I went to Ireland for the first time in 1994. I’ve never met anyone who traveled to Ireland and didn’t like it, didn’t exclaim its green beauty, its fascinating cultural history, its music, and especially its people. I’ve never heard anyone, other than the Irish, complain about the weather, and it’s just like Seattle’s (raining right at this moment), and we complain and apologize about ours all the time.
On some level, perhaps loving Ireland is a modern cliché.
I’m always quick to tell about how unique and untouristy my affair with Ireland is—no Blarney Stone, no pub crawls, no tour of the Guinness Factory. To be fair, every single time I’ve been, I’ve spent in meaningful concert with actual Irish people—in their homes, on their walks, rapt in their stories. I know I’m blessed and lucky, and I savor each minute at the Stranfield café in Dundalk, the pier down the hill in Feohanach, Frank Moloney’s breakfast in Doolin, listening to Gerry’s poems in the Osta Café in Sligo, walking through Hugo’s studio outside Limerick, tea at Nóirín’s cottage near Glenstal, the walk to the sea outside An Spidéal with Dònall, singing a capella with Moley in the garden at Number 1. And that’s just a small slice.
In the six years leading up to the pandemic, I had begun going each year, and for a few years hosted two retreats—one for women who welcomed time on the land and in the spirit of County Louth, and one to deepen creative practice in County Kerry at the stunning Parknasilla. I collaborated with Irish locals to provide an immersive experience—they cooked for us, sang to us, ferried us around—and in the weeks in between, I wandered the small roads to country villages and sea-side towns, writing, walking, listening.
Once, up in the craggy shoreline near Clifden in Connemara, Dònall told me about “resurrection places.” Those places you go where you are literally brought back to life by that landscape and its particular sensory and energetic characteristics. Ireland always resurrects me
.
I know this is a particular threshold of my own longing and I’ve tried to make sense of it ever since. I’ve long thought that the creative impulse—to write, to sing, to paint, to make—is about our relationship to longing. Poet Robert Hass said poetry is that . . . because “desire is full of endless distances.”
Dublin is a nice enough city—I can fly direct there from Seattle—and once I spent a whole week walking the streets, exploring parks and galleries, eating Indian food with Namu and Mícháel, and a super fun 30 euro street art tour where I learned the difference between graffiti, tagging, commissioned art, and art that simply appeared overnight. It changed the way I look at street art ever since.
But it’s the wide-open spaces and the rocks and water that are the root of my love for Ireland. Once, I had a meandering conversation with my painter friend Steve about the color green. I said that people love Ireland because the preponderance of green is inherently soothing, and this makes them wax on about the Irish landscape. It’s hard for painters to have favorite colors, just as you cannot pin me to a particular word, so he wasn’t convinced by my theory.
You cannot be lulled by the Irish landscape, though. It is a small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean—moody, boisterous, unpredictable with its harsh winds and sideways rain, and those rolling hills dotted with sheep and cris-crossed by stone fences exist mostly because the British cut down all their trees for hundreds of years. Once, on the cliffs above Doolin, I walked along the paths through turnstiles, ambling through fields, cattle making their slow way, chewing rhythmically, completely unbothered by the weather. Below and north, the boats leave for the Aran Islands, the tourists snapping photos of the Cliffs of Moher, holding onto the railings in rough seas. The wind that day was so fierce, it held me. I could raise my arms out and just lean towards the sea, suspended.
For me, perhaps Ireland is an art date with my longing. I knew about art dates, but I never had one until Steve and I went to the Seattle Art Museum once to spend time with a single painting. Do that with a painter. And, another time, walking the long, long city blocks in Manhattan to go to the Met after I’d read about another painting and just decided I wanted to stand in front of it. Out of the hundreds of artifacts and examples of beauty and history, it felt luxurious and decadent to spend time with just the one.
When I went back to Ireland after that first time, on my own, Owen talked me into renting my own car, reminding me that Ireland’s highway system is relatively new, and public buses and trains just only get you so far. He insisted I could drive on the unfamiliar side of the road, sitting in the unfamiliar seat in the car, shifting gears with my left hand instead of my right. “Just remember: driver in the middle,” he said, so that I’d place my body in the middle of the road, always, especially, after turning. I rented a BnB in County Kerry on the Beara Peninsula outside the little village of Kenmare. I’m sure I was Virgo-like in my planning, since I was on my own, reading Rick Steve’s guidebooks and making a list of things to see and do. “Where should I go for live traditional music,” I asked my host at breakfast after she told me she felt sorry for Americans whose butter was so white. There was the smallest of beats as she stared blankly at me. “Oh, just any pub in the evening.” But I didn’t believe her, as I wanted the inside scoop, the personalized recommendation. I tried googling and researching, and in the end, indeed, I wandered into an ordinary pub where someone was playing the harp and the fiddle, and the people talked around it like a backdrop.
Music is everywhere, all the time, and there are plenty of tourists in the better-known towns tapping their feet, holding onto pints of Guinness, but it’s just as likely there will be accomplished, world-class musicians and singers joining in a session because that’s just what they do in the tiniest of villages. My Irish friends, who are all about the craic, woven into their melancholy laughter about the weather, are happy to straight-faced pull one over on you. Owen, who is infamous for convincing me to do things he wouldn’t do himself, told me that once I’d settled into the music space on a trad night, I should just start up a conversation with any ordinary Irish person and ask them if they knew the musician Mícháel O’ Súlleabháin, who was, incidentally, his father. This was before he’d passed away, and despite what sounded like a common name—Michael O’Sullivan—people’s eyes would widen at my name dropping and say, “THE Mícháel O’ Súlleabháin?” Oh, yes, my friend’s father, the most famous pianist, the founder of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, the renegade artist who stood at the cross-roads of classical piano and Irish traditional music, setting ancient tunes and long-ago songs to an instrument of the oppressors—fiddle riffs to ivory keys. That guy!
The first time I met him, in his kitchen outside the roads to Glenstal Abbey, surrounded by hundreds of books and instruments from around the world, a piano seemingly around every corner, he exclaimed: “Oh! You’ve got an Irish face!” and it was one of my most favorite compliments ever because it felt like he was saying I was family.
My first trip to Ballyvaughan, on the edge of the Burren, I fell in love with Blackie O’Connell’s playing the uillean pipes. Another completely unoriginal thing: everyone who hears Blackie falls in love with him and the pipes that sing the whole shy story of the human heart. I was walking to holy wells and Padraig’s fields, and the confluence of the Seven Streams with David Whyte, and I wrote this line in a poem: you’re homesick already, but not for the place you left . . . because despite how much I love returning to my little bungalow in Seattle—my street, my house, my bed, my familiar—I always know I am to leave Ireland every time I go, and that pending distance wells up inside me. To arrive just means you’re that much closer to leaving with each road wandered, each tune listened, each windy day buffered.
Mostly, what I long for is to live each day as if I were wholly in it, and that’s what Ireland gives me, over and over.
Fleur Adcock’s lines are those I carry on my lips and in my heart:
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,
happy is how I look, and that’s all.
And when will you resume those magnificent trips that were so Tragically interfered with? ❤️
Oh, that poem, “Weathering.” One of the bits I wrote down and treasure from The Lakes. Loved this piece and the reference/reminder.