Signs You Don’t See at Home

Ahhhhh, Ireland …. I love your ways. I love your words. I love your laugh and your knowing nod, your faraway look, your love — that steadfast love.

But these signs ….

 

Walls and Wall Flowers

I’m a wall lover. I’ll ignore (this once) the philosophical implications of keeping out (or holding in); I’m simply drawn again and again and again to the beauty of man touching nature and entering that lovely communion, particularly when the touch is light, when each curve and coloration is naturally formed, and the grasses and flowers are allowed to have their way.

Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

 

Ireland Art Residency

Laura and Pam Decide to Dingle

And Dingle we did! A few photos from our most excellent adventure:

The Getting There

Beware of wandering cows and small children, especially while you’re swivel-heading at the endlessly alluring undulant and livestock-spotted countryside.

The Charming Town of Dingle

Gotta love a town where a guy named Foxy John will give you a Guinness along with your hardware.

I’m going to wager a guess that only one of the photos above needs explanation, and that’s the image of the cows in the field eyeing us. The cows are located on the bay, just behind the office that collects money for parking tickets, which we spent two hours of our first day trying to locate. Many tried to help but ended up just shaking their heads. At 4:55, five minutes before all offices shut for the weekend, two young girls manning the post office gave us excellent directions, drew a map, and called the collector to ask if she would wait for us to walk up the hill for the third time. She did.

Artisans of Dingle

Support your Makers!

Slea Head Drive

Ireland Art Retreat

Slea Head Tips: Small car. Passenger to let you know when you’re up against the wall. Drink it all in. Try to pull over for photos where there’s an actual space, but sometimes you just gotta see that sheep up close and personal. And it’s okay — there’s usually someone watching out for you. Cause it’s Ireland.

The Blasket Islands

The Blaskets are eight islands off the western tip of Dingle. We really wanted to walk along those shores and feel the lives that persisted against heavy odds for generations, but alas the sea was too rough for boats that day, a common occurrence which helps us understand why the last inhabited island was permanently evacuated in 1955. Fortunately the Blaskets were awash with writers who steadfastly documented life there. The beautifully designed Blasket Centre helps paint a picture with both relics and words, as does this t-shirt commemorating the passing of a way of life that will never be again: Ní bheidh mo leithéid arís ann (There will never be the likes of me again). Worth some meditation indeed.

Visitors

On Thursday I wake to signs of a visitor in the night, and the prints indicate a larger visitor than the one I imagine might have been able to squeeze through the opening in the window. But we are each ingenious when we need to be, yes?

And I wonder why, with the wild beauty of all of Ireland at his toe tips, he wants to join us inside for the evening?

And then again, why not? I’m certain this is the loveliest flat in all of Ireland, replete with charm and quirkiness and vistas of both town and countryside.

In for a Peek

Bathroom View

Bedroom View

Bedroom Flowers

Choosing Paths

Future Courtyard Gallery!

Alas, a closer inspection shows that he stepped tentatively only twice down the smooth tile walls before turning back. For this I am grateful, I suppose, but I wish him many interesting places to explore and, if they fit nicely, to stay awhile and become a part of the life there, just as I am. After all, I arrived a stranger too, without, as far as I know, an ounce of Irish blood in my French and English ancestry. But oh how this land and these generous and so very authentic souls have captured and welcomed me — how can I not do the same?
We are all explorers at heart, whether we long for distant lands, an intricate understanding of the lives of insects, an intimacy of home and family, or even a roadmap to the self. I wish a beautiful journey to all, and a warm and welcoming spot for the night.

The Wild Ones

I’ll start this post with two admissions. First, it’s a good thing I brought an extra pair of jeans, and second, I should have picked a flatter chunk of limestone for my writing desk.

Okay yes, AND I’m the only one on the burren, North Clare’s fabulous limestone Lower-Carboniferous-Period wonderland, typing away on a laptop while perched atop a world wonder. While Olive sketches and Laura paints, I’m snapping images of wildflowers spouting forth from stone like a madwoman, and trying my damnedest to process euphoria into words as I look across this improbable landscape toward the Aran Islands. I could sit here for weeks without moving, as I’m certain many have before me.

Which is actually a better idea that leaving your silver laptop on a gray rock and then wandering around to explore. Not for the first time, a sticky note has saved me.

We’ve been lucky the past two days to catch glimpses of the islands as they fade and reappear in the mists (there’s that Brigadoon thing again), three occasional mounds in the sea with a dot of a white house here and there, beckoning. Me? Did you mean me?

The flowers dance in the sea breeze, coy with their names and origins, as the burren is home to 75% of the species of flora found in Ireland. If you were forced to sum me up in 4 words, wind, stone, sea and wildflowers would likely do the trick. It is heaven here — just a wild landscape and a girl restless to know every secret of life. Here, I can easily believe for a moment that I do.

There’s a perfumery nearby that makes scents from the rare burren wildflowers. I’d like mine in pink clover, salt air, and wild horses please.

The burren covers 96 square miles on northern County Clare, stretching before me to the ocean and rising behind me to touch the clouds. The limestone formed as sediment in a tropical sea covering most of Ireland  350 million years ago, give or take. Her varied faces range from smooth sheer cliffs to jagged outcroppings to deeply gouged rock to rounded boulders gifted by glacial slides. She is mottled with grays and charcoals and whites and breathes out flowers and ferns and the occasional mounded tuft of grass. The sloping fields to my left are lined with hedgerows and sprinkled with cattle, while an errant field near the sea to my right seems to shelter a group of wild ponies … or is that my imagination again?

There is the occasional 24” of path, but in the end, you make your own. Olive and I pick our way carefully; Laura runs down like a mountain goat and has a handful of brushes out before she reaches her spot.

We are fond of the word Wild here. Wild salmon, wild caught, wildflowers, wild pinks, the Wild Atlantic Way. My first business was called Wild Hair Adventures; my license plate reads WLIDHIAR. In the end, or even better at the beginning, we each have a wild heart that seems to know the way.

Cliffs of Moher: Road Trip!

Of course we don’t know each other well yet, and still we plunge almost immediately into deep discussions of lives past and present sprinkled with hopes and dreams. Olive asks me what I’d most like to see while in Ireland, and blinks only almost imperceptibly when I name what must be the second largest tourist attraction in the country after the Blarney Stone, the Cliffs of Moher. In a stroke of luck there’s a bank holiday, those European Mondays off that surely have been created to boost the travel industry, and Olive agrees to accompany us if we’ll agree to a morning lie-in first. I’ll let you look that one up.

At the Irish crack of dawn (11 AM), we pile into the car and head for the ferry to cross the Shannon Estuary from County Kerry to County Clare, fingers tickling the rails and hair in gleeful windswept swirls like three Aphrodites just emerging from our shells and blissfully open to the unknown. Olive has assured us the drive through County Clare to the cliffs is 90 minutes at most. Five hours later we arrive at Moher, the reason being that we travel like girls.

Look at that field of wildflowers! — could we pull over for 23 photos? Look at those sheep — I LOVE sheep! Let’s picnic by this stream with the paddle boats and castle ruin! I’ve never seen this lane, and look, there’s a strip of grass growing up the middle of it — let’s see where it goes! Oh a beach, fancy an hour of shell gathering? It’s a blissful day where cares are abandoned and we simply spend it frolicking here and there according to our pleasures.

And girls again we are, crouched for the best photograph of an unfamiliar flower growing through a crack in the path, tracing  what could easily be ancient languages that paint hieroglyphic circles on even older limestone, marveling at the landscape of rock and sea and wind, bright yellow snail shells, acres of black rock with glistening strands of lime green seaweed trails, and always the sea, always the breeze, like constant companions holding our hands and whispering “don’t forget who you are, never forget.”

And yet we do make it to the cliffs on a brilliant afternoon with a sprinkling of visitors. In a few words, they are breathtaking, in a gasping, jaw dropping, wide-eyed deer in the headlights kind of way. Reaching a height of 702 feet (see the tiny people on top?), they span eight miles of the Wild Atlantic Way, and support habitats that include puffins (Eek! Puffins!) and 40,000 (literally) other birds that include 29 species. The cliffs of sandstone, siltstone and shale are dated at a mere 320 million years. Gasp indeed. We gaze and snap and imagine and wonder, walk a bit of the burren trail along the opposite peaks, sure we’ll be okay because Olive is wearing her Dorothy shoes, and we’ll always be able to get safely home.

They say the journey is the thing rather than the destination, a truth we all forget over and over and over, but in Ireland the journey is everywhere and being present is as easy as opening your eyes. That little gasp will let you know you’ve got it.

 

Brigadoon Lives! (They just had the country wrong)

So yes then, I’ve a question. Is it rude to take photos of the people sitting on top of you? Last night there was a moment during the 6 to 9 club at the pub when Carol was leaning so far across Laura that she had to prop herself on my knee, and Eamon and Ann paired their two heads with mine in an effort to hear every word, and their heads — the one crisp and bearded with white in an Indiana Jones hat and a fierce listening expression — the other a brilliant red with her green eyes forward and kind — had their faces just so in the evening light until they positively glowed, and I knew I was among angels. Carol was filled with the spirit, quite literally as she was gleefully telling them their house is haunted, punctuated by numerous slaps on my knee, and they were eager recipients. Mind you, I’ve only just met these people, and quite honestly, it was like being enveloped by a fully mystical experience. But that’s the Irish for you.

And so it begins, my lovely month in Magical Listowel, with her pretty shop fronts, her wild and rugged countryside, and her endlessly embracing people. Yes, sometimes to the point of squuushing just a bit, but I’ve decided to find it charming and love them up right back.

My first couple of days have landed me smack in the middle of writer’s week. Now where I come from, that might be a bit daunting, writers having that general aloofness thing going (some use a different word, but let’s be gracious), but in Listowel I’ve been given autographed books with a grin and a bow, serenaded by two of the most ethereal songwriters I’ve ever heard, quoted poetry from atop a daisy-covered bank, smiled at (who knew we could smile?), bear hugged, and made room for at the bar, that last being a true gesture of love indeed.

And so my stay in this country where nothing is as you expect is off to a starry-eyed start, as I wander wide-eyed from the town center (where they’ve placed a piano and every tinkle of the ivories brings out cellists and fiddlers and toe-tappers) to the shore and find myself between two flowery fields of horses and foals, manes flying as they run with exuberance toward the mountain-ringed sea and back again while I’m serenaded by two young boys on banjo and bodhrán. Magical indeed. So crossing my fingers this won’t have disappeared in the morning.

Big hugs from Pam, my fabulous flatmate and co-artist-in-residence Laura McRae Hitchcock, and the generous and infinitely talented Olive Stack!