I had seen on the website devoted to his work www.johnodonohue.com that John was buried in Creggagh graveyard, about two miles south of the village along the coast road, just beyond O’Donohue’s pub. I got out in front of the pub and walked down the road warmed by the rare February sunshine. Stepping into the graveyard I scanned the headstones and caught sight of a handmade wooden slab at the head of what looked like a small garden. It was the only site like that in the cemetery and sensed it must be John’s. On the front of the wooden headstone was a small handmade stone cross and a picture frame with a photo of John and an inscription that read John O’Donohue 1954 to 2008. . .and beyond. I burst out laughing because it so much caught the spirit of John and my sense that his big presence lives on still in his work and in the heart of all those who he touched. Next to his photo was a poem of his I’ve included below. Others had obviously visited the leaving letters in plastic bags, rosaries and flowers that had been placed amid the bed of living plants including primroses and a small shrub of camillia I left my gratitude for all the ways John has influenced by life and then walked back to village where I was staying across the gray limestone of the Burren that John loved and worked so hard to preserve.

Beannacht/Blessing

On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.

- John O’Donohue

I was traveling with a small group. We were waiting to catch the ferry from Doolin out to the Aran Islands. When the boat came into sight I realized that I had left my boots back at the hostel. I checked the ferry schedule and saw that there was another boat in two hours. My companions agreed that it would be okay to wait while I retrieved my shoes. I set off on foot intending to hitchhike the mile back to the hostel if I could. I had walked just a bit beyond the parking lot when a little blue Toyota pulls up beside be and the man driving says, “Get in, we’re going to get your boots, a little birdie told me”. The others would later explain that the man who ran the little coffee stand we had been sitting in front of and his friend noticed me leave and asked, “where is she going”. When they heard, the man in the stand says to his friend, “you watch the stand” and his friend says to my companions, “you watch my dog” handing one of them the leash as he ran to his car. We raced along the narrow lane up through the village, I retrieved by boots and we made it back in time to catch the ferry. . .

I was deeply grateful and the man didn’t think a things of helping out in that way. I have had many similar experiences in my travels throughout Ireland.

Whenever I’m in Ireland I can feel the presence of the ancestors in the land. Especially in the West, in County Mayo where my grandfather came from a deep emotion rose in me as I visited the place where he had been born. In reclaiming my Irish heritage I feel I have helped in healing my lineage.

There are seventy million people of Irish ancestry living outside Ireland mostly in the U.S. and Australia. Yet in the Irish language there is no word for emigrant. The closest word for leaving the homeland is exile. The songs about Irish who had to leave are filled with a haunting sense of lament. The Irish, who are actually the indigenous people of the island, are said to have an almost umbilical connection to the land. If you have any Irish blood I think you might be interested in exploring your roots and learning about the rich, complex history of the Ireland.

You don’t have actually go to Ireland to learn more about your ancestors. You can learn a lot on line. The Mormon Church maintains a comprehensive geneaology database that is free and not church related at www.familysearch.org. Also most libraries subscribe to online databases that do charge a fee like www.ancestry.com. If your ancestors came through Ellis Island you can find out what ship they sailed on and where it came from at www.ellisisland.org.

Judith describes the three trips: “the one you plan and dream of; the one you have unfolding in the time it took; and the one you remember. But still, the trip is all three intertwined.” She went on to say “It took about a month but finally memories of little hardships, disappointments, thought of what I should have done drained away and the essence of the journey rose up like a face in the water – palimpsest: seeing what’s beneath the mind’s blather. I remember the details of the trip with shocking clarity. I still don’t know what it means – to me – I have a feeling there will be a seeping out for years to come.”

I have been carrying Judith’s card around with me and rereading it over and over because I feel like she really captures the depth and power that pilgrimages to sacred places can bring to our lives. And I feel a sense of awe that I could be part of this process for another.

Ever since I first felt the pull of my Irish ancestors, trips to Ireland always have the quality of a pilgrimage where I let my heart and intuition lead me to visit the places and meet the people that have the ability to expand my sense of myself and my place in the world. I don’t think we have to travel half way around the world for this experience. I do think we need to slow down and pay closer attention to the world around us and our own inner yearnings and callings. You could do this on a day trip to somewhere you’ve never been before or to a favorite place with the intention of seeing it through new eyes and having new experiences. Our souls love newness and change. It’s why simply going away for the weekend can leave us feeling restored.

Writing, or any practice of creative expression, can be it’s own sort of pilgrimage where we are surprised along the way as we explore our creative imagination and inner realms. I always love it when in my writing something pops out of my pen and I think “wow, that’s really interesting, I didn’t know I thought that.” I’ve found in writing  and traveling it’s best to view the journey itself as it’s own reward and be open to what the world has to say to you through the people you meet, the inspired thoughts you have, and intuitions on where to go and what to do.

The following poem by Nobel Prize winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, which is one of my all time favorites, captures the quality of how an ordinary experience can become extraordinary by looking more carefully at the world and letting our imaginations play.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully-grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open

But as Petrina the woman who runs the Cashel Holiday Hostel said to me when I booked in on arriving, “I tell people who are all concerned with going from site to site, like from the Blarney Stone to the Rock of Cashel here, that when their travles are over it’s the people that they met along the way that they will remember”. And I couldn’t have agreed more. In true Irish fashion, Petrina was happy to talk to have a conversation, to find out more about you, to answer any questions you might have. She sent me to O’Dwyers Butcher Shop for the best Brown Soda Bread in town. She invited me to take her dog, Millie, for a walk if I wanted some company. She came knocking on my door one evening insisting that I join her up at the local church for a free concert of Irish music by a group that was really good. All in all she made me feel wonderfully at home and that is what I will remember most about my time in Cashel.

People have lived in Ireland for about 7000 years settling there after the glaciers retreated at the end of the last ice age. The burial tombs at Newgrange are a thousand years older than the pyramids. On Winter Solstice a single beam of light lasting for seventeen minutes shines into the middle of the tombs. It’s thought that this might be intended to allow the souls to ride the beam to wherever they needed to go.

The Celts arrived in Ireland about 4000 years ago. Since Ireland was never invaded by the Romans the influence of the Celts is most keenly preserved there. The Irish language (one of the forms of Gaelic) is derived from the ancient language of the Celts. Still spoken as the everyday language in parts of Ireland, it is so different from English that translation is difficult. There are no words for yes and no. There are words to express how when you love a place, the place loves you back. The language is earth-based and sensual, reflecting the fact that the Celts saw no separation between themselves and the land that sustained them. The word for the land and the people is one word, currah. The Celts had no written language so information was passed on through a rich oral and storytelling tradition which lives on today. The reverence for words is also expressed in the Irish prominence in English literature and the fact that in Ireland books of poetry are bestsellers.

Some years ago Ireland began calling to me. My grandparents came from Ireland and settled in San Francisco where my father was born; part of the generation of Americans who left behind their culture roots in order to assimilate. Yet on my first trip to Ireland as the plane swept low on approach to the Shannon airport and saw at the edge of the runway, a stone paddock holding a lone sheep, tears began to trickle down my cheeks as the word home echoed through my mind. I told this story to a native Irish speaker I know who lives now in California and she responded, “Well now that would be the ancestors winking in and out welcoming you home.” I found in Ireland not only a feeling of home but a sense of the sacred in the air. Since then I’ve studied the history, the myths and begun to learn the language and continue to feel the pull of the magic and enchantment of the Celtic imagination that lingers in the misty Irish air and moves I think in all who have some Irish blood.

In memory of John O’Donohue, 1954 to 2008

I first met John O’Donohue about 15 years ago when I participated in a workshop he offered with David Whyte in Seattle on the Celtic Imagination. I had signed up because I admired David’s work. I had never heard of John. Yet from the first moment he opened his mouth and words flowed out on a rich Irish accent, I sensed I was in the presence of someone extraordinary. Wisdom rose on his tongue, causing revelations to flood my mind. He spoke of the lack of soul in contemporary culture, calling advertising “schooling in false desire”. That phrase particularly hung in my mind while my pen scratched out pages of notes attempting to capture everything he said. I kept wondering, who is this man? Poet and philosopher with a PhD in philosophical theology from the University of Tubingen in Germany. A Catholic priest by vocation, a role he would eventually relinquish after years of consideration because as he put it “the oxygen had become too scarce and found myself diverging from quite a few of the teachings.” Still he continued to praise the power and importance of the essence of the Christian tradition and the legacy of the great Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross and Hildegard von Bingen.

I waited for several years for the book I knew would come out of him. His first titled Anam Cara, from the Irish words for soul friend was an international bestseller. Followed by Eternal Echoes and Beauty: An Invisible Embrace. I have over the years been repeatedly drawn back to his work. His words slipping under my skin traveling I think from his soul to mine. Rooted deep in the West of Ireland, he lived in a cottage heated with peat and spoke Irish as his everyday language. He was born in County Clare in the unique limestone region of The Burren, the part of Ireland that always pulls me back. From a grounded sense of belonging his mind rode the seas of imagination as he wrote and traveled to speak and teach to a wider world. Every May John held a a ten day rambling retreat in the West of Ireland. I had very much wanted to go one year. Not this year, I had thought but hopefully the next. And now this man who was so vibrantly alive is gone so unexpectedly at age 53, a keen reminder to me to attend to what calls to me without waiting, to ask the question every day, What do I really want to do with the time I’m given, and to show up fully for my life each day.

David Whyte in this eulogy to John said, This is a man who could hold the broad spectrum of human experience together in a fierce, intimate and compassionate way, leavened with a humour that defies easy description and that enlivened everyone around him . . .John was a love-letter to humanity from some address in the firmament we have yet to find and locate, though we may wander many a year looking or listening for it. He has gone home to that original address and cannot be spoken with except in the quiet cradle of the imagination that he dared to visit so often himself.

Richard who lives a few doors down from the hostel arrived shortly after and as the kettle began to steam, he referred to a poster he has created call The High Man that hangs on the hostel kitchen wall. Having lived in the area all his life, he had begun studying a map of the ancient roads and noticed that they formed the shape of a figure of a warrior that seemed to mirror the pattern of the constellation Orion. The key sacred sites in the region are located at the knees, the head, the mouth and other key parts of the body. Richard said that in studying the rich history and mythology of this part of Ireland he found the stories corresponded to different aspects of the figure as well.

Knowing something of Irish history and mythology I was amazed by Richard’s depth of knowledge and insight into the region. I was also struck by the sense that this place where myth and history bleed into one another is really fertile ground for the human imagination. Later in exploring the sites on my own I could feel, as I stood in the icy cold, a deep sense of peace rising from the land and the pull these ancient people have on my own imagination. Back at the Green Door Hostel, I mention to Eamonn, the owner, that so little is known about who these ancients were and how they lived. He looks at me with a lively smile a keen sense of irony in his tone and says, “well, we know they knew the world was round.”