium of well-read books all but falling off the shelves, and curated by a bookseller with twinkle in his eye, and tales to tell till midnight sundown. there, i plucked a tome from a poet i’ve read too sparsely till now. the book, rapture, by carol ann duffy, winner of the 2005 t.s. eliot prize, is aptly described (per the irish times): “brilliant, beautiful, and heart-aching.” here’s but one of its beauties:
p.s. happy blessed birthday this sunday to my most beloved firstborn, and law professor, will. soon to be teaching within a morning’s drive away, at the university of notre dame law school, another dream come true, prayer answered, and holy wonder for all time.
sweet will with one of ireland’s top barristers, brendan grehan, who shared his silks and wig for the occasion.
what journeys home have called to you, those taken or not yet taken?
and may the full sunlight of the solstice warm you and bring radiance to your soul….
I shan’t often begin with an image de moi but this is not usual time. This is unusual. As in extraordinary. As in pinch-me, this-could-be-heaven time.
Bliss would be a word for it. Bliss defined as when all variables in an equation perfectly align: three boys + one mama + Dublin, capital of the Land of 40 Shades of Green = Bliss. Then square it. And square it again. Getting close.
It’s only been a wee few days but oh what we’ve all squeezed in. Joyce (of course; we’re here for Bloomsday it turns out, and the city is teeming with folks dressed as if they’ve just stepped out of Ulysses, June 16, 1904) and O. Wilde, whom I bumped into on a city bench.
Oscar & me
Add to that pair, a stunning afternoon absorbing epigraphs at the Museum of Literature Ireland, miles and miles of strolls through greenswards like this:
And hilarities that come every other syllable in a land that flows with wit and gab.
It’s the gift of living in the crucible of time. You’re compelled by holy ordinance and keen attentiveness to squeeze each succulence from every blessed morsel.
And so I gulp and gulp. I whisper undying thanks and memorize the moment, pressing all this wonder, all this love, into the cockles of my heart.
Before I dive into another Dublin day, a short picture reel:
The Winding Stair Fish PlateMy Goodness, indeed.A word heard in abundance. I’m importing this new derivation.A peoples not averse to poking fun wherever possibility lies.
And I don’t even mention Evensong in St. Patrick Cathedral, nor the intoxicating tour of the Guinness Storehouse, nor fish and chips in Dublin’s most ancient pub (1198), nor the coterie of cabdrivers we now count among our friends.
But when I gulp the most—voraciously and with all my soul—is nothing more astounding than sitting round a table, or strolling hand in hand along a winding path with the boys who grew my heart as big as big could be.
May your day too be blessed in big big gulps or the sweetest sips to ever wet your lips.
i promised some iteration of a summer reading club, as in the days of yore when a little card at the public library was slipped in an envelope and marked with an empty grid, and for every book i slipped off the shelf, carried home to devour, the lovely librarian rewarded me with an ink-stamped icon of summer. an ice cream, a fish, a globe of the world. a deep-sea diver. each, a trophy for tucking myself away in the summer’s quiet, blocking out even the buzz of the vexatious mosquito, and turning page after page—finding myself in the big woods, the little house on the prairie, mary’s secret garden, or robert louis stevenson’s pages and pages of rhyme.
to garner an ink-stamp for adventuring away, for riding the winds of farflung imagination, was over-abundance defined. the reading, the being carried away, the learning to trust the deep powers of my mind’s true colors, that was the abundance. the gift. the one i’ll never surrender.
ever since those bicycling-to-the-library summery days, for me the span between the last and the first school bells of the year has long been synonymous with hours unspooled within the wingspan of a book.
the world we live in today doesn’t always require wingspans. sometimes what beckons us is flat on a screen and glows space-age eerie against the darkness. sometimes the words that stir me most in a week are words i’m able to copy and paste, words plucked from the cyberletters that waft my way.
and in those cases, this summer reading club might become more of a book report club, in which i bring to the table the one single snippet that most caught my breath in the week. this week it’s one single poem. a poem from one of my true lifelines—andrea gibson, the queer activist and poet with an ovarian cancer deemed incurable two years ago. she reminds that though the soul is my true work in progress, the thing i pray is alive into the forever, in whatever form that will be, the vessel into which it’s been stuffed is mighty miraculous too.
i’ve never quite given my physical being enough credit. i’ve not paused to marvel at many parts of it, save for the five digits extending from each palm, gobsmacked at however that ingenious appendage was wholly imagined, evolved. that we can pick up a slip of paper, or a rose petal fallen to the ground, that we can hold the hand of the one we love, or the stranger whom we know is afraid, is trembling, is nothing short of divine genius.
the priest who along with a rabbi amid our tiny city garden was blessing our newborn firstborn once gave a teaching focusing our attention on the genius of the elbow, a hinge without which we’d ever be at arm’s length, unable to bring a fork to our own mouths, or button our buttons, or zipper our zippers.
it’s ironic that for as desperately as i want my old resilient heart to keep lub-dubbing, and my little air sacs to keep being my wee vital accordions, expanding and whooshing the air in and out, as much as i think of those majordomos, i forget the rest of the bodily wonders: the way eyes crinkle when they’re in the thick of a heart-melting smile; the way the tears know just how and when to fall; that stubby little toe that in fact keeps us from toppling. . .
andrea gibson
andrea, though, as do all the best poets, makes us pause to pay attention. holy attention. to the quirks and the nooks and the crannies, the history told through flesh, bones, and sinew. and all the overlooked bits: the loose tooth of long ago, the goosebumps over the years, the boing in our hair we once tried to hide. andrea makes us take note of how holy, how blessed, these chipped, wrinkled, creaky old soul vessels truly are. the infinite ways our multiple parts—incidental and otherwise—have carried us through the years.
to do so, she puts the soul into the driver’s seat and allows it to look back, longingly, lovingly. and along the way, directs our attention. . .
here’s andrea:
For the Days I Stop Wanting a Body
Imagine when a human dies the soul misses the body Actually grieves the loss of its hands And all they could hold Misses the throat closing shy Reading out loud on the first day of school
Imagine the soul misses the stubbed toe The loose tooth The funny bone The soul still asks “Why does the funny bone do that? It’s just weird.”
Imagine the soul misses the thirsty garden cheeks Watered by grief Misses how the body could sleep through a dream What else can sleep through a dream What else can laugh What else can wrinkle the smile’s autograph Imagine the soul misses each falling eyelash Waiting to be wished Misses the wrist screaming away the blade The soul misses the lisp The stutter The limp The soul misses the holy bruise Blue from that army of blood rushing to the wound’s side When a human dies The soul searches the universe for something blushing Something shaking in the cold Something that scars Sweeps the universe for patience worn thin The last nerve fighting for its life The voice box aching to be heard
The soul misses the way the body would hold another body And not be two bodies but one pleading God doubled in grace The soul misses how the mind told the body “You have fallen from grace.” And the body said, “Erase every scripture that doesn’t have a pulse There isn’t a single page in the Bible that can wince That can clumsy That can freckle That can hunger.”
Imagine the soul misses hunger Emptiness Rage The fist that was never taught to curl, curls The teeth that were never taught to clench, clench The body that was never taught to make love, makes love Like a hungry ghost digging its way out of the grave The soul misses the un-forever of old age The skin that no longer fits The soul misses every single day the body was sick The now it forced The here it built from the fever Fever is how the body prays How it burns and begs for another average day
The soul misses the legs creaking up the stairs Misses the fear that climbed up the vocal chords To curse the wheelchair The soul misses what the body could not let go What else could hold on that tightly to everything What else could hear the chain of a swing set and fall to its knees What else could touch a screen door and taste lemonade What else could come back from a war and not come back But still try to live Still try to lullaby
When a human dies the soul moves through the universe Trying to describe how a body trembles when it’s lost Softens when it’s safe How a wound would heal given nothing but time
Do you understand Nothing in space can imagine it No comet No nebula No ray of light can fathom the landscape of awe The heat of shame The fingertips pulling the first grey hair And throwing it away “I can’t imagine it.” The stars say “Tell us again about goosebumps. Tell us again about pain.” —Andrea Gibson
what might your soul miss about your beautiful body?
and before i shuffle off, happy blessed day to two true loves of this ol’ chair: amy from illinois, as she was first made known to me, and nan P, who’s been the beating heart of the tenderest, bravest moments for years beyond years. one of you passes the birthday baton to the next, and a pairing as sweet it’s hard to imagine. love to you both, and bless these beautiful days in which we dwell on the light you bring to this world.
in a very few days,my sweet boys and i fly to the island of my dreams, the land from which i feel my ancestors calling so deeply. i’ll be in dublin when i next write. see you from there. i’ve been teaching myself irish for months, and will be meeting up with a professor of irish poetry, who mostly writes in what we’d call “old irish,” so i need to keep practicing, thus: beannachtí. (blessings.)
(these summerly trips with the boys the past few years all fall under the category “live your dreams while you can.” bless the little legs and the lungs that will carry me there…..i hope to fill those wee air sacs with the holiest breath the coast of ireland offers…)
pull up a chair 