Miracles Happen Further Down the Mountainside

How can something be so invisible, like love?

Hello, you. I hope you are bathing in seasonal light.

It’s felt like an honest eternity since I have written when it hasn’t passed a month. I hope you are well and are able to sit with whatever state you find yourself in.

Stagnation, that’s what scars. And the concept of foreverness, of permanence. Of things that cannot be rebuilt. Of things that are dead before they have been born.

But May Day spoke a different story - about love and what that could look like, if we stayed committed to our hearts this season, and stop flicking the station trying to forgive only to be forced out.

I had a beautiful poetry reading with Poetry Ireland at the Mountshannon Festival in the Snug, and felt wholly blessed to have listeners of my words as the sun stretched into Summer, Beltaine. I have been collecting these words since 2018 as a way to grow up, I guess, and a way to keep on believing, mostly.

And I sensed a revolution stir the room in which we read. And something fiery forged between us. In the room with all the hearts and ears, the floods of light emanating from every corner of Lough Derg as it sat below the window.

So I decided to leave this land for one that doesn’t co-exist with dark memories, cruel words and conditions. I was trying to be in the shadows but I realised I was punishing myself, and there is another place to ‘be’. One that doesn’t put me down. One that doesn’t make me feel small, stupid, or threaten me. One that lets me in, lets me ‘be’.

Safe space does and can exist, but not in isolation. I look at the roots, the branches, bees. All of them are looking for something or someone to pollinate and protect them. There is this intuitive sense that something is missing even though we may have never felt or experienced it before, or at least not for any considerable stretch of time. Belonging, love, and unconditional acceptance. I don’t think the trees would disagree, somehow.

Since the battery of my e bike getting waterlogged and completely dying (with a hefty cost of repair) coincided with extremely itchy feet and the drive for connection, I’ve resorted to hitchhiking around Clare, travelling miles through people’s lives and breathing in their world a while. I am always surprised and overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. By their passing participation in my silly little journey, as I share to them my life, and how we got to be in Clare. Locals. Blowins. Renters. Farmers. Dreamers. The landscape is the colour of these people. We do not always talk, or exchange first names.

Sometimes we sit and are silent and I wait to be let out, feeling a little like a dog or a passenger. And I am a farewell, a thank you. And they are a gift.

And the world is beautiful and far more open and more secret that we could only ever catch a glimpse of it.

Since the heaviness of writing last and the decision to move on from the land (eventually) I’ve been pulled every which way, filling my days with leads, loops, maybes and rabbit holes not unlike the winding paths of East Clare, with its pockets of turf and brambled paths.