After This, I Make Sense To Myself

My 73-year old mom was patting my leg and whispering, “You’re doing great” as I guided our car through downtown Dublin. I was jet lagged and hadn’t slept in 21 hours. I was humming Tight Left, Wide Right to remind myself of how to drive on the other side of the road and avoid turning into oncoming traffic.

We were finally here—in Ireland. Last year, we had stood in my messy mudroom, looked at each other and asked, “Should we go?” By unexpected necessity, we’d already cancelled the trip two years in a row. That mobilization followed by a full stop had left us floppy. There were so many reasons, still, not to go. Money. Time. Flying across an ocean away from my kids. The prep required to leave work and home completely for 8 days. But it was a We could be dead tomorrow kind of moment. “We have to go,” I urged. I’ve lived enough life—and our broader family has experienced too many significant recent health shocks—to know that Carpe Diem is more than a cute bumper sticker phrase. Plus, wasn’t I exploring how to build my latitude for what feels good?

I wanted to tap my ancestral line and see what flows from it, root myself into a wider cosmology and spend unadulterated, uninterrupted, 1:1 time with my mama.

My great-great-grandmother Margaret Lynch emigrated from Ireland as a child alone on a boat with her two younger siblings. So the story goes. I know less about her husband, also Irish. Here’s the deal, though. I’m far more intrigued by countries I’m not descended from—perhaps because my people tend to bop around and learn by being “not from” a place. But Ireland, of any of my ancestral countries, has always had the most magnetic draw for me. My body was made from this green island and I have wanted to be responsible to understanding some of my own indigeneity and placing myself squarely within in it.

And, whoa, was I placed.

To be clear, we weren’t pub crawling. We were seeking out Stone Circles, land-based matriarchal history and the many faces of Brigid. Most enlightening to me? I have never encountered modern day White people so tied to mysticism through their culture and lineage. It was a big out breath. I felt deeply relieved. Thank all the gods. Substance. Oral history. Awe. Reverence for nature and the supernatural. A patina of mystery outpacing logic. Living with seasons and cycles. Here is the thread; here is what I’ve felt inside me since I was a child; here is the ground and the sky all at once, connected. And I come from these people! Whoosh. At least from what I saw and sensed, the Celtic, pre-Christian and pre-colonized foundation is very alive—foregrounded and woven in most places outside of the cities. The Irish woman at our Airbnb balanced a tray of dishes on her hip while she talked about beehive huts and how Gaelic is preserved and spoken and why building a road in that County actually requires consulting the elders who can identify the sacred fairy places. You never pave over those. A farmer led us on an epic hike over limestone and shared the textbook history vs. the locals history with a side dose of explaining how to respect the fairies. No cynicism from him about the unseen. With pride, he then announced that in Ireland, since the beginning of time, men and women were truly valued equally in the family. In his words, “None of this women are like dogs.” Separately, my mom and I found a stone circle dated to 2000 B.C. on the side of the road. Full chills. I can’t describe standing in the center of it. Electric. Familiar. Body says yes.

Stone Circle circa 2000 B.C., at one of St. Brigid's wells, chipping paint, Gaelic signs, devotions or as my mom said about the photos and prayers in the well, "It's people loving people."

The language of rebellion. It was in everything! Tell it like it is. Non-nonsense. So much poetry. Humor and gravity intertwined like two snakes. I could hear it in the cadence of museum voice-overs and in casual conversation with Irish folks. I recognized myself. There’s my voice. I know that rhythm and tone. I know that refusal to be silenced even when you are silenced.

I even recognized my curly hair.

I even recognized my outlandishness, my silliness.

I even recognized my lifelong love of moss.

I make sense to myself.

My mom and I had many an adventure, lots of laughs, so many conversations about the other realms, even a significant wound from a fall which ended in me extracting a large (and I mean large) pebble/rock suddenly embedded in her bloody palm. One of my most beloved moments was eating smoked salmon and listening to her tell stories about her parents and grandparents and my Dad’s people too. As I listened, I could feel my cells relax. Oh, yes, all of these relatives with their tragedies and triumphs; well, they got through it (mostly). It occurred to me, in a felt-sense not concept, that stories being passed down is an essential art and service. It provides a backbone. It creates a “You will be okay even when it’s not okay” cushion to land on. They put one foot in front of the other, so… you can too. I have known that truth but it landed in me differently, like a nectar in my veins.

Limestone pelvic diamond, Gallarus Oratory, Gaelic word for home, art from Oscar Wilde's play Salome, alley street art, beehive huts

As my mom shared and shared, I started to feel the overlaps and vibrations and essences of my DNA. So many of my people were adventurers, entrepreneurs, world travelers, leaders, visionaries, rebels, discoverers of the thing others aren’t noticing, mentors, people’s people, people willing to be outsiders and learn from those different from them, people who become bridges between this and that, gregarious storytellers, fashionistas, lovers of design and art. I come from a man-servant rebel who fell off the boat and pulled himself back up, a celestial navigator, a woman who traveled through the Panama Canal alone as a teenager, the ”pretty one,” the “not pretty one,” the one who almost died from the Spanish flu, the one who noticed the copper tailings everyone else discarded and then did something with them. I could go on and on writing. Don’t you wish you could time travel and talk to the people of the past?

For 14 years, I’ve started most of my workshops with this prompt:

Where do you come from?

or

I come from people who…

Each one of us a multitude.

I wonder about your homeland and everyone’s. I think our globalized world has both expanded and diluted us. All of that is okay. It just is. For me, having grown up peripatetic and not from anywhere + being an American with no living tie to a homeland, I felt I was from everywhere and nowhere at the same time: “placeless” I used to write in my 20’s. Walking my feet on the soil of Ireland landed me in myself differently. I’m not 100% Irish, but the part that is has been woken up. Many of us have multiple homelands. I wonder which ones of yours speak the most to you? How I would love to sit in a room and listen to those stories.

Love,