Trip to Ireland and Findhorn, July - November 2006

I mostly gave up on trying to email people when I was away. There was just so much happening! Every day brought new insights, interactions, places, people - I was overwhelmed at the thought of doing any of it justice. It was by far the richest and most transformative trip ever, and I'm struggling to find the best way to integrate everything - I think I just need to let go of the 'best' way and muddle along with storytelling, pictures, dreams, writing, reviewing memories, and further research on the Internet about some of the many things that tweaked my interest as I flew by.

The two main chunks were, of course, Ireland and Findhorn. I'll give you some headlines. The Ireland part was not at all what I expected. We had talked about wanting to dance, take in live music, hunt for the Goddess, and, for me, maybe see members of my family. In fact, right away, as soon as we got to Dublin, I was thrown into an emotional journey connected with my own history and memories of Ireland as a small person, my parents' memories, my buried sense of my own Irishness and the realization that I wanted to know a lot more about some of the darker side of Irish history, mainly the famine, and the struggle for independence. I found that I didn't really care where we went, I was utterly happy to be anywhere in Ireland, cities, towns, countryside, on feet, on bus, on the water. Everything was fascinating to me, from everyday details to the many magnificent tourist centres and heritage centres which gave me so much of the information I was looking for. Ireland is spending tons of money on tourism, and much of it is really good, tasteful, informative, amazingly unbiased. Also of course there's the huge literary heritage which I've been delving into for years - but I found a whole new layer of my engagement with this, a personal connection which caused me for instance to wander around Sligo for days in the rain in love with all the snatches of Yeats' poetry I could remember and then, when I got back to Dublin, finding a huge Yeats exhibition which people told me would take three days to be able to take in everything. My head is just spinning writing all this and remembering. I tried to analyze my feelings as I went along, of course; now with a bit more perspective I see all this as hugely healing for me of big chunks of my past. Healing in a bigger sense too - but that's rather a big story and I may save it till later!