A personal note on adult aloneness

Excerpted from my newsletter October 21st, 2019. Sign-up for my newsletter.

I’ve been traveling alone in Ireland wild camping with the rocky landscapes, honeybees, waves, sheep, cattle, raindrops and sun (yes! Sometimes, sun). This personal pilgrimage has been inching its way into my visibility over the years with each, singularly small, Irish encounter I’ve made. As of late, my Irish sensibilities have expanded from a deep love of potatoes to a voracious appetite for David Whyte’s poetry and soul-inquiry inspired by John O’Donohue. The hints must have made a collective impression because it only took a matter of days to book my ticket after my psychic told me, “Everything will make more sense when you get to Ireland.” 

I have ancestors from Ireland on both maternal and paternal sides. I’ve lived most of my life in Colorado, it feels familiar and very special to me. But it doesn’t feel like “my place.” As I’ve tuned into cultural conversations about land and people, mostly stories of painful cleavages (Central Americans fleeing violence and poverty, Palestinians being pushed to tiny corners of a wide landscape they used to lovingly steward, and on-going injustices over land rights and sovereignty of Native American tribes) I’ve felt outrage and grief. At one point or another throughout history, 

We (our blood ancestors) have experienced displacement and separation from the land our body knows. 

As a white American woman, I’ve struggled to claim my inherited sense of displacement because my life is privileged and the displacement occurred at least four generations before me. Still, a deep cord of empathy twinges in me when I hear about people fleeing or being forced to leave their homeland.

Many tribal languages have extensive conjugations for a single word, because that word or concept has many hues that color a variety of human experiences. I wonder if there is a language that has a word for the multiplicities of heartbreak? Specifically, a conjugation or special word for the soul-land heartbreak; a word to describe the trauma that happens when an unwanted breakage occurs between a human and their land of origin. 

I can’t tell you exactly what this trip to Ireland means for me; I’m still in it. But I can tell you that the experience of being physically alone, in a camper van in the most remote locations of Ireland, has helped me with exactly what I was hoping for on this trip: an opportunity to feel belonging to a landscape. In ancient Celtic  spirituality the landscape is referred to as the Goddess. The creator and mother of all. In this chosen form of adult aloneness, I’ve been able to story-tell and intuit my own spirituality — concepts that flirt between reincarnation, ancestral inheritance and my unique ability to define what is moral, kind and generous. 

I’ll leave you with a poem by David Whyte, written about an incredible hermit by the name of Coleman, born AD 560 died on October 29th., AD 632. I was lucky to offer my prayers at the holy spring and oratory Coleman called home on October 19th, 2019. 

PS here is a podcast the about on-going injustices of Native American land rights. It details a very important case being heard by the Supreme Court that, when ruled on, will have a massive effect on the Native American Tribes. I cannot emphasize enough how important and immediately relevant this conversation is. This Land (listen to entire season, the narrator gets better with each episode) 

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Coleman’s Bed, by David Whyte

Make a nesting now, a place to which
the birds can come, think of Kevin's
prayerful palm holding the blackbird's egg
and be the one, looking out from this place
who warms interior forms into light.
Feel the way the cliff at your back
gives shelter to your outward view
and then bring in from those horizons
all discordant elements that seek a home.

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

See with every turning day,
how each season makes a child
of you again, wants you to become
a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,
watch now, how it weathers you
to a testing in the tried and true,
admonishes you with each falling leaf,
to be courageous, to be something
that has come through, to be the last thing
you want to see before you leave the world.

Above all, be alone with it all,
a hiving off, a corner of silence
amidst the noise, refuse to talk,
even to yourself, and stay in this place
until the current of the story
is strong enough to float you out.

Ghost then, to where others
in this place have come before,
under the hazel, by the ruined chapel,
below the cave where Coleman slept,
become the source that makes
the river flow, and then the sea
beyond. Live in this place
as you were meant to and then,
surprised by your abilities,
become the ancestor of it all,
the quiet, robust and blessed Saint
that your future happiness
will always remember.