Tag Archives: Ireland

There is a god of all things

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“You might need to know again that there is a god of all things; that everything is connected; every raindrop, every tree, every molecule of the earth.” – Manchan Magan from Thirty-Two Words for a Field

My family left Ireland more than 200 years ago. They came to Canada before and during the famine. When they arrived, they likely only spoke Irish, a language that let them see both the material world and another world, the one beyond. They arrived, most probably exhausted and sick and those who survived quarantine eventually forgot Irish, though my grandmother knew a few words of prayer. I’m descended from them – I have an old spinning wheel that belonged to my many-times great aunt, who brought it to Canada from Ireland. It comes from another time, culture and world view, which seemingly has been swept away by the stormy sea they crossed to get here.

I have reflected on and written about Indigenous cultures that exist here on Turtle Island and caught glimpses of ways of thinking and seeing that go beyond the everyday – the mundane world as it is. But that exploration seems to have left mainstream thinking and become the purview of scientists with their strange ideas and experiments in impossible things, like quarks – how at the smallest level, everything is both a wave and a particle; everything is connected across vast distances; everything hovers between states of being until someone actually looks at it and then it takes form.

Could I learn Irish? I feel like it is a sort of birthright. I incur advantages from the English language – working as a writer, making understandable the decisions and intentions of government and its laws. My last name is English and that language is also a birthright, but when I speak it, it feels like something has been stolen away. Maybe Irish is hiding in its pockets, where it stealthily crept and stayed, hiding from the English who invaded Ireland almost a thousand years ago. Will I go to Ireland and study Irish and see what shakes out? Find out how many words there are for simple, beautiful things, like trees and raindrops and a spinning wheel rocking back and forth on the docks, where the boat first arrived in Canada?

Chasing the basics: bodhrán rhythms

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When I was in Ireland in September 2023, my bodhán teacher set me up for a lesson with another teacher who plays both bodhrán and drumkit in a band. We were staying in a village in the west of Ireland and the drummer lived 2 doors down from where we stayed while we visited.

The lesson was a bit of a turning point for me. It reinforced the idea of developing a really strong motor rhythm, where your basic playing is really even and you control the dynamics–loud, soft, slow and fast. I have been told before that the most important aspect of playing is the basic down-up stroke. It should both be even and almost perfectly timed.

So when I got back home, I set up my metronome and I’ve been practicing that basic down up pattern along with a few other basic patterns. After many hours of down up down up down up, my playing is much better. I feel I’ve lifted it up another level through that practice.

I have also watched Ruairi Glasheen’s documentary on the bodhrán, which talks about Ringo McDonough and how he developed a motor rhythm, which is what I learned from the guy 2 doors down. Now I really get how important it is. McDonagh’s style was an innovation at the time and his clean, simple driving rhythm is all you really need to play well at a session. Maybe the triplets and fancy fills aren’t really the point. Anyway, it’s obvious but maybe not so obvious!

Walking to the well

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I’ve made a new friend who’s got a way about him. I mean, he is Irish and laughs the way I imagine an elf might. He’s small too, as an elf would be. Even though he grew up in the Dublin suburbs, it feels like he came into the world as a small creature curled up in a brown nest, tucked into a hedgerow of ivy. Then he grew, and tumbled out into a farmer’s field in County Clare, just missing a pile of ewe berries. How he got from there to Dublin, I couldn’t say. Though he is a modern person—he even owns a commercial van—it’s a Ford. Still, when I was visiting, I had to do my best not to stare at the faint drift of sparkles floating behind him and I definitely did not mention the green felt hat. Or the bells tied around his ankles. When he was a young fellow, he liked to leap in the air while wearing them. At least once, he arrived in an Irish village on a donkey that was wearing antlers. I’ve seen the pictures. But fair enough, it was nearly Christmas. He might have once led an ordinary existence in the city, but now he’s in the west of Ireland, where there are holy wells and old stone walls that you could follow for days. I know our time left on this earth is limited. We have only so many heartbeats and hours of sunlight. So I had better catch up with him one day soon, maybe in summer. I’ll tell him to grab his hat and walk with me for a while. We’ll follow the hedgerows, visit the well and wet our hands and faces in its waters.

Long story

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“…I had heard whispers over many years about a chamber of female divinity that was said to exist somewhere west of the Shannon, but I could find no reference to it in any book or journal. Then, finally, two years ago I stumbled upon the chamber, as some in the local community in Tulsk, Co Roscommon, had chosen to make it public again. It’s a cavern called Oweynagat in which an ancient goddess energy is said to reside…When the time was right, they were able to point small groups of individuals towards a tiny opening beneath a hawthorn tree in the bank of a field that led to it. The field is down a narrow laneway, apparently leading nowhere.”

– Manchán Mangan: Indigenous people, Ireland and guardians of old lore

These are dark days. Sometimes, before dusk, I walk across the street from my house to sit alone in the field. After a while, I feel vibrations coming from a great distance through the earth into my body. The movements remind me there are places where the goddess lives, even in these times. I imagine they are hidden safe houses where she appears. They are not written down in books or recorded in databases – they’re hidden in plain sight – maybe through that small opening among trees that could be a fox’s den. Except it opens to a much bigger place, where from time to time over many centuries, people have sat in silence, holding each other’s hands, listening to the slow, soft whisper of time passing. They are listening for the long story, the one that opens up and folds back, further and further into the past until they find themselves at the roots.

In the dark and stillness, I feel afraid. I don’t have time for this. I check my phone, but there is no signal. I’m off the grid. But I’ve already begun to sense vibrations in all directions from where I stand, which is in an ordinary field beside the bike path. It’s as if I always suspected this place was here, and somehow found that fact reassuring. Right now, I have to force myself to stay still and not run back to the house. And resist the urge to get back to business. Because this place is deep and asks a lot of me. But I know the world is at stake now. Maybe it’s always been, but we’ve reached a tipping point. We need the goddess who loves gentle creatures, like my little dog who lies in a patch of sunshine on the floor. I love to look into his glassy eyes and smell the warmth of his fur. I need to visit the goddess. I must let time take me back and further back, all the way to its roots.

Cold Water Can Work Wonders

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To help me deal with panic attacks and flashbacks that I now experience more often because of the pandemic, someone gave me an info sheet called the “Distress Tolerance Handout.” In it, I found a page called Cold Water Can Work Wonders:

“When you put your full face into cold water . . . or you put a zip-lock bag with cold water on your eyes and upper cheeks, and hold your breath, it tells your brain you are diving underwater. This causes the “dive response” to occur. (It may take 15–30 seconds to start.)

Your heart slows down, blood flow to nonessential organs is reduced, and blood flow is redirected to the brain and heart. This response can actually help regulate your emotions. This will be useful as a distress tolerance strategy when you are having a very strong, distressing emotion.”

I tucked this information away somewhere in my memory – maybe I’ll give it a try some time, I thought

I am glad I read about this technique because it helps me to appreciate the movie, My Octopus Teacher. In it, Craig Foster, who is both protagonist and filmmaker, talks about returning to False Bay in South Africa, where he grew up free-diving in the kelp forests of the Atlantic.

After many years away he returns, suffering from burnout and great emotional distress. He can no longer do the things he loves, like communicating with his son and making documentaries. There in False Bay, he begins free diving again — with only a snorkel and flippers – no oxygen tanks. He says:

“In the beginning, it’s a hard thing to get in the water. It’s one of the wildest, most scary places to swim on the planet. The water drops to as low as eight, nine degrees Celsius. The cold takes your breath away. And you just have to relax. And then you’ll get this beautiful window of time for 10, 15 minutes.

Suddenly…everything feels okay. The cold upgrades the brain because you’re getting this flood of chemicals every time you immerse in that cold water. Your whole body comes alive. And then, as your body adapts, it just becomes easier and easier. And eventually…after about a year…you start to crave the cold.”

Foster finds a way to slip inside of nature through his dives in the kelp forest and the friend he made there: a common octopus (octopus vulgaris). As much as I love the story of Foster’s octopus friend, I need to keep this story moving, so now I’ll talk about Claire Paris, another freediver.

Paris, a master at holding her breath, can do six-minute plus breath holds in a pool and dives more than 200 feet down in the ocean on a single gulp of air. Once she gets down there, she feels an immense sense of calm.

She prefers to dive without goggles to enhance the diving reflex, the body’s response to submersion in cold water. This mechanism kicks in when you immerse the nostrils and face in the water. Paris and other freedivers say that so far beneath the ocean’s surface, everything slows down.

I have a friend who lives by the Irish Sea and swims in the ocean every day—he loves both swimming and surfing. But it’s also a way to dealing with the stress of the pandemic. I’ve seen photos of him with his friends, pushing their way into the sea through the big frothy Atlantic waves. Soon enough, I’ll be up near Killaloe, Ontario, where I can swim in a cold lake and catch the last of the summer’s rays. Maybe I’ll try a few dives and see if cold water really can work wonders.

Lullaby of the land

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I wrote this song recently, after doing a “deep dive” into the Pogues’ music. It’s a contrafactum, a song in which the melody is similar to another song yet contains different lyrics. In this case, the melody is from The Lullaby of London by the Pogues.

I posted the lyrics for the original side by side with my version on social media and asked my musician friends if they wanted to give it a try. My friend John Linehan (who is, of course, Irish) volunteered. We polished the lyrics some more and he brought it to life by performing it.

I recorded it live at the Irish Session at St Brigid’s Well in Ottawa.

Have a listen!

What is reconciliation? Memory of stones

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Dusk was coming to the balcony of our Montreal apartment. We could see lights flickering on in windows of the city below the cliff. We lit cigarettes using the gas ring on the stove and I singed my hair. Standing on the highest balcony, I saw smoke drifting up and lights coming on: street lamps, flickering neon signs and high beams of cars, as I stood there with my friend and her brother.

He was visiting from his cabin in the woods near Peterborough. A small cabin with a wood stove that never gave enough heat in winter—where one night, when it was pitch black, an owl swooped down and startled him just after he had put the campfire out. His cabin was near a place called Silent Lake, not far from Curve Lake and the petroglyphs. The air is fresh up there and feels gentle and warm when summer is coming.

Back then, before the Good Friday Agreement, Ireland was on our minds: people were hoping for an end of the Troubles. Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) people from Kanehsatà:ke, Quebec invited the Northern Irish to speak to them of their struggles, so much like home—disputed borders and broken promises, guns threatening to fire, soldiers and police guarding all rights of way, armed checkpoints on the roads.

In 1994, four years before the Agreement, Gerry Adams spoke at the university in Montreal and people gave him a standing ovation, but I stayed in my seat. I knew he lived in a house surrounded by a fortress. How could he be a man of peace? I suspected him. Afterward, my friends and I were invited by an IRA supporter to have a beer at the nearby pub, in a private room, with Gerry Adams a few tables away. The whole time I waited for an explosion.

Years later, I visited Saskatchewan and a different friend, who took me walking on a flat, silent expanse of land covered in sage and short grasses. He showed me a tipi ring he had found near his home, and I stood in the circle. After dark, we made a campfire in his backyard, such a long way from my home. No trees blocked the night sky—it went on and on forever. There I remembered the campfire in the Ontario woods near Silent Lake and I remembered the owl, swooping down in the dark. I thought of all the campfires among the Pines in Kanehsatà:ke during the pow wow—everywhere I walked, the sound of drums and strumming guitars. I thought of the Easter Rising in 1916 and how the Good Friday Agreement completed a circle.

Near my friend’s home on the prairies, we listened to the crackling fire and talked about medicine wheels and stones, marking a year’s passing. We thought of how we were sitting under a slowly spinning night, under a wheeling sky. Our thoughts turned around and around the memory of stones.